The Power Law That Shapes Every Strategy

...and culture at large.

We recently worked with a parenting brand that was puzzled that despite their science-backed accolades and superior product, they were losing marketshare to a bunch of vibey new players. A good parent should want the safest, most effective product, after all. And at one time, they did.

But what our clients didn’t realize yet was that the power law has shifted. The sphere of influence in parenting is no longer pediatricians or childcare experts. It has moved to MAHA moms and feminist wellness gurus, which are two sides of the same coin. If parenting was once a science, it is now a spiritual calling.

The power law is simple: A small minority of people or things usually account for most of the impact in a market. You may have also heard of it as the Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule, where roughly 80% of outcome is driven by 20% of the players. But that split can be 90/10, and in more extreme situations, 99/1.

Source: Power Laws in Culture by Doug Shapiro

The shape of a market with a power law distribution looks very different from one with a normal distribution. Value is concentrated with a very few, very consequential participants. We fail to see power laws because the idea of a bell curve is so hardwired into our brains.

If the surface of culture or the market looks crazy to you, it’s likely because you’e averaging the market, when in reality power is concentrated in just a few hands.

Almost everything behaves like a market, and that means the power law can show up anywhere. Even in the places we feel are too precious or too sacred to be touched by market logic.

Culture is a market for status and belonging, and you can see the power law in our media, our influencer economy, and even our irl social circles. Six major media conglomerates own 90% of what Americans see¹, and a small fraction of creators capture the vast majority of online attention.

In medicine, 20% of patients make up 80% of the healthcare burden². In the spectrum of American Christianity, just 10% of churches capture 70% of all churchgoers³. Even in trend forecasting, my brilliant friend Amy Daroukakis has pointed out that 90% of the industry reports we rely on come from only 10 cities.

[Fun fact: If your user base looks more like a power law distribution than a normal bell curve distribution, it may mean what you’re selling is addictive. Most gambling platforms and alcohol sales look like power laws.]

There are lots of reasons why the power law exists and why it will never go away. Most of it has to do with human behavior and the indifference of markets. Attention will always compound and markets will always reward coordination. There is no hope of ever flattening the power law, and in some cases, we would never want to. But that’s not the primary signal.

What’s far more important is to pay attention to who is in the 20%, and exactly when the people in that 20% start to change.

They won’t be the same people forever. The face of that 20% changes, slowly and imperceptibly, but when it does, all of the rules change with them. If you’re not paying attention, you’ll still be trying to capture value - whether that be through marketshare, attention, or revolution - by appealing to a group of people that doesn’t pull the strings anymore.

That’s exactly what happened with our parenting client, and I’ve seen it happen to many builders and breakers since.

The 20% is changing almost everywhere at once, and that makes this a very exciting time, but a very confusing and risky time as well.

20% Money

Why does the stock market keep soaring while the American Dream slips away? Why is the S&P hitting all-time highs while articles about the $140k poverty line are going viral?

I sold most of my market positions shortly after Trump announced tariffs, and that one move cost me a painful sum of unrealized gains. By all measures, tariffs were going to cause at least a short term crunch in the US economy, right? And yet the stocks I had already sold just kept climbing higher and higher, month after month.

My mistake was missing the shift in the 80/20. On some level, I still naively believed the market represented some broad economic participation, when in reality it reflected the interests of a much narrower class of ultra-wealthy asset holders who understand the system will serve them. What I didn’t realize was that the wealthiest 10% own 87% of stocks.⁴ They certainly weren’t spooked, and so nothing slipped. The market just kept going up.

In hindsight, it was obvious that the market wasn’t reacting to everyday economic stress because it no longer answers to everyday economic life. Meanwhile, I kept reading the market as a proxy for the general public. I admit this embarrassment to demonstrate how easy it is to miss when the face of the 20% has changed.

Old mental models can get stuck in place, and unless we are actively cleaning them out, they will cost us.

20% Resistance

It’s hard to compare the cultural revolutions of the past to whatever is happening today. Where are the artists and musicians and actors and athletes? Where are the cultural bellwethers?

The 60s had Bob Dylan, the 90s had Public Enemy, France had Atelier Populaire posters, Germany had graffiti on the Berlin Wall. What weapons of art do we have now? There are certainly no painters or musicians or conceptual artists holding the flag of moral revolution. There is no aesthetic to our generation’s movement. We’re borrowing 30-year old Rage Against The Machine songs to make playlists for the protest.

The best we have now is memes about ‘eat the rich’ and the NPC TikTok trend.

Why does resistance feel so unserious and ironic? Why is it so invisible?

