About a year ago, I was an intern putting together my final presentation on a consumer company.

As I was writing my script and figuring out how I wanted to explain the company to a room of leaders, I kept coming back to the same word: vibe.

The vibe of the company was this. The vibe of where they were trying to go was that. The people who wanted the product wanted this kind of vibe.

I kept trying to replace it with something that sounded more sophisticated. Value proposition? Not quite. Product differentiation? Definitely not. Brand equity? Maybe part of it. But none of those words really captured what I was trying to describe.

There was something about the company that existed somewhere between the product itself, the branding, the person buying it, and the person that customer imagined themselves becoming by buying it.

And I couldn't find a better word for it than vibe.

I kind of let that thought sit with me for the next year. And the more consumer brands I watched, the more I realized that this wasn't unique to that one company.

There are entire companies now where it's almost difficult to explain what makes them special without describing how they feel.

An olive oil isn't just olive oil. It makes your kitchen feel cooler. It makes cooking feel a little more effortless, a little more European, a little more like you are the kind of person who casually makes a beautiful dinner on a Tuesday night.

The product is real. The functionality matters. But there is something else layered on top of it: an identity, an aesthetic, an aspiration, an energy that is much harder to put into a traditional business term.

A vibe.

And increasingly, there are entire businesses being built around capturing it.

The Vibe Economy is the growing universe of consumer companies that turn cultural and emotional resonance into economic value. They don't simply ask, What does the consumer need? They ask, consciously or not, How does the consumer want to feel? Who do they want to be? And what kind of world do they want this product to belong to?

So as we continue to explore all things consumer in this especially crazy time, I hope we can capture what it means for a business to be growing, innovating and counting on vibes.

Shadeh