Pleasure Codes Plus

The intelligence platform that helps you spot sharper opportunities faster

Pleasure Codes Plus is the intelligence platform behind The Pleasure Codes: a living library of cultural signals and brand moves that helps you understand what people actually want, and what that opens up for anyone building something others are supposed to care about.

Why this Exists

The pandemic made one thing unmistakably clear to me:

Pleasure is one of the clearest signals in culture.
(If the word pleasure just made you twitch, this note¹ is for you.)

That period did much more than Zoom us into little boxes and teach us to wipe down groceries with the seriousness of a surgical team. It changed how people wanted to feel: in their homes, in their bodies, in their relationships, and on another what fresh hell is this Tuesday.

What became obvious was that we were living through more than a health crisis.

We were living through a reset in human desire.

So I gathered futurists, semioticians, and cultural anthropologists to study the forces reshaping life around us: the long afterlife of busyness, the emotional weather of the news cycle, the pressure of being permanently reachable, and the unmistakable ways people were rearranging their lives around what made them feel more alive.

What emerged was a way of understanding pleasure in its fuller human depth.

Sensory pleasure.

Social pleasure.

Purposeful pleasure.

Far beyond the flat, wink-wink version people often assume when they hear the word. The ancient Greeks had a richer vocabulary for this. Pleasure that stretched from sensory delight to the deeper satisfactions of meaning, vitality, and human flourishing. A way of being completely (and unapologetically) alive.

Modern culture collapsed all of that into something considerably narrower. When most people hear the word they hear indulgence. Or sex. That reaction says more about cultural hang-ups than the concept itself. The Greeks did not. Our research didn't find new desires. It found the old ones, unnamed and slightly ashamed of themselves. People wanted everything the Greeks had words for. They just hadn't been given licence to say so.

The whole body of work became The Pleasure Codes: a timeless lens on human desire, and a very current way of reading where culture is heading and where sharper opportunities for brands are beginning to form.

Pleasure Codes Plus is where that lens becomes usable.

What Winning Brands Understand

After decades inside the briefs of some of the world’s biggest brands, one pattern became impossible for me to ignore:

The brands that win are rarely the ones with the best product, the biggest budget, or the most exhaustive research stack.

They’re the ones that understand which desires they are really selling. They know whether they are trading in status, comfort, belonging, ritual, excess, control, self-authorship, escape, or something stranger. Ignore it, and you hand the market to the ones who do.

Pleasure Codes Plus was built to make that thinking available beyond one boardroom, one brief, or one consulting engagement.

It is the same thinking I’ve used with Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 clients, now available for you to use on your own timeline.

What’s Inside

The Pleasure Codes Compass

The strategic map behind The Pleasure Codes: eight overlapping territories of desire. Comfort, ritual, status, identity, connection, exploration, belonging, and the parts of human experience that resist easy naming. Each one a different way people seek pleasure, meaning, relief, recognition, or aliveness. Built from cultural research into shifting human desire, the Compass helps you see not just what people say they want, but the deeper motives shaping what they reach for, and how to build more interesting things in response.

3,000+ Brand and Culture Moves

A growing library of signals, updated weekly, from across categories, each one mapped to the desire behind it, decoded for what it means, and translated into questions and innovation opportunities you can actually use.

40+ Cultural Currents

Named movements within each territory that show how desire is evolving right now. Revealing where culture is headed, the emotional weather gathering around it, and the strategic openings those shifts create.

30+ Years of Pattern Recognition

Distilled from decades of work across some of the world’s biggest briefs, this is strategic pattern recognition that can help you:

• make strategy more interesting, and more true

• sharpen a position

• stretch a brief

• prep for a workshop

• spot non-obvious opportunities faster

• move beyond trend theatre

Or less politely: use it when you are tired of everyone saying the same thing in slightly different fonts.

Who It’s For

• founders building brands people are supposed to care about

• strategists who need sharper stories and examples

• innovators looking for ideas with more stretch in them

• writers and creatives looking for more original ways in

• anyone trying to understand not just what people do, but the motive underneath it

What Happens Next

Become a paid subscriber to The Pleasure Codes and Pleasure Codes Plus opens up immediately.

You’ll receive a welcome email with a magic link to the platform. Use the same email address as your Substack subscription, click once, and everything opens up.

This is the part where desire gets practical.

1. One small clarification: when people in business hear the word pleasure, they often assume indulgence or sex. That reaction says more about our cultural hang-ups than the concept itself. Pleasure includes comfort, meaning, ritual, exploration, status, identity, and connection. It is the map of human behaviour. Ignore it, and you hand the market to brands that understand desire better than you do.