Happy 6th Birthday, Culture Cookies!

It’s that time of year again: my blog birthday! I love that WordPress sends an alert, because it’s truly a reason to celebrate. Six years is a pretty long time to keep up any sort of personal project, don’t you think? Especially when you’re not monetizing it 😉

Just feels fitting to give this post a cake. Even if it’s only a picture of cake.

I started this blog as a personal outlet for things I loved to do, but wasn’t getting out of my job at the time. Back then, I was a management consultant and my days mainly consisted of spreadsheets, process flows and PowerPoint slides. I missed writing essays, and decided to start a blog so I could write about anything on my mind.

This blog has carried me through so much since then: a cross-country move, several apartments, job swaps, relationships. I ran into one of my loyal readers the other day (Hi Mary-Lynn!) and we chatted about how I post less frequently than I used to. That’s partly because of my second blog, which often steals my attention away from this one. But it’s also because my relationship to this blog shifts over time, depending on what’s happening in my life. Like any hobby, its role fluctuates depending on what I’m doing and how I’m feeling.

Culture Cookies began as a space for commentary and long-form writing. Then I shifted into a brand strategy job, and spent my days thinking about consumer behavior. I’d read trend reports, conduct consumer research and think about how brands should express themselves. That meant marketing and behavior were always on my mind, so many of my posts ended up touching on consumer psychology, social commentary and brands. Even though the blog synced somewhat with what I did at work, it was still an outlet for long-form writing since most of my “official” work still ended up in PowerPoint slides.

Now here we are, May 2017, and suddenly: writing is my job. I get to write for work, day in, day out. But while I do see lots of data (I’m a business writer!), and I do often write about consumer behavior, my daily work doesn’t focus on spotting behavioral patterns anymore.  And I do think that has had an impact on this blog. In the past six months or so, I’ve written much more personal reflection than social strategy or marketing analysis. It makes sense: switching jobs last fall marked a big change in my life, a change that prompted lots of self-reflection. So naturally, the blog evolved again.

But as I told Mary-Lynn the other day, I miss the old Culture Cookies. I enjoy writing personal essays, and don’t plan to stop, but I do want to beef back up the other parts of this blog that I’ve sort of abandoned for the past ten months. Consider this my blog birthday pledge: I pledge to reboot my marketing talk and behavioral commentary. It’s time to turn more of my scheming scribbles into actual posts. I already have a couple of drafts in the works, and promise to share them in the next few weeks.

As always, thanks for reading. Hope to see you back here soon!