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?

Image: Courtesy of Keep Calm Gallery

Brand identities are too often based on style manuals, branding workshops with overpriced branding specialists and fancy design. Developed in shiny offices with hip furniture and signed off by C-level executives. Imposing static visual standards to our culture. Tragically for these brand experts, our culture is highly dynamic: reinventing itself constantly, mashing it up, and responding to responses of responses. Unpredictable and always evolving. Static branding is only capable of taking a snapshot of the brand at a given moment. The moment the new brand identity launches, it’s already out of date.

Time to stop that practice. And start developing an organic brand.

Organic branding acknowledges the fact that the brand isn’t what the executives say it is. Brand is what everybody else says about the brand. It isn’t about a strategy, it is about actual behavior. The brand doesn’t exist in a branding ivory tower, it lives in this chaotic, messy place we call world. Organic branding doesn’t hide in the Presidential Suite. It lives everywhere, interacts with anybody, lives in the real world. It listens, observes, is curious, interacts, reacts, breathes and experiences.

Organic branding is not about silly fonts or PMS colors. Organic branding develops a brand DNA based on the meaning and purpose of the product/service. The brand DNA determines the personality of the brand: its voice, attitude, ethics and cultural place in the world. While the personality always stays the same, the expression of that personality constantly changes. Through colors. Fonts. Different styles.

Think trees.

A brand is like a tree. The roots of the brand tree symbolize the purpose and meaning of your business, designed to grow over time. The trunk stands for the entire body of cultural references a brand possesses. Branches stand for each part of your brand personality. Leaves represent the expression of your brand personality. Leaves will change colors, disappear, just to grow again. Seasons come, seasons go. Just like fads and bright, shiny objects. Or fonts and website redesigns.

Just like all healthy trees grow, a healthy brand will grow. Proper nourishment from the bottom-up is the key, and companies that root their brands organically will build strong roots with a dense trunk, creating a regenerative and expanding system of branches, twigs and leaves. Happy gardening.