About a year ago, REN—once the brand leader in the clean beauty category—closed its doors. The company’s rise and fall provides an excellent case for clear and strategic thinking when the barriers to entry drop and your market becomes ultra-competitive. So, let’s take a deeper look.

1. The rise

REN was founded in 2000 by Robert Calcraft and Antony Buck to provide a solution to a problem that the market couldn’t remedy: Antony’s wife, who was pregnant, started having allergic reactions to her skincare products, which prompted Antony and Robert to explore the possibility of an irritant-free skincare range that actually worked.

The premise was simple: skincare that works, made from ingredients that aren’t bad for you. Clean skincare.

In a world where the average functional skincare product will contain anything from carcinogens to hormone disruptors, you can imagine what an easy sell this was. Especially because, at the time, the alternatives made from natural ingredients were mostly perceived as being a bit woo-woo.

What I really liked about REN was the simplicity of the proposition. “Ren” literally means “clean” in Swedish, and I remember one of the brand films Robert showed me about ten years later. Here it is:

A woman goes to swim in a beautiful, pristine lake somewhere in Sweden.

A man meets her in the lake.

They kiss.

They make love.

In full ecstasy, she dives backwards into the water.

Cut to the edge of the lake. They’re sitting together, blissful.
He asks “How do you feel?”

She replies “Ren.”

So far, so good. We have a brand that rests on a simple concept: “clean”. And we have a fun way for the brand to express how that concept feels. How do you feel? Ren. Even though it’s not an actual word in the English language, you kind of feel like it should be. In a previous essay, I’ve talked about words that turn the lights on in your head. Ren is definitely one of those.

Robert talked at length about how he wanted REN to feel. The idea alone that a skincare and cosmetics brand could focus on being a vector for a distinct feeling—feeling ren—was, in my view, the most valuable part of the whole strategy. Because, ultimately, that’s the goal of a beauty brand, isn’t it? Make people feel like a slightly upgraded version of themselves.

2. The fall

I’m going to start this part with a quote from an article by Philippe Silberzahn, professor at EMLYON business school:

“Faced with uncertainty, many organisations need to reinvent themselves. And this is precisely where they risk losing their way. For when familiar landmarks disappear, the instinct is to seek out ready-made models: industry best practices, “professional” management, a purpose statement, ... The underlying mindset is one of conformity as survival strategy. Yet, by succumbing to conformity, a company gradually becomes a pale imitation of its competitors, often a poorer version. It loses its uniqueness at the very moment when it needs it most.”

REN was bought by Unilever in 2015, which pretty much coincides with the time we started to see some very rapid changes in the world of cosmetics and skincare. Chinese manufacturers made it easier for new brands to start-up, the barriers to entry fell, and the competition went up to 11. Purpose-led branding became a trend and multiple beauty brands started one-upping each other on an ever-changing set of virtues and purposes.

Unilever, surrounded by what seemed like unpredictable changes in the market, went into reactive, conformist mode. Having started with a strong conviction about REN, they quickly began to doubt the “clean skincare” proposition, believing it was somehow no longer enough to differentiate the brand.

As a result, they did what Professor Silberzahn described: dropping the strategy and communicating the same messages as everyone else, just to “keep up with the Joneses”.

The advertising and communications started to echo every new trend in the sector—eco, carbon neutral, fairtrade, inclusive, etc.—until the brand turned into an insipid soup of copycatted messages... The complete opposite of differentiation, and the complete opposite of the feeling of “ren” that had been cultivated for 15 years. Notice, in the advert below, the recurring word “we”: we are this, we are that. It’s all about “we” and no longer about you.

Year after year, we saw a loss in brand equity, which eventually resulted in the company closing its doors.

3. Post-mortem

Now, there are two points to pay attention to:

The first is about the mimetic nature of ultra-competitive markets: everyone pretty much copies everyone else and turns to clichés (a.k.a. intellectual commodities) in the hopes of pulling customers from their competitors.

The second is about how to win in such an environment. REN just followed what everyone else was doing; what should they have done instead?

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3.1. The rise of mimetic signalling

Let’s look at the first point.

If you’ve paid attention to the beauty sector for the past decade or so, you’ll definitely have noticed it going through what some will describe as a moral awakening, and others will describe as a mild identity crisis. To the point where beauty is no longer allowed to just look beautiful, or even to focus on your beauty being the source of its virtue: it has to be inclusive, socially aware, culturally sensitive, and ideally capable of solving at least one global crisis before being allowed anywhere near your skin.

The weird consequence of all these ideological acrobatics is that, in beauty, the concept of beauty has somehow managed to become controversial.

It’s a bit weird if you think about it. Something that used to be aspirational and emblematic of the sector as a whole is now treated with suspicion. The word itself is constantly under scrutiny, as though beauty should have to justify its right to exist before it can be expressed.

And, sure, some of that evolution may have been necessary. The industry wasn’t exactly flawless before. The fact alone that REN was successful by offering a functional product using ingredients that weren’t bad for you tells you something about the industry’s state before they arrived on the scene: beauty products have no business meddling with ingredients you should keep as far away from your skin as possible.

But by infusing all these ideological purposes, the hordes of new beauty brands have made us forget what it was for, generating what is essentially an identity crisis.

Originally, beauty had a job, and I think REN were spot on with their initial proposition. To use Clayton Christensen’s terminology, the “job in the consumer’s mind” was really simple: attract, inspire, and make people feel like an upgraded version of themselves. It’s an intrinsic value, the diametric opposite of the extrinsic virtues the new beauty brands are attaching to themselves.

