Category Archives: Brand

The literary brand

Brand

A philosophy is the process of coming to vision. The developing vision is in the foreground.

A novel is a story told within a vision. The vision is in the background.

Popular fiction is a story told within the prevailing common vision of the populus, or the popular vision.

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Popular art in general is popular for the fact of its basis in the popular vision.

When the  popular vision is vital, popular art is exciting. When the popular vision is depleted, popular art falls into a pattern of self-imitation, nostalgia, recombination, pastiche and casting about for novelty. The popular culture believes the problem is with the artifacts, but in truth, the popular culture is bored with itself, with the banality of its own vision. However, vision being vision, it cannot see what it isn’t seeing. Vision is its own reality.

Only extraordinary need will make the popular vision do the only thing it can do to revitalize itself: venture out into the unfamiliar, the literary and the philosophical, and learn to see life in a stranger new light.

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A brand is a story an organization tells about its offering.

Most brands are popular art. They’re satisfactory, momentarily entertaining, but not unique, and they come and go without demanding much or changing much.

Some brands are literature. They are loved by the marginal souls, the canaries in the coalmine who already feel the depletion of the popular culture. But unlike a pop-art brand, the literary brand changes those who “get it”. They come to see by its vision – not only the brand’s offering, but to some degree life as a whole. The literary brand carries within itself a holistic life vision. The literary brand is a seed of popular culture.

A literary brand can change popular  culture, and effect its own popularity. The literary brand’s moment of opportunity is cultural depletion.

Synetic branding

Brand, Synesis

Synetic branding (ORIGIN Greek synesis, understanding, literally “togetherness”) – The art of persuasive alignment of perspective, intended to reveal the unique superiority of an organization’s offerings.

Synetic branding brings an organization’s internal and external stakeholders to a common understanding – a way of seeing and feeling – which binds employees and customers at a level far deeper than the concrete qualities or features of an offering. This does not mean the concrete qualities or features of an offering are irrelevant, however. It means the qualities and features of the product, chosen in light of the synetic brand, manifest the synetic brand’s ideals and simultaneously 1) affirms the bond of agreement between stakeholders* and 2) creates offerings that seem deeply, exactly right. (* Now what is at stake runs deeper than simply a thing, but rather, one’s worldview: what makes the world feel like something stable, coherent and intelligible. A synetic brand contributes to reconsituting the coherence of our badly fractured postmodern world, where even the hope for cohesion – a “Grand Narrative” or a “neutral standard”, or anything at all that could serve as common ground – is scorned, made taboo, laughed at or treated with a deep cynicism that borders on peremptory dismissal. The reason for this is a long history of manipulation, using the need for this coherence as bait. In regard to subjective sincerity, every organization is guilty until proven innocent. Human beings have very sensitive bullshit-detection apparatus. Genuine sincerity is a competitive advantage. Learning how to find the authentic goodness inherent in the culture of an organization, cultivating it, and making it active and visible and communicable is the soul of synetic branding. )

Synetic branding, done well, makes competing offerings seem muddled, imitative or beside the point. (It is like framing, but it is free of manipulation. It is an open, shared framing – the framing one cannot imagine being bettered.)

A synetically-branded organization is animated by the vision of the synetic brand. The organization’s culture is both an expression and a reinforcement of the synesis.

A synetic brand is an outgrowth of a company’s culture, and has its origins there. A synetic brand is not a constructed. It is not built like a machine. It is grown from existing life. It is the cultivation of the collective personality of an organization.

The questions are: Who can this organization be? How does it see what it does and makes. How does it see differently from its competitors? How does its difference in vision affect what it does and make? Where does it lack confidence in its vision and why? How can it gain the confidence to differentiate?

Empathy + Alignment + Realism

Biography, Brand, Design, Philosophy, Synesis

I wrote a manifesto for my company and put it on our intranet:

An attempt at a distillation of [this company]’s culture, in words we frequently use when describing and differentiating our approach:

  • Empathy means to take care to really understand how other people see, feel and think.
  • Alignment means to pursue solutions which do full justice to the concerns of all involved.
  • Realism means to find solutions which do exactly what they are meant to do within their real-world context.

These three principles govern how we relate to one another on our teams, and how we relate to our clients.

