Describing the hard-to-describe



Some months back, I tossed up a really gnarly doodle I did in a meeting in an attempt to flesh out the deeper markers of Brand Identity as opposed to, say, the blindfold-darts marketers sling around under the same name. It's been kicking around in my head as a precursor to an image of Lady Liberty used in the brain/brand series ....


[Click for legible if you like]

If you didn't click, the text in the image describes the statue (green part) thus:

Think of the individual as a statue. This is the idealized view we all have of ourselves. This is the bigger better me we all aspire to achieve.

The pedestal description:

The products the individual buys, the work they do, the companies they chose to work for, the office they inhabit--these are the pedestal on which they stand.

Identity, desire, ambition, justice, truth, beauty; all the intrinsic things that make us much more alike than we are different--these are the metrics by which the [bricks] of the pedestal are chosen. They must fit together. [Or we reject them]

In that pedestal description, one should include clothes, cars, music and the gadgetry to play it, and a large variety of the products that drive our economy, many of which, seem boringly similar.

(Anyone familiar with the Advertising industry knows that in the late 80s, the British imported to the US a thing called Account Planning. It's purpose was to ask deeper, more holistic questions of consumers' total acquisition picture to attempt to break this code. It's had successes, and many failures.)

Well, purty as that image may or may not be, it's only part of the story, and it's the second act of a three part story weaving identity and brand and self-realization together. It's a journey that--surprise--ends with us realizing, finally, that our favorite brands, the wisdom received from parent or peer group, what we think we believed, were really only crutches--and we ditch them when we're ready to stand on our own. When we realize we are not our stuff--the pieces and the pedestal weren't necessary.

Yeah, yeah. How and why do they fit together?

How and why do we choose or not chose?

Well, if you notice, that pedestal is made up of "things" whereas the statue itself is more "ideal," in this case, the heroic, helpful, hopeful figure of Ms. "Bring me your tired... your huddled masses." She's about opportunity and freedom, not to-do lists or litmus tests. In many ways, she's a big green Rorschach.

She is options for self-realization.

Sound like "branding" to you? It should. It should sound like branding, and its soul-mate, leadership. At least, it should sound like those things when practiced to their fullest and highest use. And rare companies and leaders get this, either intuitively, perhaps like a Steve Jobs. Or the hard way, like an Andy Pearson.

Okay, so we have our lady, and we have our pedestal. And we have choices to make. But in many cases, we make those choices unaware of the mental framework that processes the data and yields our "correct" choice. I put quotes around correct because the framework that does the choosing is far less rational than we'd often like to admit, and, in fact, looks much more like a hall of mirrors than some easily mapped process. I think it looks like this....



Like I said, a hall of mirrors. And a prism.

In the above depiction, that ball representing the self is the only unfettered reality that matters. It the equivalent of our own internal Lady Liberty, symbolizing all that we believe or want to be possible.

The mirrors of our Ego and Id reflect that Self back at us. Ego (or Persona) strenuously maintaining an unsustainable (and usually untrue) level of competence and condfidence that eventually wears us out as we age. In short, we grow tired of the bluffing. (An interesting nerological study on this age and worldview phenomenon here.) Id, the worrisome one, wearing us down from the other side--a glass forever half-full.

An important point: Persona or Personality are shields we begin to assume aggressively around age 7. They aren't so much who or what we are and desire as they are a compromise solution.

....for example, personality prevails over essence. An isolated rainforest tribe member typically has a much more developed essence but little development of personality. Our essence relates directly to another's essence if personality is not threatened, and we find each other charming. The energy of essence is literally finer than that of personality, and it is a delight to experience it. Children are another example of essence predominating over personality. We may have all witnessed the growth of children in which personality begins to predominate, say from the age of 7 and on, and we cannot help but feel that something is being lost. Strictly speaking, it is not being lost, at least not yet, but rather becoming covered by a protective coating, which is personality.