Nowhere is this identity crisis more obvious than in how new beauty brands actually look. At the exact moment when luxury skincare prices are climbing into orbit, the ubiquitous aesthetic seems to be a toning-down of anything that might look too indulgent, too refined, too obviously luxurious. Because heaven forbid a product should look expensive while being expensive.

Through this combination of purpose messaging and minimalist packaging, the industry ends up performing an odd trick: charging luxury prices while pretending it’s not doing luxury. A kind of visual disclaimer. “Yes, this face cream is £200, but look how humble it is.”

Meanwhile, outside the beauty bubble, the rest of humanity is doing just fine with beauty and beautiful things. We admire stunning architecture. We obsess over beautifully designed cars. We drool over fashion, watches, furniture, things that don’t downplay their own intrinsic excellence, and certainly don’t let that intrinsic quality be hijacked by extrinsic virtues.

We understand, instinctively, that beauty can be aspirational without being offensive. That it can provoke desire without committing a moral crime. So why is the beauty industry the only one acting like it got called into the principal’s office?

I think it’s something to do with the “swagification” of beauty products that’s happened as the barriers to entry in the market have dropped. The products aren’t so much products in their own right, they’re merch. The equivalent of a T-shirt you bought after a rock concert.

The new beauty brands being launched aren’t brands cultivated by people who are particularly interested in beauty, just like the rock band members aren’t particularly interested in T-shirts, and the barriers to entry in the beauty market are now low enough for them to launch and keep on signalling their extrinsic virtues.

As a result, the sector is now tangled up in a web of assumptions about class, inclusivity, identity, all of which seem to require constant negotiation. The upshot is that beauty has been expanded to include everything except the unapologetic pursuit of beauty itself. Aspiration is suspicious. Refinement gets labelled elitism. Excellence gets toned down, just in case it makes anyone uncomfortable.

3.2. How to win

The upside—because there is one—is that this creates an opening. Which takes us to the second point: what should a brand like REN have done instead?

Well, there is a big, obvious gap in the market for anyone willing to stop overthinking and remember something profoundly simple: humans like to look good.

The beauty industry is old. Older than the wheel. Arguably as old as “the oldest profession in the world”. And through every cultural shift, trend cycle, and philosophical detour, one thing has remained stubbornly consistent: humans like to look good. They want to feel attractive. And, yes, the definition of “attractive” may evolve. But the desire itself does not.

This is basically the same logic behind Jeff Bezos’s favourite business insight: focus on what doesn’t change. Here’s what he said back in 2006: “Everyone is obsessed with what’s going to change in the next ten years, when it’s so much better to build our business on the things that are never going to change”. He was referring to the fact that nobody in ten years (or ever) would complain that Amazon’s customer service was too good, or that their prices were too low, or that their delivery service was too convenient. But it’s an argument we could easily make about beauty, too: nobody will ever complain about being too beautiful.

Nobody will wake up ten years from now and complain their skin routine made them look too good. There is no future where someone says “Ugh, I wish I didn’t look this radiant.”

Which brings us to the conclusion that the real opportunity in beauty today is a brand that doesn’t twist itself into ideological origami. If you’re looking to start a new beauty brand, you could just focus on the 21^st century’s version of what beauty itself has always done: attract, inspire, and make people feel like an upgraded version of themselves

Seeing things through this lens, we can see the mistake many brand analysts have made in the past year, arguing that REN closed down because “clean” is no longer enough to differentiate the brand, and that consumers nowadays want something the brand’s competitors own.

Nobody in their right mind would argue that, say, Volvo’s concept of “safe”, or DHL’s “speed”, are “no longer enough to differentiate the brand”. If anything, the cumulative effect of 50 years of communication discipline—finding ever new ways of expressing that one clear value—is the moat. It’s something that’s near-impossible for any competitors to replicate.

And nobody in their right mind should be telling a beauty brand that’s been successful for 15 years on the back of “clean skincare” that its brand concept is “no longer enough”. The whole point of proper branding is precisely to own a concept that’s short, simple and emotionally resonant in the consumer’s mind, and then keep running with it decade after decade.

Because, in an ultra-competitive market, the only thing of true value is brand salience.

Simply put, if you can be the brand that owns “clean beauty”, and spend 15 years developing that little bit of real estate in the consumer’s mind, you will own a category entry point, a mental shortcut in the consumer’s mind that says “this is what I need to do next” whenever that particular thought pops into their head. Just like “I need a fast courier” leads you to the natural conclusion you should call DHL, and “I need a safe family car” leads you to book a test drive with Volvo.

These mental shortcuts are built over many years of discipline around expressing one single concept and finding new ways to make that one concept interesting.

So, what should REN have done in the face of a rising tide of mimetic new beauty brands? Simple: carry on carrying on, continue being the brand that owns the “clean skincare” category in the consumer’s mind.

And when I say “simple”, I don’t mean that it’s easy. Quite the opposite, it’s one more example of the simplest things being the hardest to do. But it’s the only strategy that aggregates value over the long term, because it addresses the only thing that matters: the intrinsic value we build up over the years by focusing on the one and only job we have been chosen to perform in the mind of the consumer.

PS: many thanks to for originating the idea behind this essay, and for your feedback on every version, too.

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A few years ago, Frank Stephenson and I were discussing a car that had just been launched, when Frank joked that it looked like two designers who hated each other had agreed that one of them would design the front and the other design the back.

Aside from being spot on, it was a clear example to me of what happens when a car company loses its brand concept: instead of trusting their designers to re-interpret the over-arching brand’s design codes, the company ended up depending on the designers’ own, personal, design values to decide the aesthetic.

