When I grew up, my favorite brand was Coca-Cola. I also loved McDonald’s and any cereal brand. The unhealthier sweeter, the better. Over time, I learned that Coke was nothing more than sugared water and McDonald’s peddled really crappy food by sourcing through really terrible methods. Well, and cereal was nothing more than sugar in milk. My love for these brands turned into cynicism. They still created great advertising but it’s hard to enjoy any commercial or online game when you have these videos of tortured chicken in your head.

Branding used to involve big budgets, flashy advertising, a lot of good looking people and promises that were never kept.

This branding era is about to end.

We are about to experience a branding renaissance

Branding doesn’t happen in brainstorming sessions, on TV screens or through false, beautiful worlds anymore.

Branding today entails:

- Focusing more on stakeholder value, less on shareholder value

- Social Currency is more important than immediate profitability

- Innovation more important than messages

- Customer experience is almost everything

- Delivering constant customer value is everything.

Advertising noise will continue to be part of branding. Over time, that noise will just lead to tone deafness and the return will be minimal. Companies that are doing it right will succeed over time. The others will fade away.

Thank you, Dr. Seuss.

Think about:

Make the board happy.

Make the shareholders happy.

Make the R&D department happy.

Make the customers happy.

Make the employees happy.

Make the sales department happy.

Make the marketing department happy.

Make the focus groups happy.

Make the stakeholders happy.

Make the audience happy.

Make your career happy.

Everybody wants to be happy. Everybody has a different definition of happiness.

If your business is about keeping many different audiences happy, how can a brand have a meaningful and touching point of view?

Happiness used to be a by-product for many brands. Now, it has become the main goal. Is that why most marketing has become ineffective and so bland?

Most brands are like toddlers: If you don’t give them guidance, they’ll just end up eating candy all day. Just to be miserable at the end of the day.

When trainers catch an elephant, they will take a strong chain and tie the elephant’s leg to a long steel pole which they drive deep into the ground. For a while, the elephant will pull and fight but they they stop because they learn that they can’t get away. Over time, the pole becomes smaller and smaller because the elephant doesn’t pull as hard. The chain becomes a rope, the pole becomes a stake, and soon they stop fighting altogether. With a fully trained elephant, a trainer will simply tie a rope to its leg and toss it to the ground, or attach it to a very small stake, and the elephant won’t even try to get away.

The elephants’ belief that they are helpless becomes so strong that it becomes even stronger than innate instinct for survival. In 1967 at a circus in Mannheim, Germany, 6 elephants died as the result of a tent fire. They were all tied to very small stakes hammered into the ground…stakes they could have easily pulled themselves free from.

What is your ball & chain?

Nobody is without their own ball & chain.

They limit you. They make you believe you’re a terrible athlete, a horrible singer, just a middle manager, not an executive, a follower not a leader. Our education system doesn’t help (Why grades in 1st grade?), our whole system of rewards and punishment is not helpful either. (Why are good grades in math more rewarded than a good performance  in dancing?)

Brands have their own ball & chain.

Amazon could have just stuck with the vision of being the world’s largest book store. Instead, they revolutionized book reading.

Zappos could have been happy becoming a profitable online shoe store. Instead, they revolutionized customer service.

Dreaming and the courage to do so, is actually tremendously important for us as individuals and companies, but also for our society. Just think what our world would look like if, for example, Einstein, explorers like Columbus, and the Brothers Wright had been “realistic” and hadn’t had the courage to dream and to pursue their dream…. It is not unlikely that we’d still be sitting in the dark at night, and that we wouldn’t be flying in metal tubes over oceans to other continents and countries at over 30,000 feet.

We have an obligation to dream.

More importantly, we have an obligation to get rid off the ball & chain.

“When we are narcissistic, we are not on solid ground (earth) or thinking clearly (air) or cought up in passion (fire).  Somehow if we follow the myth, we are dreamlike, fluid, not clearly formed, more immersed in a stream of fantasy than secure in a firm identity.” – Thomas Moore

Mediocre brands love to talk about themselves. Just like the dull dinner companion or date that can only talk about him or herself. It’s hard to escape a dinner date, it’s easy to escape mediocre brands. I just tune them out, throw their stuff in the garbage, don’t even see them.

Great brands talk about what they believe in. What they are passionate about. What they love. They take a stand and tell you what they’re standing against. Sharing with the world what your really believe in is inspiring. Sharing a passion with the world makes people want to connect with a brand. It’s so much easier to connect with people when you share your real identity with the world.

What is your brand passionate about?