EXPOSURE
THERAPY
An educational community for strategic minds.
Strategy is everything.
It’s how you build a brand, win a market, move in the world, and live meaningfully. It’s also a demanding lifelong practice.
Exposure Therapy is an active gathering of innovative people who move the practice of strategy forward.
It’s all centered on a highly curated, high-touch Slack community with powerful programming and original content created by us, for you.
We expose ourselves to provocative new ideas, bring in smart new voices, actively train ourselves to be better strategic thinkers, meet for immersive and connective dinners, and grow in both our personal and professional lives.
Exposure Therapy is where we explore the most important thinking in strategy, brand, culture and futurism today. You will continually get better at your craft.
Where else would you get to do all of this cool stuff? →
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We’re bringing our wide network of thinkers, authors, strategists, researchers and creatives to you in intimate conversations, to discuss the most provocative questions in their fields.
These roundtables are designed to go off the beaten path, where you can ask the kinds of deep, action-oriented questions that rarely get asked in other venues. Get inside the minds of people that are solving big problems and creating new futures. -
The heart of this community is shared exploration, and our organized community discussions give everyone a chance to spend time with each other and our team, going deep on monthly topics and any other ideas that captivate our members. You will walk away with new ideas, new insights you can work with right away, and a new understanding of how brand, culture and markets are evolving.
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Our absolute favorite part is spending time with you in person. Our dinners in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco aren’t just meetings in restaurants. They’re themed gatherings with fun surprises, thoughtful activities for creativity and introspection, and most importantly, they’re designed to make deep, intimate connections between members. These highly intentional events are the highlight of our Exposure Therapy community. They’re not to be missed.
Any member is welcome to any party in LA, NYC and SF, regardless of what city they’re located in.
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If we’re known for anything it’s our strategic research, and now we’re sharing it with you. Our original research makes sense of culture, reveals how consumers are being conditioned by the market, and will provide you with novel (and very actionable) perspectives on the underlying forces behind waves of new innovation.
Our insights will help any person, in any role, at any company, understand where the strategic opportunities of the next 3-5 years will emerge.
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Our team reserves a handful of hours every month for 1-on-1s with members to consult on their specific challenges. If you’ve been struggling with a strategy project, need some immediate brand insights, need a quick overview of market forces in a specific niche, want to run product strategy by peers, are looking for general advice in your work, or any other strategic or branding need, we’re here to support you.
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Every application includes a personal interview with our team so we can get to know you in a meaningful way. The more we learn about you, the more we can provide personal intros to other members of the community that we think would be great for you to know.
We connect people who can help each other with specific challenges, who share obsessions and interests, who can benefit from each other’s points of view, who will inspire each other, who are doing the same things in wildly different ways, who we know will form a bond.
Our connections are intentional and our hope is to enrich you with friendships you may have never found outside of Exposure Therapy.
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Every video, discussion, worksheet, exercise, resource, transcript and recording is organized and archived for our members to return to whenever they want. If you can’t make it to any of our roundtables, events, or other online gatherings, rest assured you can always access our valuable content.
Our deep archives are an ever-growing asset for all members of the community.
“Exposure Therapy is incredible, just in the way the team is freely sharing ideas and thoughts, and the power that gives people to go and build brands.
It’s so intellectually stimulating. These are the questions I haven’t been able to articulate, and they took me in entirely new directions in my thinking.”
Katie Faulkner
Brand Marketing Director at Nike
"This group is different. They go deep and explore topics that are profoundly relevant today and are having - and will have - significant impact on the world we live in.
This is a great community and the ideas shared can be compelling to anyone who’s curious about the world of strategy and brand building."
Diksha Idnani
CCMO at Eli Lilly
"Exposure Therapy is a special place. We're having mind-bending conversations about the tiny bubbles forming in culture that will generate the brands of tomorrow. It's fun getting a sneak peek of the future."
Joe Fernandez
Co-Founder and CEO at allUP
"The way this community thinks, connects, and shares is a strategist's heaven. The alchemy of the curated knowledge, inspiring guests, robust Slack discussions, and in-person events creates such a potent elixir - surrounding and inspiring my thinking in ways that have already cracked open entirely new ways of thinking about brand challenges and opportunities (and, quite frankly, about myself too)."
Meghan McCollum
Strategist at Adventure
“I feel like I’m getting a PhD. Hanging out with this caliber of people, it’s like being invited to the cool kids table. The conversations, the original research, the topics… it makes me really look forward to each new drop at the beginning of the month."
Russ Rands
Founder at Prolego
“From day one I've been blown away by the quality of the research, the speakers and the energy of our members. I’m super excited to have this opportunity to learn from and grow alongside such talented people.”
Carina Bhavnani
Director of Brand Strategy at Sonder
How it works:
$3,000 annual membership
Applications considered on a monthly basis
Each month we’ll expose you to a big idea that is either strategically or culturally relevant.