It was a bit of an epiphany moment because, for the first time, it was a clear sign that brand concepts matter, and not only in the narrow sense people usually think of when they talk about branding and marketing (advertising, promotion, etc.), but in the very product itself as a manifestation of the brand concept.

So, now, let’s ask ourselves a simple question:

1. What should a Ferrari look like?

It’s a question many people are going to be discussing soon, since Ferrari are about to reveal what the Luce—their first EV—looks like from the outside.

Funnily enough, it’s a question that brings us back to Frank, since he was Ferrari’s first ever design director. There were two things he was in charge of when he was in that role:

1. Designing the F430, FXX Enzo and the other models of his era.

2. Defining the design codes that made a Ferrari look like a Ferrari. The visual elements that would connect future Ferrari models to past Ferrari models. You could call it Ferrari’s “design DNA”, or style guide.

Now, here’s Frank’s latest “HOT or NOT” article for Top Gear, reviewing the new Ferrari 849 Testarossa.

The level of detail and reasoning is pretty much what you’d expect from a great designer who actually wrote Ferrari’s style guide. And the fact that this car is a “NOT” makes you wonder what happened to that style guide in the last 20 years or so.

2. Style guide vs brand concept

The annoying thing about style guides, is that they often feel like the brand is going to be OK when the creative director leaves the company (“hey, just follow these instructions”) but they quickly stop being used when a new team takes the reins. And if they’re not used, it’s mostly because they tell you what things should look like without telling you why they look the way they do.

To illustrate the point, think about someone in your life whose style you really like. If you pay attention, you’ll quickly notice that their style isn’t so much a fixed set of items they always wear. It’s not even a general colour palette. It’s more that they have a point of view. Their point of view dictates their aesthetic. If you wanted to emulate them, copying their aesthetic would only get you so far. What you’d really need to copy is not how they look, but how they see.

However, a brand is more than a person. A real, lasting brand signature is not an aesthetic, but it’s not one person’s point of view either, no matter how iconic they are. A real, lasting brand signature is its concept.

The brand concept brings about a culture—distributed over many people, not just one person—which is as close as a company is going to get to a point of view. The aesthetic is a by-product of this culture, and the culture is downstream from the concept.

One classic way to illustrate this might be to look at a car that many Ferrari drivers might buy as their family car—Volvo. We all know exactly what Volvo’s brand concept is: safety.

And they don’t just talk about it in their ads. The designer who might apply for a job at Volvo is a very different person to the designer who might apply for a job at Ferrari. The things they talk about in their meetings, the music they listen to when they’re driving, the pictures on their moodboards, all end up manifesting differently in the sound of the doors, the colour palette on the dashboard, the smell of the seats, the haptic feedback on the accelerator, the shape of the buttons, the texture of the gearstick handle, etc. Everything is different. The aesthetic of the cars is a by-product of this culture, and the culture is downstream from the brand concept.

So, let’s look at the question again: what should a Ferrari look like?

The answer is clearly another question: what is Ferrari’s brand concept?

However, let’s not rejoice at this answer too soon! Framing Ferrari in the context of other car brands might have made sense 10 or 20 years ago, but the world has changed, and there’s something we need to address that many people who used to hang pictures of Ferrari’s cars on their walls when they were 13 will find hard to swallow:

3. Ferrari has long ago stopped being a car brand.

It would be far more accurate to say that, for many people, Ferrari is now a lifestyle brand whose flagship products are cars. Just like, say, Hermès is a lifestyle brand whose flagship products are Birkin bags, but whose revenues mostly come from prêt-à-porter, accessories, scarves and fragrances.

If you go to the Ferrari website today, you’ll land on a page selling handbags, jackets, shoes, sunglasses and accessories.

Ferrari has extended out of its product category, the same way Nike extended out of the running shoe category, the same way Gucci extended out of the leather shoes and handbags category.

This is a pretty big deal for Ferrari. It’s definitely the kind of thing that reshapes the brand’s destiny. So, the first thing we need to ask ourselves is: why?

4. Why did Ferrari jump out of its product category?

The answer is quite straightforward. Ferrari’s big competitor is not other supercar brands. Ferrari’s big competitor is… the ever-growing second-hand Ferrari market.

Think about it: Ferrari’s cars aren’t the kind of cars that end up in a landfill, to be replaced by newer models. Nearly every Ferrari ever made is still in circulation. Which means that every new car produced by Ferrari has to compete not only with other car brands, but with all the cars Ferrari itself has produced since 1947!

If we give this market a name, we’ll be more aware of it as a direct competitor. So, let’s call it ”Ferrarieri” (as in, “tutte le Ferrari di ieri”, all of yesterday’s Ferraris). Here is one of Ferrarieri’s most beautiful models: the Dino.

It was named after Enzo’s son. Its price tag today puts it in direct competition with many new Ferrari models. And it’s by far the most desirable classic car, ever.

Now, Ferrari is a company whose business model has always been based on the development of scarcity. To quote Enzo Ferrari himself: "Ferrari will always deliver one car less than the market demands."

But you don’t get to do that with 350,000 Ferrarieri cars in circulation, any one of which could become available to a buyer with sufficient funds.

So, this is clearly a problem. Ferrari’s target audience, i.e. customers who want and who can afford a Ferrari, can either:

- buy a new Ferrari.

or

- buy a Ferrarieri built between 1947 and yesterday.

Is there a way to stop Ferrarieri stealing Ferrari’s customers away? No, and neither would we want that to happen, of course, since Ferrari depends on this legacy to sustain its perception of value.