Our goal is to help our clients actualize empathy + alignment + realism in their own organizations, both externally with their customers and internally with one other.

We believe that empathy + alignment + realism are core principles of ethical effectiveness. By articulating, championing and exemplifying these principles, and by helping our clients and partners put them into practice [this company] makes a positive contribution to the world of commerce and to the world as a whole.

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These principles do not exhaust the range of values active in [this company]’s culture. However, if you look closely at those values it gradually becomes clear that they all grow out from the root principles of empathy + alignment + realism.

A helpful analogy: the root principles are the DNA of our culture; the core values are the genetic traits of our company – which is the starting point for our brand.

Our brand is developed continually through collective self-cultivation (iterative clarification, accentuation and application of our principles and core values, alongside the company traditions that support them) and collective self-presentation (our formal brand guidelines – visual identity, voice and tone, interaction style). The latter can be seen as a sort of grooming: We present who we authentically are in the best possible light.

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[This company] will strengthen its brand externally, partly through explicit branding efforts, but more because [this company] has a powerful internal and semi-internal (our clients and partners) brand community.

This is something we also can perfect internally and then package for our clients: internal brand community as the key to authentic and powerful external branding. It is grounded in a simple idea: the most effective way to be perceived as something is to actually be it.

Branding can be seen as the practice of compellingly and authentically externalizing a company’s culture. Internal branding is the conscious aligning of a company’s culture to its external brand, so the two mutually reinforce.

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  • Empathy means to take care to really understand how other people see, feel and think.

Empathy is not figuring other people out; it is not discovering what they are after, or knowing how to manipulated them to get them to do what you want them to do.

Empathy is, in Aristotle’s language, synesis, or understanding. Synesis is like sympathy, but involves the entirely of another’s subjectivity – cognition, language, moral priorities, hopes, fears, symbol-system, his aesthetic sense, his social environment… it is not a theoretical, externalized theory, but a holistic vision of life in which an understander is involved. Synesis turns parallel talking into dialogue.

Empathic understanding is the deepest form of respect.

  • Alignment means to pursue solutions which do full justice to the concerns of all involved.

Alignment is not stalemate or compromise. It is not accomplished in a battle where each party pushes as hard as it can for its own interests until it has won as much ground as it can. Alignment can only happen when all parties have a stake in the other parties’ well-being. All parties must desire and aim for a solution that satisfies everyone involved. This aim has an abstracting effect: what concern is embedded in each conflicting solution? What solutions are possible that satisfy all concerns and dissolve the conflict?

Alignment presupposes pluralism: that there can be multiple satisfactory solutions. It is not a question of which solution is viable, and which solutions are not viable. It is a question of which viable solution can be agreed upon by all parties in the deliberation.

Alignment is, in Aristotle’s language, phronesis, or prudence. Phronesis is what turns churning debate into productive deliberation.

For alignment to work, all parties in the deliberation must (empathically) respect the others, but in the end, the focus of the deliberation must be, not on the parties in the deliberation, but on their shared problem.

  • Realism means to find solutions which do exactly what they are meant to do within their real-world context.

Realism is not functionalism. Realism is also not being resigned to “the way things are”.

Also, realism is not factoring oneself out of the picure in a misconceived attempt at objectivity.

Realism means being scientific. It means cheerfully putting your ideas to the test, and letting them go if the test shows the ideas are not viable. It means cheerfully adopting another’s ideas as one’s own if they are shown to be better.

Realism means that you stay subjectively, personally involved in the problems you are deliberating, but in such a way that you are open to change.

For realism to work (and to not devolve into the poverty of functionalism or complacent pseudo-conservatism), all parties in the deliberation must (empathically) respect the others and enlarge their understanding of the problem at hand to include the concerns of the others. The group must collectively turn toward the problem itself, and work toward solutions that satisfy the concerns of everyone involved. Finally, the solutions must be subjected to test, whether that test is a formal experiment or some other criterion or standard for success.

Brand Cramps

Biography, Brand

When people start listing great brands you can count on Apple being at the top, then Nike, then Starbucks, then usually Sony, etc.

To make my list more interesting and less credible I think I am going to start dropping the Cramps into the second or third spot.

