Goldman
Sachs
Radicalizing the financial sector to reshape socio-economic infrastructures.
Challenge
Outcome
Create product innovation and frameworks needed to ensure Goldman Sachs can sustain and succeed today and thrive in an uncertain future.
An all-new business strategy, product evolution, brand positioning, and messaging campaing.
The Year
2022
Problem
Every year, the School of Visual Arts' Masters in Branding program culminates in a thesis project where brands that are thought to have fallen out of step with culture are reimagined.
For 2022, the companies selected had to be included in the current Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), with the assignment being to secure their position on this stock market index for the next ten years. The DJIA comprises 30 large, publicly traded companies, each chosen by a committee based on "reputation, its history of sustained growth, its interest to investors, and its sector representation of the broader market."
This Case Study is an extension of the Goldman Sachs thesis presented on September 21, 2022.
2032 Forecast
As we look ahead to 2032, technology surpasses expectations, seamlessly merging the physical world into tech-centric domains. The new decade's most influential populations will be a threefold "hyperconnected" generation whose coming of age was shaped by communing in multi-dimensional realities, with avatars and social channels becoming extensions of their very being. Yet, amid these marvels of technological advancement, whispers of concern echo, hinting at the price of this new age. Will this relentless connection to devices lead to a decline in meaningful face-to-face interactions and holistic well-being? Can the upcoming generation maintain their analytical prowess amid the overwhelming influx of information and automation? As we step into this brave new world, we project that prioritizing connected well-being, multi-intelligence platforms, tech-centric citizenship, and generational wealth will grant US businesses a competitive advantage in this shifting landscape.
Key Findings
Money: The (Death of the) American Dream
The country's singular focus on fortune regatively impacts the physical, psychological, and emotional well-being of its citizens.
While people are often said to have money, many Americans today are money, and they thoughtlessly use others to make money. In this land where all people are supposedly created equal, gross inequality persists with great prosperity for some still meaning limited opportunity for many. The lines between people and profit remain distressingly blurred, with people restrictively defined by the riches they have or the debt that they owe.

In modern-day America, the apotheosis of financial capital has conflated the pursuits of happiness and money and limited the American Dream to fiscal achievement. The unharnessed power of money has resulted in societal and personal imbalances that are severe, destructive, and unsustainable-harmful to relationships, the environment, and physical and mental health.
Uprooted by the pandemic with systemic cracks widely exposed, America is at a critical inflection moment. The country has been in this position numerous times before, but previous solutions and regulatory measures have been ineffective, temporary, or outrightly marginalized-mere patches to shoddily cover severely broken foundations.

Rather than continue to build on what has intermittently, but repeatedly, failed, the country should take this opportunity to reevaluate and restructure its economic model. Given the fundamental and seismic changes needing to be made, the effort should have a powerful financial institution with ample resources and great influence, like Goldman Sachs, at its helm.