I’m not a foodie, I just like what I like,” she says. “Yes, I know, it’s just like hipsters saying, ‘I’m not a hipster.’ ” (The cliché cracks her up.) “But it’s like when my boss says, ‘Oh, you’re such a foodie.’ I’m like, Oh God. When I hear the word foodie, I think of Yelp. I don’t want to be lumped in with Yelp.

In this soft economy, hard luxury has thrived.

That’s because these brands provide a not-so-little-thing called meaning, which translates into value. And more than ever it’s about value: the interaction between price and what we get in return. In truth, that’s what the economy has impacted most—a closer examination of what’s behind the brand curtain as consumers have searched for more value, not just lower prices.

Yet brand managers, staring down the barrel of a lingering recession, often blame high prices for lost sales. It’s reactionary, in order to move product. But we know that people don’t choose a product in a purely logical way. Brand Keys proprietary research points to a split: rational factors make up only about 30% of why we choose what we choose. Emotional factors account for the rest.

And that’s the luxury advantage. Luxury brands know how to create and foster emotional value. It’s this distinction that enables them to continue to live so large, even in a time of constricted budgets. What luxury brands do well is exhibit clear brand values that lead to a meaningful emotional differentiation in the mind of the consumer.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, “The report of [brand] death is greatly exaggerated.”

The right-brained will rule the earth. And the Earth will like it, too. The abilities that matter now and in the future include empathy, visionary-big picture thinking, artistry and creativity, the ability to intuit, absorb, predict and anticipate.

Collaboration is overrated. At least the word is.

What people want is “community,” engagement and highly effective opportunities to work with highly effective people who can get things done. And if those highly effective people are kind of cool and kind of smart they will become your “work friends.”

Then they will become your Facebook friends and you will have Thanksgiving Dinner with them because it’s way more fun and much less stressful than hanging with your own family. And you will be happier at work, and therefore stay longer and then that big nameless, faceless, well-branded corporate entity that signs your paycheck will continue to prosper and thrive, making bazillions of dollars, and then it can hire a phenomenal design firm to build a “campus” for its happy workers, who will stay longer and work more but won’t mind as much because they have a dry cleaner, fitness center and their best friends all within 10 feet of their desk. See how this works?

Petula Dvorak called Pinterest “digital crack for women” arguing that “the site’s churning cycle of interest, hope, inspiration, jealousy, desperation, despair and depression keeps them coming back.

Add easy functionality. You sign-up and hit the “Pin it” button. It requires no investment of time or learning and accelerates behavior many women were doing anyway.