So, then, is there a way Ferrari can benefit from the existence of its competitor, Ferrarieri?

Yes, there is. Leverage the emotional pull of Ferrarieri’s most desirable cars—an iconic heritage that only Ferrari has access to—and place them at the top of the Ferrari value pyramid. Then, build a world of products around them that the target audience always wants more of e.g. seasonal fashion collections, fragrances, etc.

As you can see in the images below, it’s not new Ferraris selling the clothes, shoes, handbags and sunglasses.

So, now that we’ve rationalised the category extension for Ferrari, let’s look at category extensions for a minute.

5. Category extensions

Many years ago, I used to work for Severin Wunderman, who owned Corum, the Swiss timepieces brand. Before buying Corum, Severin owned the licence to make Gucci timepieces. He bought the licence from Gucci in 1972 for less than a million, and sold it back to Gucci Group (who I’ve also worked for) in the mid-90s, for roughly $300 million.

Now, the reason Aldo Gucci sold the timepieces for less than a million is simple: he didn’t think it was worth very much. How many people would realistically buy a watch from a company known for its shoes and handbags?

The answer, as it turned out, was “a lot”. In 1974, the Gucci Model 2000 broke the Guinness world record for bestselling watch, ever.

It’s a question that touches on what we’re going to discuss in a minute: how many people would buy a car from a company known for its shoes and handbags?

My answer is “a lot”. A Gucci car would break the world record for bestselling car.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Aldo Gucci clearly thought there would be a market for Gucci timepieces, but he didn’t imagine it’d be as big as it ended up being. He pre-ordered a lot of watches from Severin to sell in the Gucci stores themselves. In fact, the cheque he signed for his pre-order was bigger than the price Severin paid him to buy the licence. But the reason that cheque was bigger is simple: he just didn’t see much value being given away in the licence. Nobody then—not even Aldo Gucci—could have imagined that Gucci would have to pay $300 million to buy it back 25 years later.

The question, then, is: how far can category extensions go?

Well, imagine a category Nike hasn’t entered yet, like hotels. With a brand concept like “Just Do It”, we know exactly what a Nike hotel would look like and what we could expect from it, don’t we? The gym would take centre stage. You’d stay at the hotel for the training camps. The best rooms would have a view of a running track, where you’d see Olympic athletes training in the morning.

There is clearly a lot that can still be done in category extensions…

6. A “quartz movement” for cars

What would have to change for lifestyle brands to extend into cars?

Well, what has stopped them from extending into cars so far?

The answer: making cars is very difficult. It’s generally considered near-impossible for non-car brands to enter the market. Even Apple, a company full of competent engineers, tried it and failed to make the numbers work for them.

My contention is that this era is over. The car world is entering a similar situation as the watch world did when quartz movements blew everyone out of the water.

The moment quartz appeared in the watch industry, the game was up: any watch could keep accurate time forever, easily and affordably. Problem solved. The holy grail of seeking ever better performance became irrelevant overnight.

The Swiss called it the “quartz crisis”, because most players in the sector spent 20 years in the red while they tried to figure out what to do about the fact that a $10 Seiko could tell the time more accurately than a $1,000 Swiss watch.

This massive disruption enabled any lifestyle brand from outside the watch sector to enter the sector, launching watches just like they launched shirts, bags or shoes. Nike and Armani’s watches, for example, use quartz. Most Gucci watches use quartz.

And the reason lifestyle brands did that is because they knew something that watch people apparently did not: nobody buys a $1,000 watch to tell the time.

The same will, I believe, happen to the car industry. On the one side will be the luxury car brands we all know. On the other side will be cars launched by brands like, say, Nike, or Armani, or Gucci.

So, in light of all this, we can see Ferrari’s big problem coming up on the horizon. It’s the entry of lifestyle brands into the car market. Companies known for their shoes and handbags entering the car sector, just like they entered the watch sector 50 years ago.

7. The end is nigh (for some)

Why do I believe this will happen? Because we have seen the first symptoms of this change already: Xiaomi—a smartphone and electronics company—built the SU7, an affordable electric car.

It’s a really good car in terms of performance: 0 to 100 in 3.1 seconds! We’re talking Ferrari Purosangue performance at 1/10th of the price. And you get a great driving experience, enhanced by great technology (as you’d expect from a technology company...).

Now, you can argue the SU7 copied its looks from McLaren, Porsche and Mercedes, but that’s precisely what puts Xiaomi into a favourable position for what’s coming next: producing cars with a partnering lifestyle brand. Xiaomi will be the Severin of Gucci Automobiles. Or if Gucci won’t play, imagine Xiaomi producing a car with Nike, with a uniquely Nike-like approach to the way it looks and performs.

The first lifestyle brand to do it will have the same effect on the market as Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had on Mount Everest: signalling to the world that it could be done.

The moment this happens, two things will follow:

1. some car brands will collapse, because the only thing they could offer is something you can get from any EV. Just like quartz made us realise people don’t really buy a luxury watch to tell the time, so EVs will make us realise people don’t really buy a luxury car to go from 0 to 100 in 3 seconds.

2. other car brands will survive and prosper, the same way Cartier, Rolex, Patek and Tiffany survived and prospered after the quartz crisis. They’re the ones with a clear and resonant expression of a brand concept you’re buying into.

We see the latter most clearly in a brand like Rolex: a clear and resonant brand concept: “success”. You see it in the latest slogan (”Reach for the crown”), you hear it in the podcasts, where every guest they have talks about their road to success. Rolex has spent 70 years cultivating this concept into a culture. And it shows.

