To learn a What from someone is to acquire a new fact.

To learn a How from someone is to acquire a new skill.

To learn a new Why from someone is to learn to see the world differently.

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Sometimes when we find it impossible to comprehend a fact it is because we lack the How required to understand it.

To understand this new What, one must learn a new intellectual How ¹.

But sometimes we cannot see the point of bothering with it: “Why would I go to the trouble to make sense of this abstract, complicated stuff?”

So, not only do we lack a How that enables us to understand — we cannot feel any Why that might motivate us to learn this How, which in turn would enable us to learn this What.

And if you point this out to someone, the question arises: Why would I want to learn this Why you claim to know?

And there’s really no answer to this question.

Once this question is asked, the answer is excluded.

(Only love or great need makes a person want a Why beyond their own. This is why Socrates called himself a philo-sopher (not a sophist) and it is also why he was a great seducer.)

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Simon Sinek says it explicitly, but he does not know how to live out its implications: Only the What is explicit and lends itself to language. The How and the Why are tacit. What they are essentially is not conducive to language, at least not by itself, and employed directly.

But we cannot seem to internalize this fact and live according to it.

We keep trying to reduce How to methods, techniques, policies, or instructions.

We’re constantly attempting to reduce Why to doctrines, statements, manifestos, slogans, or images.

And we become frustrated and angry when this fails to work. It makes us feel crazy and occasionally lonely.

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So Sinek tells us Apple’s Why is: “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo.  We believe in thinking differently.  The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use, and user friendly. We just happen to make computers.” And he finishes with a coup de gras: “Wanna buy one?”

That is gross simplification. When Apple launched its “Think Different” campaign, most people didn’t wanna buy one, unless they were already thinking differently. They preached to the choir, and it made the choir start singing again, which was important at the time of the campaign, but it won few converts.

What has brought Apple its new mass success is not that it is different, which is a negative definition, but its particular, superior, differentness which cannot be understood until one participates in that differentness it by using one of Apple’s products. One experiences How using an Apple product is different, one also might experience the importance of this differentness and feeling Why people become Apple fanatics and find most other electronic products unsatisfying. We can talk all about the qualities of the experience, try to articulate what that difference is, but only someone who already knows it will understand the language. To everyone else it is fanboy raving, or evidence of a cult.

I would argue that Apple’s first truly successful advertisement was the iPod. Not the advertisements for the iPod (which were very good), but the iPod itself. The iPod involved unbelivers in Apple’s vision and converted them. The key was its relative uniqueness (at least to consumers) and its affordability. Had they been aware of a cheaper alternative, they might have bought it. But Apple smuggled its vision in a slick and affordable consumer product. When unbelievers bought an iPod and concretely participated in and experienced Apple’s positive differentness, they were initiated into Apple’s How and Why. This new wave of converts and their testimonials carried far more weight among the unbelievers, it made Apple (and enthusiasm for Apple) respectable. These were not fanboys, but persuaded, skeptical normal folks.

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The iPod story points to why experience design has eclipsed and subsumed advertising.

Advertising has its roots in communication. It still drags its legacy behind it in how it approaches problems: “What’s the story?”

Mere communication, even if it is outfitted with dazzling cleverness, charm or elegance, etc., even if it tells a good story, lacks the persuasive force of participation. Telling is not enough — everyone knows that — but neither is showing. And neither is “interacting”. Don’t just tell, and don’t just show, and don’t just interact.

When revealing a new How and Why, one must draw the other into participatory involvement. Social media barely scratches the surface of possibilities.

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Brand is rooted in Why and its immediate manifestation in in How: in how an organization approaches problems, how the organization manages itself and how it relates to its stakeholders. Some of this How is formalized in process and policy, but much of it remains tacit. The results of this Why and How is the What of the company: its offerings and its marketing. But clinging to the concrete What is the tacit Why and How that brought it into existence, and it is these that make a brand compelling or repellent.

The problem with 20th century branding is what is wrong with everything from the 20th century: it overvalued the explicit and dismissed the tacit. The objective manner of thinking sterilizes institutions by killing off what cannot be explicitly formulated, most of all tacit traditions, leading to that very neutral nothing feeling we call “corporate”. 20th century branding actually killed brand by trying to systematically construct what can only be cultivated, cared for, grown and shared.

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NOTES:

1. This is what is meant by a subject being difficult. One must learn how to learn it before any of its material makes sense. It is also why the more profound philosophers resort to the analogy of dance to describe that of which their philosophy consists, as opposed to its positive assertions and its arguments. A dance is describable in terms of steps, but it is not merely steps, and until the steps fade out and only the dance remains, the dance is not essentially dance. A profound philosophy is a new way of experiencing life. Philosophies produce thoughts, but they are not reducible to the thoughts they produce. Yet, the philosophy’s thoughts are the medium by which one is inducted to the philosophy, through the struggle to comprehend.)