All Brands are Bastards
And other misadventures in messaging
With “communities” and “movements” being central to brand identity over the past 10+ years, and CEOs continually getting dinged or canceled for disingenuity—do you think businesses should stop trying so hard? Just stick to being businesses that don’t stand for anything besides a good product?
The Wing is a perfect study of a business that seemed to get feminist branding right, then totally wrong, and now it’s hobbling out of an image crisis with virtually no message at all. I wrote about it (from a co-working couch at one of their locations) for Rhetorica’s Medium pub this week. Check it out here!
My Experience was More Miraculous Than Yours
If you haven’t listened to Midnight Miracle yet, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s like eavesdropping on two genius storytellers, and Talib Kweli is there too.
I kid! But Kweli really only says like one thing in the first episode. He does however do the perfect musical backdrop to Dave Chappelle and yasin bey’s conversation about life, inspiration, addiction, and death (my go-to podcast topics).
It’s so thought provoking that my husband and I got into a passive-aggressive showdown over who understood Episode One on a deeper level and who knows yasin bey better. (I said “MOS DEF sounds MOS DRUNK” and Luke got mad and said he’s always sounded like that, he’s just older now.) I know arguments get dumber when you are married but I was not expecting to prove I’m not a poseur on pizza night.
Help Me Clear Up a Few Hundred Things
As a process junkie with a deep hatred of swirl that happens on team projects, I’ve realized that most confusion and conflicting expectations are because everyone uses the same terms for different things, or different terms for the same things. When someone talks about a “strategy,” inevitably someone else is thinking of a “concept” or a “campaign.” It’s worse when you have older ad people working with younger freelancers and creatives who’ve had three different jobs in the 18 months.
In my quest to #stoptheswirl I’m putting a glossary together so everyone understands what everyone is talking about across creative, product, marketing, and project managers. It will be something you can hold up and say, “Actually, Gary, that’s an idea for a brainstorm, not a campaign strategy…”
I’m not sure how much it will cost but you’re guaranteed to get it FREE if you become a paying subscriber to this newsletter today. You’ll also get other brand strategy guides and DIY handbooks that are dropping this fall.
Another way to get free stuff? Send me your suggestions for the glossary! What’s a term you use at work that you feel like everyone uses differently or throws around without really knowing what it means? Reply to this email or comment below to let me know.
#FreeTanika Update
Olivia and I (mostly Olivia) have made some progress since starting #FreeTanika last week. We have two reputable journalists reading through the police report, court transcripts, appeal briefs, and analyzing the video “evidence” to put potential stories together. I’ll be posting more on the case later this week and setting up a hub where you can see all the aforementioned material for yourself. In the meantime, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, read last week’s newsletter.
Take it from Spoonman
I’ll end this with a hopeful* story and some links. Have you ever worked on a creative project or something for which no one is paying you, and hit a point where you thought, “This isn’t working,” or worse yet, “This is stupid.” It happens to me every day, even when people are paying me to finish something.
In these moments I’ve started saying something to myself—a mantra, if you must—to help me see things through. It’s a single word: Spoonman.
Yes, Spoonman, like the Soundgarden song from 1994! I even sing it to myself the same way Chris Cornell sang it in the chorus.
Why would I give myself such an awful earworm? Because I believe Spoonman is one of the dumbest songs ever written. It’s a song about a street performer who made music with a bunch of spoons. That’s it. It’s not a drug metaphor or a political allegory. It sounds like a grunge parody, especially compared to far superior songs on the same album like Black Hole Sun, and Mind Riot (from their second album, which is the only Soundgarden song I can ever say I’ve truly loved).
I have to believe that at least one member of Soundgarden was not feeling Spoonman during its recording. The facts that Chris Cornell suffered from depression and Matt Cameron and Ben Shepherd had a side-band literally called Hater (terrifically underrated album btw, terrible cover art) are pretty good odds that someone in the studio was thinking, “This is dumb. It’s a song about a guy who plays spoons.”
But Soundgarden finished recording Spoonman and it ended up getting picked as the first single off Superunknown by the person at A&M records who was responsible for picking Soundgarden singles. Spoonman ended up at the top of the charts and won Grammys!
So how do any of us know what’s worth finishing? Even if you are working on the objectively dumbest story/essay/painting/prototype/song, it’s none of your business how good or bad it is. Your only job is to finish it and let other people decide how they feel about it, which is also none of your business. If what you’re toiling on is as dumb as Spoonman, well that’s an honor because a million guys with barbed-wire tattoos who drive pickup trucks with Calvin pissing stickers may actually love it. Who are you to deny them such pleasure?
I just realized this is the plot and moral of the children’s book I’ve always wanted to write. Gotta go.