8. Conclusion

So, where does this leave us with Ferrari?

We’re going to hear a lot of noise when the Luce is launched. Armchair generals telling us the brand is dead because it’s an electric car, or because Jony Ive designed the interior and it looks like an iPhone, or because Marc Newson designed the exterior and, oh, he’s not a car designer. Never mind that one of the 20th century’s most desirable cars—the Citroën DS—wasn’t designed by a car designer either. Flaminio Bertoni was a sculptor.

Ultimately, the thing you have to do is transcend all the short-termist noise, transcend all the change and, echoing Jeff Bezos, ask yourself: what are the things that are not going to change in the next few decades? Since we mentioned Rolex, they’re actually a good example of this: one thing that is not going to change is people’s desire to express success. Whether they do that with an Oysterquartz or an Oyster Perpetual is almost irrelevant, as long as that specific desire is expressed through it.

Among the “things that are not going to change” is one thing that Ferrari has in spades. It will make all the difference and that nobody seems to be talking about very much.

Ferrari have been here before.

It’s somewhat known among Ferrari enthusiasts that Enzo Ferrari didn’t really care much about road cars. He only built road cars to pay for his real passion: racing.

The racing wasn’t paying for itself, but there seemed to be plenty of wealthy people willing to buy really fast road cars... which, when you’ve got a team of amazing engineers who can build the fastest racing cars in the world, isn’t that difficult to do.

Viewed from this perspective, Ferrari is not a “business”. It’s more of an obsession in search of a way to pay for itself. And that obsession is something Enzo Ferrari had so much that he infected everyone working for him with it.

If you think about it, that’s the most authentic way you can imagine a brand concept trickling down into a culture, which then forges the point of view we spoke about at the beginning of this essay. The products are merely by-products of this point of view.

Ferrari spent 70 years cultivating this obsession into cars that make customers believe they’ve found something better than sex. And, just like the road cars were a way for Enzo Ferrari to pay for that obsession, Ferrari have now found a way to continue paying for that obsession by launching a world of desirable products around it. As long as that obsession itself exists in the customers, as long as they see that part of themselves expressed through the brand, Ferrari will be just fine.

I was recently invited into a start-up’s pitch when, near the end of the presentation, the founders started going through the numbers, which—as you’d imagine—lead to lots of doubts and disagreements from most of the investors, until the most respected of them asked everyone to just shut up about the numbers and go back to discuss the concept.

I was really happy he did that because, in my experience, a start-up’s numbers don’t really tell you anything. Whether it’s going to have one hump or two, it’s going to be a big animal and that’s all that matters at this point.

So, to get into this mindset, let’s imagine an investor trying to estimate the value of two companies ten years from now.

On one side, they have a large, established business with decades of spreadsheets, book value, EBITDA, free cash flow, dashboards, charts, committees, subcommittees, and several people whose only purpose is forwarding PDFs.

On the other side, they have you: a start-up with very little historical data, but a brilliant product and a lively community of genuine fans who can’t stop talking about them.

Which company will be worth more in ten years? If you’re focusing on numbers, there’s no way to tell. Because all the numbers the big company as describe the past. There’s no numbers for the future. That’s what makes it the future.

That, right there, is your start-up’s advantage.

Large corporations are forced to work with measurable inputs and outputs. Every pound a marketing director spends must eventually be translated into a tidy performance metric to justify their continued access to oxygen. So, they rely on what happened yesterday to decide what to do tomorrow.

This is their weakness: they’re driving full speed into the future while staring into the rear-view mirror.

Meanwhile, as a start-up, you have the rare privilege of not being trapped by metrics at every turn. You barely have a dashboard, you don’t even have doors, never mind a rear-view mirror!

Good. That means you can focus on what’s actually in front of you.

You can feel this difference most clearly in how big companies approach “community”. They build loyalty with offers. Join our members club for exclusive access to seasonal promotions and selected discounts! Because, clearly, nothing ignites human passion quite like selected discounts. You can almost hear the quarterly presentation: “Engagement rose 14% after we gave away a tote bag.”

It’s a fake community because they’re measuring the wrong things to begin with. Small companies that understand themselves don’t need discounts to create fans.

Think back to the bands you loved as a teenager. Why did you love them? Was it because they offered 10% off merchandise for newsletter subscribers?

Of course not. You loved them because the music sounded like your private thoughts. Because the singer looked impossibly cool brushing hair from their eyes while insulting an interviewer. Because someone you fancied loved them first. Because they came from a city you romanticised. Because they represented a version of life that felt different and alluring.

Notice something important: none of that was measurable. No spreadsheet can quantify longing, identity, belonging, taste, obsession, or wanting to become the sort of person who listens to that band. And yet those forces move markets every day.

The music industry has always understood this better than most. That’s why A&R people work the way they do: they’re not hunting balance sheets, they’re hunting electricity. They know the odds of finding the next Lady Gaga are absurdly small. But if they can find that strange, magnetic force that makes fans rally around artists like Wilco, Pavement, or Röyksopp, they’ll find something far more valuable than a quarterly spike: durable affection. And, in today’s world, a tiny label with taste can spot that just as well as a giant corporation.

This brings us to another beautiful feature of the unmeasurable: it creates the perfect conditions for asymmetric warfare.

As a start-up, getting people to love you is possible You can be personal. Distinctive. Slightly weird. Intensely thoughtful. Generous in ways that don’t fit neatly into reporting software. You can become the brand people feel clever for discovering.

