Hello Brand New World

I’m a brand strategist. I first became one 25 years ago when only corporations could afford to create and build their own brands, and no one knew any brand strategists. The world is very different now.

I didn’t set out to become a brand strategist. I kind of fell into it. Like so many things in life, a variety of unlikely events led me to that first job and have pulled and pushed me along ever since.

Working on and with and for brands for all this time has changed how I see things. If I was a math teacher, an orthodontist, a priest, or a gardener I’d see the world differently. As it is, I see the world through a brand lens.

Seeing the world in this way means seeing not only how brands and branding have changed, but how brands and branding have changed the world.

We’re in a period—probably unprecedented—of brand anarchy. A crisis of trust and meaning. A failure of accountability and dynamism.

The chaos feels exhausting. Without a reliable, healthy ecosystem of brands to bind us together, we’re splintering into tribes and cliques; like in Babel, the lack of a common language leaves us isolated and alienated from each other. The world feels not only fragmented but incoherent.

I started writing about this during the pandemic. Writing became a way to try to work through the confusion and the chaos. To figure stuff out. At first I wrote for myself. Eventually I began publishing a newsletter on LinkedIn. It was encouraging and energizing to share my ideas with others and to hear their thoughts and responses. Now I’m moving to Substack to be closer to the writers I read and to the center of the action.

I’ll be writing about brands, but my real interest is in people. We can’t understand ourselves or our present moment or our potential future without a clearer and more honest understanding of our relationship to brands.

Each one of us interacts with thousands of brands every day. We build and maintain relationships with hundreds of them. For the most part, we take this entirely for granted. Rarely do we stop to consider the astounding power that brands have to shape reality.

The brands most of us think of first are the products and services we buy and the companies that we buy from. These are the brands we see advertised on television, in social media, and on billboards. They’re the brands traded in the stock market and talked about in the news. People have used brands for commerce since ancient times and brands have always played an essential role in our economies.

But brands are not just commercial—they’re cultural. Humans are brand creatures. We build our civilizations, our societies, and our faiths out of shared symbols and meanings that endure over time. So, the story of human history can be understood through the rise and fall of brands. From symbols daubed by the first humans on cave walls, or seared into the flanks of medieval livestock, to the flags we rally around and the altars at which we worship, to the sports team we cheer for—all are brands.

Brands clarify, organize, and forge identity; they let us dream bigger and do more; they are the building blocks of human experience, and the connective tissue that makes our global society possible.

When our economies and societies were made up mostly of physical, analog stuff, brands were constrained by the physics of the material world. But a few decades ago, the Internet started changing everything.

It began with dotcom domain names: a new kind of brand that made it easy to navigate complex computer networks. Since then, more of our lives have been turned into software. And brands have played a major role at every stage of the transition.

The digital world is a symbolic world. It’s needed brands to make it feel real, friendly, trustworthy, and safe. From those first dotcoms to the usernames, profiles, icons, avatars, accounts, handles, followers, hashtags, “likes”, reviews, and memes, the mechanisms of brands and branding have made the digital world possible.

As brands went digital, brand-building changed. It became bottom-up as well as top-down. For the first time, everyone had the means to create and distribute brands of their own. Suddenly everyone was given power to celebrate, promote, criticize, and even try to destroy other brands. Tens of millions of new brands were created—and millions more have been created each year since.

We’re living through the aftershocks of this seismic shift in the dynamics of brand building. It can feel like rather than consuming our brands, they have started consuming us. Neither our minds nor our markets were designed to handle the confusion. We can’t process the swirl of it all.

But the thing is, while brands play a powerful role in shaping reality, they get all of their power from us. They can’t exist unless we allow them space in our heads and our hearts.

To change the world, we only have to change our minds. The path out of brand anarchy twists and winds through shifts in our consciousness and our values. That’s an easy thing to write, and a much harder thing to do. But the first step is opening our eyes to the reality-shaping power we give to brands and reclaiming our authority over that power. If we can pull it off, we can get back to the creativity and collaboration that brands have always offered, and together find ways to rebuild meaning from the ground up.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll subscribe and follow along on this journey.

And if you know someone who would be interested in this work, please forward it along!