When banks were failing and bread lines forming during the Great Depression, cosmetic sales rose 25%. In 2008, as the global economy collapsed, Lego posted record profits. In 2020, as the pandemic shuttered industries, the pet sector grew 16%.
These industries weren’t selling products. They were selling joy. And in every moment of profound collective anxiety, that turned out to be the most recession-proof offering on the market.
Trend analysts have a name for what’s happening now, at scale and with new urgency: the Joyconomy. And for leaders who are still running their organizations on fear-based operating assumptions, it represents a more fundamental disruption than AI.
From Trend to Economic Shift
The term emerged in 2023, when intelligence firm VML identified the Joyconomy as a defining consumer trend: brands offering bold color, positive connectivity, uninhibited play, and movement designed for mood rather than metrics were gaining ground across categories. By 2025, Forbes had declared it a major force reshaping how successful businesses operate.
This was not a rebranding of optimism. It was a structural observation about where consumer attention, loyalty, and spending were migrating – and why. The question for leaders is not whether to join the Joyconomy. It’s what to subtract from their current operating model to make room for it.
The underlying driver is anxiety. Against a backdrop of persistent uncertainty (geopolitical instability, AI-driven economic disruption, information overload), consumers are making a quiet but consequential shift. They are moving toward brands that make them feel something generative rather than brands that exploit their fear.
They are, increasingly, learning to use their spending as their voice: 64% of global consumers now report boycotting brands that don’t align with their values. Fear-based marketing, which has dominated brand strategy for decades, is losing its grip precisely as the conditions that once made it effective have become intolerable. READ MORE
By Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey
Source: forbes.com
After being laid off, 57% of U.S. workers said they’ve felt pressured to accept a lower salary to get back to work, according to Glassdoor poll results released Tuesday. Women, the results show, feel greater pressure, with 63% saying they’d considered a lower offer compared to 52% of men.
Celebrate the big wins. They are well-deserved products of your efforts. Accept the laurel, frame it, show it off. Celebrating the big win doesn’t translate into complacency. It implies acknowledgment. The idea behind the resting-on-laurels effect is not to minimize your accomplishments. It is to use them as springboards and to be mindful that they don’t become traps.
The other day someone mentioned a friend who had recently retired. Then they paused. “Well… semi-retired,” they said. “He doesn’t really like calling himself retired.” I understood immediately. Not because I know the man. I don’t. But because I recognised what he was trying to protect. His relevance.