Big companies struggle with this. They can absolutely buy awareness, but love is ruinously expensive when purchased through campaign budgets and approval chains. Before they can attempt anything interesting, someone needs forecasts, benchmarks, ROI models, stakeholder sign-off, legal review, and Trevor from Finance asking if whimsy can be depreciated. By then, the moment is gone.

So, use your advantage. Do the thing that can’t be easily measured, copied, or approved in triplicate. Create the atmosphere, identity, taste, intimacy, or devotion that large companies can’t manufacture without spending millions trying to imitate what came naturally to you. Make that thing the reason people buy from you in the first place, and watch the big corporations spend billions trying unsuccessfully to replicate it while you ride your wave to success.

PS: speaking of unmeasurables, did you know GNIROB was free?

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I first came across the concept of nation branding when I was around the age of 7. My father had been working for the outgoing President Leone of Italy for a while and explained to me one of the mandates of the Ministry of Culture created in 1974.

In his own words: “First, people will fall in love with Verdi and Michelangelo. Then, they will fall in love with Italy. Then, they will fall in love with everything Italy has to offer: wine, cars, clothes, vespas, even mozzarella”.

Michelangelo selling mozzarella. It made little sense to me at the time, but I did feel like I had been let into a secret that would make me feel like a cynical outsider, no matter what country I was in: beautiful as many nations’ cultures are, they are often diverted and re-structured by governments. They do this to cultivate desire and attachment, just like the best brands we all know and live with in our lives.

As I grew up, I heard many people criticise this commercialisation of culture. Especially at universities like Bologna and Urbino that focused on semiotics—which in many ways is the very study that provides the foundations of brand practice.

But the necessity for a “brand Italy” was clearly there, and its positive impact on the wellbeing of millions of Italians is undeniable.

Before the 70s, there was very little love for Italy abroad. There were a lot of stereotypes about Italy being a chaotic country of mafia, mummy’s boys, lazy people, bicycle thieves, etc. And this negative view generated very little demand for anything made in Italy. So, before the concept of “Made in Italy” could be created, the brand concept that underpinned it—“brand Italy”—had to be created.

Brand Italy’s proposition was very simple: love. For every product, there was an Italian brand that made it with love.

Now, you can talk about love in dozens of different ways. The love of family as expressed in a family business. The love that the craftsman puts into his work. The love of the land as expressed in the produce and in the foods we cook with it. And so on. But it’s all just different facets, different forms of expressing the concept of love, which is very simple.

It’s very simple, and it worked. I’ve often spoken about the way Top Gear’s episodes on Alfa Romeo are different to all the others. For every car on the show, we get to hear numbers: speed, horsepower, torque, acceleration, etc. But when they get into an Alfa Romeo, all they can talk about is opera, art, beauty and, well, love.

But it’s not just cars. It’s everything.

Just look at the phenomenal quantities of Italian exports across the board. Wine; olive oil; balsamic vinegar; cheese; prosciutto; pasta by Rana and Barilla; sauces by Mutti and Saclà; coffee by Lavazza and Illy; coffee machines by Zanetti and Bialetti; cars by Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Lancia, Lamborghini and Fiat; motorbikes by Ducati, Piaggio, Aprilia, Benelli, Malaguti and Moto Guzzi; shoes by Berluti and Ferragamo; handbags by Gucci and Bottega Veneta; dresses by Pucci and Missoni; silk by Ratti and Mantero; fragrances by Acqua di Parma and Santa Maria Novella; jewellery by Buccellato and Pomellato; woolwear by Loro Piana and Brunello Cuccinelli; kitchenware by Alessi and Smeg, etc. Brand Italy plays a key role in all of them.

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Now, unlike my last essay on Made in Italy, I want to contrast this with France’s nation brand, because it highlights what happens when you keep things simple, emotionally resonant and uniquely yours.

France, too, has a Ministry of Culture. They’ve had it for much longer than Italy and, historically, it’s been much better funded. Where Italy had to make do with shoestring budgets, France spent more on culture than many countries’ GDP.

Just looking at film, Jack Lang—France’s Minister of Culture throughout most of the ‘80s—spent an annual 500 million francs on direct film funding, compared to Italy’s roughly 150m. He left government for a couple of years in 1986, but returned in 1988 to spend even more: of the 94 films funded directly by the French Ministry of Culture in 1988, only 14 had a budget under 5 million francs.

And yet, Italy’s exports exceed France’s exports, despite France’s GDP being more than a trillion Euros bigger. Even in terms of gastronomy—a pillar in France’s nation brand—Italy’s cuisine is by far the most popular around the world. In almost any city on Earth, Italian restaurants outnumber French restaurants more than 10-to-1. In almost any kitchen cupboard on the planet, Italian food brands outnumber French food brands more than 10-to-1.

Why is this? Why did Italy produce a commercial hit on a shoestring budget, while France had to spend so much to reap so little?

Because France had a lot of coats, but no coathanger to hang them from. France’s nation brand didn’t have a concept to hold it all together for you to get it. Let alone such a resonant concept like love. Let alone a concept that could underpin the quality of every product in just about every category from food to fashion, because everything that is made with love will be consumed with love in the consumer’s heart. People who drive Italian cars and vespas aren’t ambivalent about them. They love them. People who own Italian furniture love their furniture. People who wear Italian shoes and bags love their shoes and love their bags. People who eat Italian food love their food.

So, what do we learn from this for our own brand strategy?

First, keep it simple. Stick to just one thing. Italy’s entire nation brand strategy was built on a single word: love.

Second, make sure it’s something authentic: the brand director’s job is not always to invent, but to discover. This is particularly true for brands that have a long heritage, as most luxury brands do.

