Find your next brand idea

Turn what’s happening in culture into a stronger idea for your brand…

Before your competition does it by accident.

Pleasure Codes Plus is brand innovation intelligence from The Mighty Shed that includes thousands of real brand and cultural signals, each traced back to the underlying human desire that made them work. £95 a year.

The Company Taking Your Customers May Not Be in Your Category

Picture someone quietly giving up on something they've bought for years. Imagine it however you like: they cancel the gym and start walking instead, or they stop buying wine and take up cooking, or the weekend away becomes a Saturday with nothing in it at all.

Notice what didn't happen in any of those imagined examples. They didn't switch to another supplier of the same thing. Their time, attention and money went somewhere outside the usual competitive set.

A want can stay put while the products come and go. Someone who wants to feel looked after might find that in a hotel, a hairdresser, an app or a phone call.

So your real competitive set may be much wider than the one on your slide. Happily, so is your opportunity: studying how another category serves a desire can suggest something new for your own.

This is not your mother's trend report

Trend reports collect what is happening. The harder question is why anyone cares, and what that might mean in another category.

The Global Head of Innovation Insights at BAT has made a version of this point publicly about our work: ordinary trend reports are difficult to make relevant across R&D, marketing and board stakeholders, while the examples and storytelling here help the material stick with people.

That's the difference we've built PleasureCode Plus around. Every example inside it comes with an interpretation, giving you a way to discuss it with people who don't share your job.

What's inside

Plus holds 2,766+ brand and culture moves, each mapped to the desire it serves, with new moves added every week.

They're organised around 8 territories of desire and 39+ Pleasure Code Currents, the directions things are travelling within each territory.

The Pleasure Codes Compass helps you get your bearings.

Behind the mapping sits 29+ years of pattern recognition from our team, whose agency work includes Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Formula 1, The Macallan and McDonald's.

How to use it

Open the Compass and find the territory your brand already occupies. Consider the difference between the thing you sell and what people might want from it.

Then go and read at least two territories next door to yours. That's where ambition gets stretched, because you start seeing how other categories serve an appetite adjacent to your customer's.

From there it goes wherever you need it: into a brief that needs a reason to exist, into a boardroom where someone has asked why anyone would want this, or into the blank page nobody enjoys starting.

A quick word about the word “pleasure”

It's a bigger word than it looks. Here it covers comfort, meaning, ritual, exploration, status, identity and connection. Think about how much of a person's spending, or their Sunday, might be explained by those wants.

Whose Idea Was All This

Hello. My name is Angelique Green, and I founded The Mighty Shed and mapped out the Pleasure Codes after running global branding at Starbucks and network agencies. PleasureCodes Plus makes the way we approach reading desire available for your own work.

What membership includes

£95 a year. Membership includes Pleasure Codes Plus with its thousands of worked examples, cultural signals and strategic openings, updated weekly, plus the eight Pleasure Codes strategic principles, the full deadly sins series, the monthly Trend Safari dispatches and the full library.

If you'd rather read before you join, the free Pleasure Codes newsletter sends weekly essays. Paid membership is the route that opens Plus itself.

[Join Pleasure Codes Plus — £95/year]

If your team wants a look before deciding, write to hello@themightyshed.com.

P.S. Think of a customer you lost and ask what they're doing instead. You may find that the desire hasn't disappeared. It's being answered somewhere else. Give yourself a wider place to look.