IKEA, Whole Foods & VW: How Brands Rewired Human Habits
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IKEA, Whole Foods & VW: How Brands Rewired Human Habits
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About this listen
IKEA made a bed for your phone. Whole Foods turned a grocery list into a cultural forecast. Volkswagen’s top-selling product isn’t a car—it’s sausage.
This week on BRANDED Weekly, Ben Kaplan (Founder + CEO, Top Agency) breaks down how brands stopped reacting to culture and started writing it. From IKEA’s behavioral design experiments to Whole Foods’ 2026 trend report and Volkswagen’s nostalgia-driven empire, today’s most powerful brands aren’t selling products—they’re engineering habits, identity, and emotion.
We unpack:
IKEA’s Phone Bed — gamifying guilt and designing digital discipline.
Whole Foods’ Trend Report — transforming food into status and self-expression.
Volkswagen’s Currywurst — turning nostalgia into profit.
The Death of Millennial Brands — why aesthetic polish stopped working.
Because branding in 2025 isn’t about storytelling anymore—it’s about habit formation, desire curation, and emotional anchoring.