Third, make it emotionally resonant. Just like with Alfa Romeo cars: it’s never about the numbers.

There are some interesting moments in history that don’t get talked about nearly enough. Moments when, as a result of a sudden change in cultural values, hypervaluation happens right in front of our eyes.

In 1813, Prussia was at war against Napoleonic France.

To fund this expensive war, the Prussian Royal Family came up with an interesting concept: they issued steel jewellery that citizens in Berlin could exchange for their gold jewellery. On this steel jewellery was marked the sentence “Gold gab Ich für Eisen”—I gave gold for iron—a clear signal of the wearer’s patriotism.

This phenomenon has been repeated a number of times throughout history. In World War I, when Germany started running out of gold to pay for cannons, they issued rings with the same line for people to swap their golden wedding rings.

The function of jewellery has always been that of a 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝗹. In a way, it almost doesn’t matter what materials you make it from, as long as the right signal is being emitted. For example, when M and I got engaged, I offered her a rubelite ring, and she cut off a few hairs and wrapped them around my ring finger.

The signal is the thing. Usually we don’t notice this so much, because the signal stays constant. It’s just part of the matrix of value, as invisible to consumers as water is to a fish. But just as some fish are quite sensitive to changes in density of the water, so it is through sudden changes in our value matrix that we realise there was a signal at all.

Which means that, when lab-grown diamonds become commonplace, the difference between a low-priced diamond necklace and a high-priced diamond necklace will likely have nothing to do with the diamonds themselves, and everything to do with signals.

This de-coupling from any notion of “intrinsic value” is not that unusual. After all, you’re not paying 100 million for a Picasso because of the price of the raw materials.

This is one of the reasons I never liked the name the lab-grown diamonds industry gave to their product: “lab-grown” is quite alien to the signals people like to emit when they wear jewellery.

What’s more, the sector’s opponents immediately have the mental hooks they need to oppose its endorsement: “Lab-grown diamonds are artificial. They’re fake copies of the natural diamonds we work so hard to mine.” Immediately, an opposition is created in the consumer’s mind between “mined diamonds are real” vs. “man-made diamonds are fake”.

Which is a shame, because luxury consumers tend to appreciate man-made products just fine, as long as they’re framed around the concept of craftsmanship and precision, rather than “labs” which frame the concept of artificiality in the same way as artificial ingredients in our food.

Notice how we appreciate “cultured” pearls rather than natural ones, for example.

So, taking our cue from the cultured pearls industry, “cultured diamonds”—the phrasing, the concept, everything—was right there for the taking. It still is, of course, if you’re feeling brave...

More broadly, you could say that today’s humans are signalling animals who often pretend that their signals are not signals. Another way of putting it is that we’re essentialists who pretend to be materialists. Somewhere on Earth, there is a human who bought the Omega Speedmaster watch Neil Armstrong wore on the moon at a far greater price than all the other Omega Speedmaster watches, despite looking exactly the same as all the others. As long as this remains the case, I will disagree with anyone who claims that luxury is materialistic: a materialist would never do that.

Often, when I discuss these subjects with clients, I end up returning to the same conclusion: all value is subjective.

One book that never makes it on any Marketing MBA’s reading list is Ludwig von Mises’s “Human Action”. It’s not strictly speaking a marketing book, but it is almost entirely dedicated to the subjectivity of value. And, I’d argue, it should not only be compulsory reading for marketers, but even more so for designers: one way you can tell if someone is a really thoughtful designer, is if you hear them re-framing the current product’s subjective attributes before putting pen to paper. Sometimes, all you need is to re-frame the perceived negative attributes in order to create new value.

PS: speaking of compulsory reading,
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Remember the crush you had on that popstar when you were a teenager? Try to write down the reasons for your crush. Most likely, it’ll be something ineffable. Some kind of weird combination of disparate elements. Their poise. The way they stood, sat or moved. The way they flicked their hair, ...

Humans are emotional animals. We like things for reasons that are mostly ineffable and unmeasurable.

Imagine, for example, that you met the love of your life on a train: would you want your journey to be over quicker? Or would you want it to last all night so you could spend more time getting to know each other?

Trainlines can’t guarantee you’ll meet the love of your life on them, of course, but what if everything on board was designed with the sole purpose of being beautiful? A place you actually want to be in? A place you look forward to be in? A few years ago, I took Belmond’s Andean Explorer train from Cuzco to Puno. Every moment on board was a joy.

The weird thing is that it got me to realise there is no reason commuter trains from London to Oxford shouldn’t be equally joyful. If we don’t have the billions to make trains faster, what if we made every second on them delightful instead? How much value could be created if beauty were a KPI?

There is a kind of beauty that triggers a deeply emotional connection, and that creates deep value out of it.

For example, when Frank Stephenson pitched the Nuova 500, FIAT only had enough cash in the bank to keep the lights on for another 18 months or so. So, one of the main reasons they went for it was that the car was going to be built on the already existing—and thus fully homologated—Panda’s chassis. This was the only way a new car could even be developed in 18 months instead of the usual 3 to 5 years. A choice made by necessity lead to FIAT’s best-selling car ever. A massive payoff.

So, the business case for beauty is definitely there.

At the same time, it’s very difficult to put numbers on the effect it will have on your business. Its impact can be orders of magnitude greater than other options, but it’s never going to be an easy pitch in a boardroom, because it attracts a very different kind of investor. One who “doesn’t need to weigh an elephant to know it’s an elephant”, as Warren Buffet put it in one of his stockholder letters.