What makes this moment confusing is that we’re still looking for revolution where it used to live. For most of the last century, we went to artists and musicians for the language, symbols, and emotional permission to push back against power. But today, much of the art world is hollowed out and gatekept, and I don't think it’s equipped to offer what this moment demands as America moves into whatever order is coming next. I’m not sure there is a single major artist on tour that could credibly subvert authority.⁵

Memeologist Aidan Walker, one of my favorite cultural thinkers, says, "Memes are produced by an audience in search of new forms. The memes themselves are not the final phase, but a reaching.” You have to watch his incredible breakdown:

@aidanetceterawe carry the flame, fight for the gospel, and honor his name #kirk #kirkification #luigi

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That’s what this moment feels like - a reaching. A population trying to process grief, rage, fear, and powerlessness with the only tools that still feel participatory. Memes aren’t the revolution, but they are a sign that the 20% here is changing.

Kirkification memes and Mangione thirst traps do subvert. They reject a singular “truth” that may be imposed upon the people by an authority, and that is exactly what postmodernist art used to do. Revolutionary art is a rejection of the mirage.

I doubt the thing that finally binds us will come from the art world or from entertainment. Those channels are too compromised and flattened. Memes won’t take us all the way either, but whatever comes next will emerge from a stranger place. It will be weird and from the outside, but we'll know it when we see it. Pay attention to the 20% as it changes here, because whatever group takes power next will change the rules.

20% Social Forms

For about two decades, the tech world functioned as a giant social laboratory. The most profound technological products were testing new ways of people being together. Forums, social networks, open source communities, creator platforms, DAOs, Discord servers and coworking spaces were all new experiments. We were tinkering with coordination, identity, trust, governance, and belonging at scale.

A subset of tech founders was the 20% that controlled 80% of how we gathered. They were the new architects of our social forms and the shape of our interconnected lives. If you wanted to see where new social rules were being invented — how people gathered, argued, collaborated, found status, or fell apart — you didn’t look to institutions. You looked to tech. Engineers and platform builders became accidental social architects, setting the norms we now live inside.

But that phase has ended, the Metaverse is shutting down, and most platform innovations have hardened into infrastructure. Experimentation has given way to optimization. Our systems are too profitable to be tinkered with.

So the locus of experimentation is moving again. Today, the most active testing ground for new social forms isn’t tech. It’s care.

Radical new experiments in co-living and community, emerging forms of therapy and healing we haven’t seen before, the explosion of non-normative relationship formats, reimagined recovery spaces, intergenerational living, the booming and evolving retreat industry, even the play we see in the intentional gatherings in our homes and public spaces - all of this is beautiful, new innovation.

As Toby Shorin has pointed out, some of the most interesting social innovation right now is happening right now in these care and relational spaces⁶. These formats may not be perfect but they’re still flexible. They’re still allowed to change and fail and reform in new ways.

This doesn’t mean tech is irrelevant and it doesn’t mean care spaces are the answer to everything. It just means the face of the experimental 20% is changing in a really consequential domain of life. I’ve written about how ambient extraction is changing human behavior toward private spaces, and this retreat from the digital world is only hastened by a sudden romanticization of irl that’s captivated pop culture. It is both necessary and aspirational to move our social lives from the internet to the real world now, and that means we’re bringing a great amount of energy and imagination to our care spaces.

As we shift the 20% to care, our norms around how we commune will change again. The people you will have to appeal to, and how you appeal to them altogether, will also have to change if you play in this space.

The power law is the language the world is written in. If you’re building anything - a brand, a movement, a community - or all three at once - your job is to learn how to read it. To see where influence is actually concentrating, especially in places that don’t look like power yet.

The world very seldomly works in natural averages. Most often, the majority of power and value is captured by a minority of players.

Power laws are most potent when they hide inside domains we still think of as neutral, or too human to be governed by cold math. That’s where they reshape behavior the most.

Moments of paradigm change, like the one we’re entering now, tend to rewrite power laws. The equation stays the same but the variables change. New people take the place of old authorities. New arenas start doing the work that legacy ones can no longer do.

The biggest risk is doing the old math in a new market. Optimizing for yesterday’s 20%. Speaking to institutions, tastemakers, or symbols that no longer pull the strings.

Stay alert and watch where experimentation is allowed to happen, and stay on the right side of the line.

Public Interest Clinic

My team and I are launching a special project for 2026 where we’ll be donating pro bono hours every month to select organizations helping people and causes that are critical right now.

If your organization does work in the following areas and could benefit from an hour of brass tacks, no-BS, actionable consulting on brand, positioning and narrative, let us help you:

• Civil & Human Rights

• Women’s Health & Safety

• Children’s Wellbeing & Protection

• Middle East Humanitarian Efforts

Just fill out this quick form telling us more about your org and your current brand challenges, and we’ll reach out if we can help.

Wayfinders Anonymous

Here’s what we’ve been consuming.

For Those Who See What Others Don’t Yet (The Starting Point): “And understand that there are many wayfinders. Some see systems, others sense atmospheres. Some move through dream and myth, others through data and strategy. Each carries a part of the future. No one carries the whole. So the weaver’s work is to bind what is fragmented—to transform what we see into something others can also carry, in the way that works for them.”