Then we go deep. You’ll have a chance to join expert roundtables and community discussions, explore shared ideas, and see our original research focused on that topic. Our goal is to explore from every possible angle.
The topics are exciting and far-ranging, from “Positioning & Storytelling” and “Personal Branding” to “Modern Riches” and “Eternal Youth”.
Individually, they will help you understand the landscape.
Together, they help you understand how the world works.
The whole point of Exposure Therapy is to be open to unexpected insights. Even if a topic isn't immediately relevant to your field, there are fundamental human truths and insights within it that are… and that’s usually where game-changing perspectives come from.
We help you predict the future so you can own it.
See our full 2024 calendar of topics below.
(2025 topics to be announced this summer.)
2024 Strategic Topics
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Applications
January
We’ll be accepting applications for our launch cohort throughout the months of December and January, and you can apply for membership here.
You can apply at any time throughout the year. We accept on a rolling basis, so even if you aren’t accepted immediately, we’ll still keep your application for consideration in a future group.
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Positioning & Storytelling
February
Positioning is an incredibly powerful tool that few brands do really well. It requires a deep understanding of market forces and how far a consumer audience can be pulled into the future. Storytelling is the vehicle though which positioning is communicated.
We’ll explore a wealth of thinking, research and best practices in both positioning and storytelling, along with guests who will help us understand the levers that make positioning and storytelling as effective as possible.
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Modern Riches
March
Has wealth finally decoupled from money or are we just fooling ourselves? The things that make us feel rich are far more varied than they’ve ever been. From social wealth, time wealth, to “health is wealth” and conspicuous commitment, these modern riches have us feeling something different than money in the bank.
How can strategists and brands engender feelings of new wealth in people? What does money even mean anymore? We all want to be rich, but with what?
— LA Members Dinner Party: “Night of Abundance”—
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Build Your Strategic Mind
April
We’re unlocking your superpower. Many of us only do a fraction of what is possible with our minds, but high-level strategic thinking demands we employ all kinds of cognitive abilities at once.
It’s a constant practice, and we're sharing our most effective methodologies with you along with guest speakers and experts that will cover first principles, mental training exercises, world-building, finding levers in the system, and the most powerful mental models.
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Eternal Youth
May
From longevity and biohacking to old standards like beauty and entrepreneurship, the ideas of age and aging have begun to expand to hold a lot more culture and ideology than before. “Youth” is no longer tethered to the “young”.
Get ready to explore the cultural and branding applications of youth through the generations while also bringing a youthful mindset to your own life. We’ll have great guest speakers, and our own team dive deep into helping you both understand and live youth itself.
— LA Members Dinner Party: “Supper For Your Second Life”—
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The AI 1%
June
What does it take to be the top 1% of AI thinkers and doers in your work? If you feel you’ve plateaued when it comes to using AI in your day-to-day, this month is dedicated to teaching you the new methodologies and approaches to gain a significant advantage.
We’ll also approach the broad topic of AI from a cultural standpoint, to understand how it will impact culture, business and the future of brands.
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Deep Community
July
Community is becoming the lens through which all of brand is seen through. Meanwhile, strong tie communities that create deep social connections between members are becoming the dominant threads of our social fabric. In this new era of increased intimacy, what we value and what we create are moving in a markedly new direction.
We’ll explore how to build these new communities, the new rules they follow, and how they will impact the brand landscape over the next few years.
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Matters of the Heart
August
Love, sex, relationships, dating, marriage, friendship. Matters of the heart are a window into the soul of a culture, and through this window we see a lot of new aspirations being measured with old measuring sticks.
As Stephen Chbosky said, “We accept the love we think we deserve”, so what does society think it deserves now? How can brands in all categories center themes of love and connection in a way that moves people to act?
— NYC Members Dinner Party: “Emotional Alchemy For The Bravehearted” —
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How To Predict The Future
September
Predicting the future is a highly creative act that very few people are trained in. It requires reaching a bar of imagination that is so high, strategists often find it an uncomfortable way of thinking. But not members of Exposure Therapy (at least not after this month).
In addition to our incredible speakers and experts, we’ll be leaning hard into ‘play’. Be ready to play with reality in order to make it new, retrain your mind to see the future, and apply it to your strategies.
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Special Spaces
October
We’re colliding and drifting apart in new ways, as the physical and digital spaces of our lives rapidly evolve. Nearly every brand in every category is affected by how and where we’re gathering, why and when we’re staying home, and what personal space even means anymore.
Our special spaces are becoming more polarized, more customized, and far more interpersonal. Space is the last bastion of control. Brands that create the physical/ digital spaces that hold us will probably be the ones that win.
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Personal Branding
November
The future of B2C and B2B is personal brands, but building a personal brand is very different than building a business brand.
We’ve built a lot of personal brands and will share our tools and exercises with you. We’ll also bring in experts who will cover personal branding from different perspectives including PR, thought leadership and social media. Use this month to not only develop personal brands for your company, but more importantly, a personal brand for yourself.