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The Cramps were my first and purest brand experience. They were my favorite band during my transitional years between high school and college, the years when I left my parents’ home and was airdropped into alien college territory. I loved the Cramps, but I only sort of liked their music. There was something inexplicably compelling about them but it had little to do with the sound. I didn’t know what to do with this discrepancy, so I just left it alone and assumed I actually did love their music, despite the fact that I listened to it only occasionally, primarily when I wanted to be existentially Cramped.

It took me years to realize: In the space of that discrepancy is the life of brand.

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Looking back, the Cramps’ way – a rigorous logic founded on a strictly limited set of aesthetic premises (*see note 1 below) to create a world-view as consistent and coherent as it was irrational – was ideally suited to my own situation as an alienated, disoriented kid in chaos.

The Cramps’ modus operandi: Don’t look for order out there, because the world is mostly ridiculous and what isn’t ridiculous is boring and not worth the pain. Found your life on your own ridiculous enthusiasms. Then, with the diligence and discipline of a medieval scholar, build out a world of pure, crystalline nonsense. Finally, and most importantly, do not talk about it. Do not explain the punchline. Simply do it, and let the actions and the artifacts speak for themselves. Enjoy it when people get it, and enjoy it even more when they don’t.  This stance was pure first-wave New York punk (*see note 2 below).

The Cramps provided me a starting point for creating order founded on meaning, and gave me relief from disorientation, boredom and anxiety. This is what good brands do in our nutty post-modern world, where meaningful orientation and coherence are far from given.

Human beings cannot live without meaning. Even a tiny grain of authentic meaning (even something as insignificant as really digging your iPod) properly understood can eventually grow out into a robust life-sustaining vision. Brand is not enough, but it is a start. Learning what brand essentially is, can help us recover many other forgotten human truths.

R.I.P. Lux Interior.

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Some examples of the vision:

* NOTE 1: The premises of the Cramps: 1. music fandom – rockabilly, surf and 60s garage punk – recorded by crazed geniuses stranded in obscurity, limited releases, collected by obsessed cultural packrats; 2. cheap horror flicks; 3. severe mental disturbances (psychosis, lycanthropy, adolescence, major inbreeding, etc.); 4. sexual perversion, conceived as something cartoonish and as innocent as Elvis.

* NOTE 2: Anyone who thinks punk rock was primarily a musical form or just a style has missed the point. Punk rock was a vision for a dignified existence in a undignified world.

Design thoughts

Brand, Design, Etymology

Solution – A product or a service that is used because it is wanted, needed, or otherwise required.

Solution provider – An individual or collective entity with a solution to offer.

User – The consumer of a solution; for example a customer, an employee, a member of an organization, an operator.

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Usefulness – A useful solution satisfies a user’s known and/or unknown functional needs. Usefulness is a solution’s functional value.

Usability – A usable solution removes functional obstacles that discourage a user’s acceptance of the solution. Usability is a solution’s ease-of-use value, or more accurately the absence of pain-in-the-ass anti-value. Ideally, usability is imperceptible, being essentially the absence of negatives.

Desirability – A desirable solution fosters a user’s goodwill toward the solution, emotional inclination to accept the solution. Desirability is a solution’s subjective value.

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User experience  – A solution viewed from the perspective of the user. It signifies a user-empathic perspective on design: that the proper locus of design is not in the artifact itself but between the artifact and the one who uses it, in the experience the user has interacting with the artifact to satisfy a need or want. (In this sense user experience is form of practical idealism; see definition below.) The experience is not confined to the duration of the interaction, but also in how it is remembered and anticipated; nor is it confined to the artifact itself but into the user’s life, particularly to the effects of the interaction and to the entities perceived to be responsible for the effects, both good and bad.

On-brand user experience – On-brand user experience thinks not only about the design of the experience of a solution but also about how the experience with the solution will affect the experience of the provider of the solution and ultimately the enduring relationship between the user and the provider.

Experience is the conducting medium through which the brand flows. Brand is made visible through the graphic identity, articulated through messaging, expressed through voice and tone, demonstrated through prioritization and structuring of content and function, embodied through the feature set and given conduct and character through interaction design (a kind of body language).

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On-brand usefulness – An on-brand useful solution satisfies a user’s known and/or unknown functional needs in a way that enhances the usefulness of the solution provider, and naturally reinforces the user’s perception of the provider’s indispensability.

