Brands of the Week: $100K College Tuition, Amazon Beats Walmart, Caitlin Clark Backlash, Taylor Swift x Toy Story, Victoria's Secret Comeback & More
On Brand with Donny DeutschShow Notes
Donny Deutsch breaks down the biggest brand winners and losers shaping culture right now in this week's Brands of the Week episode of On Brand with Donny Deutsch — the podcast where everything is a brand.
This week Donny covers: college tuition hitting $100,000 at Duke, Georgetown, and Wash U — and what it means for the value of a college degree in the age of AI and trade careers. Amazon dethrones Walmart on the Fortune 500 after 13 years, signaling the definitive rise of e-commerce over brick-and-mortar retail. AI kills the cover letter — Wharton research confirms AI-generated applications have made cover letters meaningless for hiring managers. Clint Eastwood retires at 96 — a look back at one of Hollywood's greatest directing and acting legacies. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's Papatui cologne launches at Target — is a $40 celebrity fragrance a brand win or a miss? Harry Styles gives away free concert tickets to fans who volunteer through nonprofits on his Love on Tour residency. Acadia National Park tops Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon as America's best national park. Gen Z and pet ownership — why younger generations are spending big on pet care and treating pets as primary emotional relationships. Costco gas stations hit record demand as national gas prices surge past $4 a gallon. Hollywood popcorn buckets become the hottest collectible in pop culture marketing — The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey buckets are selling out and reselling for $250 on eBay. Taylor Swift drops a new song for Toy Story 5 — and breaks Apple Music and Spotify records within 24 hours. Caitlin Clark faces an unfair double standard as media scrutinizes her competitive sideline behavior — the same behavior celebrated in Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. Zebra striping — the new drinking trend of alternating alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages driving a 22% surge in NA beverage sales. Victoria's Secret stock surges 44% as CEO Hillary Super leads a brand comeback by leaning back into the brand's identity. And the sleep divorce trend — why 1 in 3 Americans are sleeping in separate beds and what it means for the mattress industry.
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This week Donny Deutsch and Lou Pellegrino run through who's up and who's down in American culture. They start with a CDC report finding that most U.S. adults are running on empty, then compare notes on five o'clock naps and why sleep has become a $100 billion industry. From there it's senior TikTok creators talking openly about sex and intimacy, the University of Chicago banning AI and laptops from its core courses, and the dictionary's newest additions, including "parasocial," "cuffing season," and "Sunday scaries."
Anthony Scaramucci joins Donny Deutsch to break down his new book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, a sharp and surprisingly self-critical look at how America got here. The SkyBridge founder and co-host of The Rest Is Politics: US walks through the three turning points he believes set the stage for MAGA: letting China into the WTO without checking its rise, the post-9/11 wars funded by tax cuts that blew up the deficit, and a 2008 bailout that rescued the banks but left Main Street behind. As Scaramucci puts it, Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party "had a baby, and they named it baby MAGA."