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Amusement of Everything
December
Everything is collapsing into entertainment. There is no category that remains untouched by gamification, social media, VR/ AR or content. The nature of entertainment is becoming the nature of business.
We’ll explore best-in-category examples of entertainment as brand strategy, develop the rules of engagement for brands in any industry that want to tap into this narrative, and predict where the culture of entertainment + business will be in 3-5 years.
— LA Members Dinner Party: “The Final Bet”—
The difference between this community and others is that we ask you to engage your heart and mind with the group.
We welcome anyone from any background who is doing things in branding or the strategic front, but require every member to follow our three principles.
Commit To Exploration
Skip the small talk, ask the big questions, and take intellectual risks. Approach this community from a place of deep, humble curiosity.Evolve Yourself
Come with the intention of growing yourself personally and professionally. Be open to being changed.Elevate The Group
Support and benefit one another. Be positive, have fun, play, celebrate.
Rules of
Engagement:
We’re the team behind Concept Bureau and we’ve spent years developing our practice of strategic thinking. Now we want to share it with our beautiful community.
Our mission is to elevate the strategy of the people who shape the future.
We promise to immerse you in the bleeding edge of culture, technology, and human psychology.
Below are your Exposure Therapy guides, and if you’ve been a reader of Concept Bureau’s insights, you may already know who we are.
We’re in this community with you, every day, getting better at what we do.
We hope you join us.
Who We Are:
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Jasmine Bina
CEO of Concept Bureau, obsessed with the psyche of the modern consumer.
Recent Publications
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Jean-Louis Rawlence
Chief Strategy Officer of Concept Bureau and systems thinker/ aerospace engineer turned futurist.
Recent Publications
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Zach Lamb
Concept Bureau Senior Strategist and social theorist focused on the future of culture + tech.
Recent Publications
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Rebecca Johnson
Concept Bureau Strategist studying consumer psychology and emotional storytelling.
Recent Publications
Want to get to know us better?
Sign up for our Concept Bureau newsletter and we'll mail you 2-3 times a month with a well-researched, thought-provoking, actionable article that will unlock the world of strategy for your brand.
We promise it will be one of your favorite emails to receive.
Being a true strategist means cultivating a fearless mind. It requires the constant pursuit of knowledge, discovering the inputs that fuel our culture and behaviors, and grasping the forces that govern the future of markets.
When you’re engaged in all of those fronts, you get one huge advantage:
The ability to bend reality toward your doorstep.
Strategy is how you thrive.
If you’re reading this and you know us at Concept Bureau, you probably already feel this in your bones, but you also probably don’t feel like you get the exposure and connection you need.
If you did, you’d be unstoppable.
What you need is Exposure Therapy.
Strategy is everything.
FAQs
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The annual fee for Exposure Therapy is $3,000. You can read more about cost and details in How It Works.
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Anyone who is doing interesting things in the brand strategy or strategy world, from any category or industry is welcome to apply. That being said, Exposure Therapy may be most relevant for brand strategists, brand owners, marketers, CEOs, CMOs, founders, researchers or anyone from academic research backgrounds who is applying it to business (think cultural anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, behavioralists, etc.), futurists, and anyone immersed and/ or studying culture.
If this community has piqued your interest, that’s a decent signal. We encourage you to apply or email us with questions at hi@theconceptbureau.com.
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We ask you to engage your heart and mind with the group. That will look different for everyone, and the time needed for you to do that is up to you, but we will give you plenty of opportunities to do so. You need to do enough to feel that you are connected with other members and have a sense of belonging here. When you do, everyone else will feel it, too.
We ask that every member follows our three principles:
1.) Commit To Exploration: Skip the small talk, ask the big questions, and take intellectual risks. Approach this community from a place of deep, humble curiosity.
2.) Evolve Yourself: Come with the intention of growing yourself personally and professionally. Be open to being changed.
3.) Elevate The Group: Support and benefit one another. Be positive, have fun, play, celebrate.
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The whole point of Exposure Therapy is to be open to unexpected insights. Even if a topic isn't immediately relevant to your field, there are fundamental human truths and insights within it that are (there always are, and usually a lot of them).
It’s those unexpected insights from tangential spaces that usually lead to business breakthroughs.
We spent a lot of time organizing the topics to make sure the insights they reveal are applicable to anyone and everyone. We promise that taken together or individually, each month’s deep dives will be fruitful for you.
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We're building the community slowly to help engender a certain vibe and make sure the culture stays scalable, so if you're not accepted to this month’s cohort and you think you'd be a great fit, it's likely because of that.
Don't worry about it. We keep all applications for consideration in future cohorts so there's no need to reapply, but if you feel the info on your form has changed in any significant way, please feel free to send in a new one.
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It’s easy! Just fill out this form!
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Awesome. Please email us at hi@theconceptbureau.com and we’ll be happy to help you out.