Branding, how it COULD be
The French writer and journalist Jules Huret, who visited Germany several times between 1906 and 1913 wrote about a flourishing country, about enormous economic growth — and a militarized society. He, like almost all the other observers, didn’t see a World War coming, not even in the edition of “L’Allemagne moderne” of 1914 — some month before the War actually broke out. In 2008, when Lehman Brothers were sent into insolvency as a political gamble and a test-balloon for what might happen, if a bank with a balance-sheet-total of $ 691 billion went bancrupt, a global tragedy started, with the loss of estimated 80 trillion $. The biggest financial crisis — ever. No one seemed to have taken notice of the writings at the wall.
Neither World War I was predicted by the EXPERTS, nor was the total crash of 2008. So why believe in EXPERTS when it comes to BRANDING? Isn’t branding about the future? About prospects, visions, perspectives? Don’t we need experts for this?
I think that EXPERTISE is even counter-productive when it comes to the prediction of complex, ambiguous and contradictory future developments. Financial experts e.g. should simply shut up when a discussion about the future of the economy starts. They have lost their credit, in 1873, in 1923, in 1929, in 1973, in 1987, 2000/2001 and 2008. If expertise would've helped, the 120 Harvard graduates, who worked at Lehman in 2008 should have noticed SOMETHING in advance.
But instead of expertise: what could serve as a stable ground for branding? I offer a simple answer: General knowledge and empathy. Branding is so complex, it covers and touches so many different aspects and dynamics, that it can’t be overseen from an EXPERTS’S perspectives. One thing we REALLY know from the past and from recent experience is, that entrepreneurs start their businesses not on expertise but on emotions, wish for change, feelings, intrinsic energy, the desire to break free, to make a statement.
If we take branding serious as a branch, we must accept the simple truth: The more general knowledge we have, the more empathetic we are, the wider our horizon is, the broader the approach — the better it is for our clients — and the healtier it is for us …
So simply forget branding-EXPERTISE. Go for the entrepreneurial perspective, or even better, go for the Effectuation perspective in branding: Start with what you have. Build you brand upon yourself. And if you are a branding expert: Look at your clients instead of the market and other experts and benchmarking. Look. Straight. Into. Their. Eyes. That’s where the future can be found.