On-brand usability – A on-brand usable solution removes functional obstacles that discourage acceptance of both the solution and the provider’s other solutions, (ideally together as a single integrated system), and naturally reinforces the user’s perception that the provider is easy to deal with.

On-brand desirability – An on-brand desirable solution creates goodwill toward the solution that naturally extends to the solution provider.

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Empathy – The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. ORIGIN: Early 20th cent.: from Greek empatheia (from em– ‘in’ + pathos ‘feeling’)

Context – The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed. ORIGIN: late Middle English (denoting the construction of a text): from Latin contextus, from con– ‘together’ + texere ‘to weave.’

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Idealism – Any of various systems of thought in which the objects of knowledge are held to be in some way dependent on the activity of mind. ORIGIN: late Middle English: via Latin from Greek idea ‘form, pattern,’ from the base of idein ‘to see.

Pragmatism – An approach that assesses the truth of meaning of theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application. ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Greek pragma, pragmat– ‘deed.’

Perspectivism – The theory that knowledge of a subject is inevitably partial and limited by the individual perspective from which it is viewed. ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense ‘optics’ ): from medieval Latin perspectiva (ars) ‘science of optics,’ from perspect– ‘looked at closely,’ from the verb perspicere, from per– ‘through’ + specere ‘to look.’

Empiricism – The theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. ORIGIN late Middle English : via Latin from Greek empeirikos, from empeiria ‘experience,’ from empeiros ‘skilled’ (based on peira ‘trial, experiment’ ).

New brand

Biography, Brand

A premise for a book: 1) Brand theory is evolving, because brand itself is evolving. We are not deepening our understanding of something constant. We are reflecting on something that is rapidly evolving and our thinking reflects the change: the relationship between customers and companies in a cultural environment centered with increasing exclusivity on production and consumption of salable goods and service. There is no time and even less energy for anything but this, and we humans, the spiritually insuppressible and resilient beings we are, learn to love and humanize what we are unable or unwilling to escape. 2) This new kind of brand relationship originated in the relationship between fans and their bands that existed in the proto-alternative music of the 80s and early 90s, and came to prominence as gen-x became more influential in the market as producers and consumers. The new brands owe more to the Pixies and Pavement than to Tide and Geritol. The old brands were mere functional promises. The new brands are more richly dimensional and help support personal and social identity.

Not by choice

Biography, Brand

Our heroes, who move us in paradoxical awe and pity, have never chosen this way of being.

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When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s the misfit kids were indignant when their bands were adopted by the mainstream. I think it was like this: the mainstream could have chosen otherwise – it just helped itself to something novel that happened to be there. The mainstream would equate its consumption of yet another variety of entertainment with our need for what we experienced as art, as a rare and precious sense of belonging.

I think when we pulled that move of dismissing an artist’s later work (“That first album was great, but…”), we were attempting to preserve a brand relationship. We severed our relationship with the band as it exists in the present – and even with the band’s past work as it is discovered in the present. The new brand relationship was having been there at the time it was happening: having the right to enjoy the band nostalgically. We learned how to do this, and did it repeatedly, constantly, as our desperate alternative to an unacceptable existence became the consumer category Alternative Music.

Then we became ashamed of hanging our identities on bands at all. Sonic Youth decided to like Madonna and hip hop, and that seemed like a good way to go. We tried to like sports, and we wore baseball caps. We looked for guilty pleasures that could democratize us a little. We loosened our grips, opened our hands, went out into the market…

Dimensions of brand relationship

Brand
  • Functional: the brand as promise. The old view of brand, still legitimate in the majority of cases.
  • Communal: the brand as emblem of group-identity.
  • Personal: the brand as affirmation of moral-aesthetic priorities. (or to put it more flakily and precisely: resonance with spiritual ideals.)

These meanings are manifested in the product, practice and symbology of the brand.

For a while there I was thinking brands fell into categories corresponding with these dimensions, but now I think all three are present to some degree in every brand.

But not die out…

Brand

When I was in high school the English teachers would explain literature to us. They’d make big tables of symbols and the corresponding meaning of each symbol.

“Blue enamel sky” = Nature’s indifference to man’s plight. And so on.

I’d sit there wondering why Stephen Crane didn’t just write an essay and say what he meant.

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People used to love poetry the way people now love music. They weren’t “appreciating” it. Poetry moved them.