Persona is the mask we wear. It's also the reason we continually fall for quick-fixes and look for silver bullet solutions. Why? Because they offer the least exposure to our fragile Self. This hard-wired urge for quick fix is what allows companies to continue to exist and push product. And here, I think the Vance Packards and Neil Postmans of the world miss an important point: Companies don't manufacture need. They are however, very good at identifying and feeding on them. They merely prey on our insecurity and on an intrinsic laziness within us that hopes for an external--and also easy--boost to our particular ideal future or happy state.

Okay. Next is Id. Just to reiterate, we're using Jung's definition of Id/Ego.

Id reflects back at us an unfair and also practically unattainable level of perfection. It is within us all--the fear that we could be better at being whatever somebo0dy, somewhere down the line told us we ought to be. Did Mom want you to be a Doctor or a housewife? Did Dad want you to be a Lawyer or take over the family business? Did you get great grades and stay between the lines while envying the kids who goofed around and seemed to roll with the punches? There you go. Id, the half-full glass.

Finally, as presented properly, that sphere representing self should revolve to show that not only is the halo not really there, neither is the "hole" or void percieved by the Id. In many ways, that hole is there due to the circumsantial sense that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

But the cleaned up version above was compelled by a weird deja vu - this link from uber-meticulous Steve Pavlina's blog. If you click you'll see that Steve's crossed some kind of personal/prefessional rubicon lately on the way he views how and what he does.

Anyway, Mike of Spooky Action fame told me about Steve's ponderings and I came across this in them...

So if you were to ask me to step into your “objective” reality and buy into your belief system, I could do it, but it would be unnecessarily limiting and pointless. Let’s say I’m stepping from a 3D reality onto a plane. When I do that, you present the argument that spheres don’t exist; only circles do. I say, “Well, within this reality, you’re right. But there exist other realities where spheres do exist, but you have to believe in 3D to see them.” If you staunchly believe that your 2D world is objective reality, then you will never see spheres. I can step back out into my 3D world, and I can show you all the spheres my world has to offer, but you’ll only see their 2D projections — just more circles. There is no way I can convince you otherwise.

Holy synchronicity, Batman, I said. And ran and dug up that ugly doodle used in the previous post. But that, and the words with it, didn't suffice in my mind. And Steve's musings really kick started the juices, hence the purty version above.

Now, I'm just noodling this stuff out more fully for a book project, but it feels right. Does it to you? The thing holding up that perfect sphere? The collective unconscious which yields archetypes and metaphors that get us excited, scared or angry; that gets us up off our asses or make us fall in love. And it fits together with the Ideal of branding becuase, as you see in that reflection denoting Id, we've all got holes to fill. And, at any particular moment, our holes beg to be filled (no jokes, I've heard em all). This sense of empty space, of incompleteness, is what Jung also referenced, almost as the cork is to the "jug"of wine in his idea of a collective unconscious.

Just as nature abhors a vacum, so too does the human mind. Where there is a lack of information, the imagination will rush to fill a void.~ Carl Jung

If you'll step back from that statement and apply it in modern business terms, it could be construed as "manage perceptions" or spin control. In many ways, it is.

Why am I mumbling about all this? Well, if you haven't trolled through brain and brand, the simple answer is that marketing effectively and leading change (same thing -- move people from habit and preference "A" to better moustrap, "B") comprises turfing up the paleo reasons why humans do things--brave things, stupid things, unconventional or predictable things. And the reasons are paleo; limbic ("people buy on emotion, justify with logic").

And here's the kicker: If we don't dig deep enough, and don't understand our successes and failures (and their reasons) we can't replicate, teach, or scale them up.

If we look at companies that have made the grade, they all fan out from a central intrinsic urge made real through their particular product or service. As companies mature, they lose contact with that central imperative. The reasons why we make what we do, and how we do it, and how we represent it, and why a new merger or change in strategy makes sense--well, they all lose connection with that central premise for being, for founding the company in the first place.

As buiness-people we often view asking, or rather, reaffirming, these founding principles as a distraction from our "real" business. If I work on the assembly line, they would be a distraction. Even perhaps for a supervisor. But for management, especially at the senior levels, this really is part of our job description. Those assembly line workers and supervisors still often want context and clear understanding of "why?". Our job is to parse it, and to communicate it. Our job is to provide practical relevance to the founding concept. The context. The point of it all.