Man Who Makes the Clothes.

For about the last thirty years of advertising, everybody and his bastard cousin has talked about branding, re-branding, the importance of brand, and various brand-related things like brand architecture, brand strategy, branded content and the like.

Everything but 40% brand flakes.

To paraphrase Mark Twain in his, probably apocryphal, quip about the weather, everybody talks about it, nobody does anything about it.

I see more companies--new companies, old companies, small companies, large companies--tinkering with their logos, their typography, their colors or some amalgamation of those elements and announcing, as if anyone outside of the incestabubble of the marketing industry gives a bloody rat's ass.

You also hear people--doyens of the industry--talk about things like brand advertising and performance advertising as if they're separate and distinct, as if one is different from the other because their bottom lines and reporting structures are different. As if anything a brand does is devoid of its influence on its own brand. 

We use the word brand like a blind man uses a .30-caliber air-cooled machine gun. We spray it everywhere. We hurt things with it. But we don't know what we hope to accomplish with it or why. Ready, fire, aim.

In fact, most brands as they're articulated by most companies and most "branding" agencies, are nothing but "design." (I write that though some of the people I most respect in the advertising industry work for some of the big design shops.) But what's missing from most of the verbal onslaughts we hear about brands is a simple idea which I sum up in a sentence.

We like brands that act like people we like.

You probably missed that. So I'll repeat it.

We like brands that act like people we like.

That Keatsian sentence (that is all there is to know and all ye need to know) is unknown, unconsidered, unheeded to by about 99.78797-percent of people who use the word brand.

In fact, I have about four-dozen pdfs of brand guidelines on my hard-drive, ranging from about 15-pages in length to over ten times that. 

From these so-called guidelines (which are more lines and less guides) I can neither discern nor understand how any of these brands act, who they are, how they behave, what makes them different or, to be simple about this, 'what they are like as people.' Yeah. I know what they look like.

So what. 

As Schaffner said to Marx, 'clothes do not make the man. Man makes the clothes.'

Maybe because I used to love the ad industry with such ardor, I'd say that the holding company and agency entities that profess to be brands might well be the worst offenders.

Yes.

They all have a be-fukkin-spoke font. A system of colors. Some ratiocinated logo treatment. A way to get in and out of videos. A look and feel. And an about section that means about as much as a politician's promises. As Alban Barkley said about the vice-presidency, "It ain't worth a bucket of warm shit." You can say that about most of the words below.

This isn't just a case of the cobbler's children having no shoes. This is an entire industry not even knowing what shoes are. Or even feet.

This is Shoelessness writ large. Not knowing what they're for, or why we're better off with them than without them.

This is like designing graphic guidelines for a human heart but forgetting that it first has to work as a pump.

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GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is a one-person agency that helps companies figure out who they are, why they're different, why they matter, what they do, why they exist and what they sell.

I don't have a patented process to get to the nub.

You'll never see me employing the "Trapezoid of Truth" or the "Helix of Heuristics" or the "Polyhedron of Personality."

Yet, I employ the oldest and most effective discovery process known to our species. 

I talk.

I listen.

I question.

I think.

To founders, progenitors, scientists, practitioners. People who love you. And people who hate you.

Then we write it all down.

Simply.

Memorably.

With indelible ink.

A set of beliefs. Behaviors. 

A way of being you.

And no one else.

Condensed for legibility and memorability.

It's not for everyone.

But it might be for you.

And no one else.