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An explained metaphor or symbol is as effective as an explained joke. But this is how metaphor and symbol are taught to us. A student is left with the impression that something has to be concrete and objective to matter to us.

Could it be that the table-of-symbols approach to teaching literature is some sort of inoculation against religious experience?

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(Brand is the poetry of our time.)

(Brand is not a replacement for full-fledged poetry, but a spark of something.)

Complaints against my people

Biography, Brand

I was raised Unitarian-Universalist. I would characterize my relationship with them as hostile.

I’ve been looking back through my journal archives. Some of my posts are nothing but hot bile, but some of them are hot bile that point to themes that have become central in my life.

A post from January 2004:

The archetypal Unitarian summits the mountain by telescope. 

Another post from the same day, entitled “Uh oh,” which I completely forgot about: “Kwame just suggested that perhaps I am the perfect Unitarian.” — Someone accused me of something similar last week.

Another one from March: “I approve of the Unitarians’ hidden meanness, but disapprove of their hiding it.” 

This one, which I called “Hater” is from 2005:

I hated my high school one way, I hated my home another way, and I hated the Unitarians a third way. That was my whole hateful life before I started taking art classes.

The students at my art class played mysterious music from some other world, and I would sit there silent, stunned, painting. Many of them were gay, but I had no concept of gayness, and only found out years later.

We were all outsiders in respect to school, home and church in our own personal ways. That’s how it is in small towns. In large cities it’s all about affinities. In small towns, desperation drives you to learn abstraction: “I am like you, because neither of us are like them.”

 

A nicer post on UU was one of the last before I took my new job and entered a very different phase of my life:

Unitarianism is the religion of subjective show-and-tell. When the Unitarian exhibits his theological opinions, the others can either 1) nod with them, or 2) tolerate in silence.

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Picture Unitarianism as a venn diagram of divergent beliefs, with one microscopic overlap: “God is a matter of opinion, not debate”. This is the Unitarian ideal of “tolerance”. 

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Perennialist theologians sometimes compare religion to a mountain with various paths to the top. Most Unitarians agree with this picture of religion, because they’ve been to the top of the mountain many times, by telescope.

“God is a matter of opinion, not debate.” That is it, my core complaint: the refusal to converse past a certain boundary.

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So what if we cannot finally know? There are other reasons to know than to definitively grasp reality. There are good reason to keep God discussable while avoiding all attempts to “capture in words” what or who God is.

(At work I keep insisting that a brand essence can only be indicated by words, but no sentence, no book – no library full of books – could be the essence of any authentic brand. Brands are essentially spiritual, and that means you see with them or by them. A graphic identity system is only a manifestation of a brand.)

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At this moment – and I can’t explain why – to call the Unitarian-Universalists “my people” is comforting, and not despite the fact that I disagree with them so deeply on so many things. Perhaps my disagreements, as deep as they are, are nonetheless, not essential? Or perhaps when I disagreed I disagreed as a Unitarian-Universalist against Unitarian-Universalism? If I were to discover that Unitarian Universalism accommodates this depth of disagreement… and by “accommodates”, I mean actively accommodates through dialogical involvement – as opposed to theoretically permitting (a.k.a. “tolerating” or “accepting [the fact of]”) the belief.

There is no greater difference: the former is love (or at least a good, fertile kind of hate that easily transmutes to love); the latter is indifference and alienation and impotential. Genuine religion is a practice of intersubjective spirituality. Whatever speculative knowledge gets wound into the practice is mere support for this practice. Religion is not essentially a matter of beliefs – and especially not objective, reflective beliefs, which belong to the realm of physics.

So, the question for me is whether there is anyone in the Unitarian-Universalist tradition who will participate in our disagreements with me. If not, all my complaints still stand.

To constellate

Brand, Fables, myths & parables

Facts, or personal attributes, or elements – think of them as stars. Throw them into the sky and let each find its logical place in the heavens. Walk around and look out into them from different perspectives. See with unsquinting eyes what is there, adding nothing and subtracting nothing. When you find the place where they are most beautiful sit down and and trace out the constellations.

A way of understanding a situation; the spontaneous experience of a person; a brand; a design – what matters is constellations.

“Constellate”: ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from late Latin constellatus, from con- ‘together’ + stellatus ‘arranged like a star.’