You Don’t Need a Better Strategy Yet (thinking out loud): “When you feel stalled, it’s usually not because you lack insight or data. You’re stuck because you’re solving the problem the same way, through assumptions that need more questioning. Even strong thinking can produce increasingly refined versions of the wrong thing.”

Virality Without Velocity: The Pat McGrath Labs Lesson. (Branding With Benefits): “Virality is a window, not a destination. When culture hands you a moment; a viral TikTok, an unexpected endorsement, a product that catches fire, the clock starts immediately. The audience’s attention is borrowed and not owned. If your operations can’t keep up with your cultural velocity, you’re not building momentum but watching it dissipate while someone else figures out how to serve the demand you created.”

The Private Equity Takeover of Indie Film (Sam Widdoes): “A24 spent a decade of steadily building its brand as the coolest label in film — full stop. From Oscar winners Everything Everywhere All At Once to Moonlight, and dozens more — thee studio had an absolutely insane run of movies that were wholly original, not very expensive, and effectively the opposite of what the other major studios were making. Audiences loved it, to the point that A24 became the first branded and consumer-recognized movie studio since….Disney? And in 2022, it made the decision to take outside money…”

[BONUS] I spoke on Great Mondays about the changing order of values in our culture, how everyone sees themselves as a free agent now, and what that means for organizations. We also talked about what it takes to build community that actually works.

If you're a strategist that wants to be good at second-order thinking, you need two things: 1) an incredible library of knowledge, and 2) the ability to reconstruct the world not just from your eyes, but from the eyes of players you will never know in your life.

We build elegant strategies and forecasts and theories, but the best plans break because we fail to imagine how other players may be smarter, crazier, more optimistic, more nihilistic or more desperate than we think they are.

Second-order thinking is only as good as your ability to imagine the other person's reality. When that imagination is thin, the downstream consequences are almost always surprising even when they shouldn’t be.

• Biden cut off China from our AI chips and semiconductors thinking it would slow the race, but all it did was incentivize a nation of brilliant minds to create DeepSeek (without our tech) and reprice the entire market.

• When I work with human rights orgs, they all want "awareness, awareness, awareness"!! But look around. Nobody is starved for information. We are starved for empathy. Awareness assumes people act from their brains, when we all know they act from their hearts.

• AI, climate, everyone sees the cliff coming but no one can afford to move first because our systems penalize responsibility and reward whoever keeps pushing ahead, and the most influential leaders do not follow some visionary plan, they follow incentives.

• Prediction markets are supposed to give more fidelity into the future (if you believe what Kalshi’s founder says on stages, I don’t). But anyone who is tapped into our current negativity economy + meaning crisis + cost of living can see it’s little more than a circle jerk primed for large scale fraud.

We're wrapping up an intense month studying second-order thinking in Exposure Therapy and I can tell you that, as our incredible presenter Dr. Lydia Kostopoulos (PhD) told us recently, even the most clever strategies only work when our environment is stable, and we can't even see stability in the rear view mirror anymore.

When the world gets unstable, people will surprise you... if you're not paying attention.

Learn to build the world through other peoples' eyes. You have to build it through a dozen different eyes and viewpoints before you can get even a semblance of reality. Learn to read the story that stitches different players together in invisible ways. Learn to inhabit someone else's mind and heart and motivations just as you inhabit your own.

"Rational" explanations, despite what we learned in b-school, have never accurately described the market. You have to balance the mathematical truth of the world with the psychic truth of humanity. Then you get to some interesting second-order territories.

Yours,

I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist.
If you love this newsletter and need more:

• My private community Exposure Therapy “will open your third eye” (words from the Head of Google Play Partnerships, not mine).

• My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau can build your culture-leading brand.

• My LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok where I post my ideas daily.

• My public speaking, and how I can be on your stage.

1. The Motley Fool, “The Big 6 Media Companies”
https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/communication/media-stocks/big-6/

2. eClinicalMedicine, “Trends in medicare spending across strata of resource utilization among older individuals in the United States”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8144657/

3. Hartford Institute for Religion Research, “Fast Facts on American Religion”
https://hirr.hartfordinternational.edu/fast-facts-on-american-religion/

4. The Motley Fool, “How Many Americans Own Stock? About 162 Million -- but the Wealthiest 1% Own More Than Half”
https://www.fool.com/research/how-many-americans-own-stock/

5. I know some people are hanging their hats on the Super Bowl in the coming weeks, but I remain skeptical that any of those performers will come out a lightning rod. Others have rightfully said it is the fragmented nature of social media itself that makes it hard for any one artist to capture the imagination of a public. I agree with that, yet still I don’t see any major creatives capable of subverting authority.

6. Care Culture, “Theory of Social Forms”
https://careculture.tobyshorin.com/theory-of-social-forms/