In that respect, companies focusing on beauty and delight have a lot in common with start-ups, especially the ones that really go for disrupting the entire status quo in a particular sector: investors in them can’t put a number on the business’s eventual value, but they know it could be billions. Precisely because business-by-numbers leads their competitors into a massive blind spot for the things you can’t measure, and the opportunities that come with them.

Beauty in business is disruptive, and very much the domain of the underfunded underdogs. So, if your budget is limited and you’re looking to make a big impact in a sector filled with boring brands, look for the disruption opportunity in beauty and delight.

PS: speaking of boring brands, GNIROB is a substack on branding and design dedicated to the opposite of boring. If you enjoyed this essay, subscribe.

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Before working on luxury brands, I used to design campaigns for films. And it's only when I stopped doing it that I realised how effective films were at teaching me the basic tenet of marketing: the emotion is the product. A campaign's success depended entirely on finding an emotional hook and building some kind of promise on the back of it.

Every now and then, a film would pop up where we'd do a focus group and find out you can break all the rules and still do something very successful.

Pulp Fiction was a classic example of this: nobody in the focus groups talked about the story. In fact… they didn't even remember the story!

Instead, they talked about:

- the "royale with cheese" scene;
- the "I love you, honey bunny" scene;
- the "bring out the gimp" scene;
- the "cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast" scene;
- ...

We had people in the focus groups who'd quote lines from the film at each other. One girl asked "Who's Zed?"; the guy sitting next to her answered "Zed's dead, baby"; and everyone in the room laughed and felt like they were part of a new in-crowd. I had seen a few phenomena like this before (Monty Python was already being quoted at nauseum on university campuses), but nothing quite like this.

So, when the time came to promote Pulp Fiction's DVD release, instead of pushing trailers, we just pushed these standalone dialogue scenes, on the basis that the one great thing about DVDs was that people could watch the movie over and over until they knew those dialogues by heart i.e. the true mark of any self-respecting hardcore fan.

Which brings me to the question of your brand concept, a subject we often discuss in these short essays.

There's a good case to be made that your brand concept is simply the thing your superfans remember when they talk about your brand to their friends. No more, no less. Essentially, your brand concept is your “aboutness”: it’s what they talk about.

So, it's worth considering that, if the thing you want the brand to be about isn't the thing your fanbase wants to talk about, you might just be overcomplicating things. Just like with Pulp Fiction, they're talking about this one emotionally resonant thing they have found in you. What are you talking about?

Allbirds is so boring, people stopped buying their shoes, and the company went from a £4 billion (B!) valuation during the pandemic to $40 million (M!) last week.

So, what exactly is so boring about Allbirds?

Funny you should ask. I actually wrote an Allbirds brand analysis for an investor a couple of years ago, when the share price had already dropped about 10x from its peak and value investors started being interested.

Now that the value destruction has been quantified (a 100x drop before going private) it’s worth revisiting what I wrote, in the hope that others (i.e., you) don’t fall into this trap.

Allbirds is one of the best examples of a purpose brand riding on the back of sustainability.

Now, I’m not here to say sustainable businesses can’t survive. What I will say, is that it’s not a brand concept you can own. “We’re sustainable” isn’t something that’ll make you unique, or bring you any kind of differentiation in the long term. In fact, it’s the kind of concept that will—by your very own agenda—condemn you to become a commodity: logically, if you really want the world to go your way and other businesses to do the sustainable thing, you can quickly see where your problem is going to be: they’ll all compete against you on the same terms.

So, clichés like “we’re sustainable” are basically intellectual commodities. And, as much as you might mean them, there’s nothing to stop people with bigger budgets from pulling the green-washed carpet from under your feet.

Which means you’ll inevitably end up in an “out-agreeing each other” scenario:

—”Ah, but we’re 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 sustainable!”
—”No, we’re even 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 sustainable!”

This, when the goal of a brand is to show the consumer how different you are to everyone else. How can you be different if you all agree with each other?

What’s more, Allbirds made a point of not looking particularly distinctive either. Which made sense for a short while: people in Silicon Valley wore Allbirds to signal that sustainability was more important to them than logos. Great, but it still doesn’t solve the problem of what these signals should look like. Signalling no importance to logos is still signalling!

For example, many years ago, when Asprey expanded from jewellery to become a lifestyle brand, they didn’t want to put their logo on the menswear labels: the only name that should appear in a gentleman’s jacket is his own. Fine, but then how do we know it’s an Asprey jacket? The solution we advocated was a purple stripe lining, which later went on to become a distinctive brand asset: Asprey later released the purple Stripe bag, the purple Stripe tea set, etc. Even the GMT line on the Asprey watch was a purple stripe.

Our rationale for the stripe was simple: from pinstripe suits to school ties and rugby shirts, stripes are the minimal aesthetic unit that conveys Englishness. So, the simplest and most understated way to express the ultimate authentic English lifestyle brand whose brand colour was a royal purple should be… purple stripes.

Understated is not another word for bland. But bland, unfortunately, is the one aspect showing just how much Allbirds was a product of its time—the age of blanding—when dozens of fashion brands thought it was a good idea to just write their name in the same sans-serif typeface as everyone else.

The lesson here is simple: don’t be boring, even (especially!) when boring is fashionable.

If someone asked me to redesign the calendar, I’d start the New Year on 24 March. Between Jesus’s circumcision and my birthday, I choose my birthday.

Cynics will say my over-inflated ego has taken over the asylum. Are we to rename March to Alexary, too?

But, let’s face it, New Year’s Day has a branding problem: its real, lived-in brand experience is very far from feeling anything like new.

24 March, by contrast, is all fresh air and springtime delight. So new!

“So what?” you say.

Well, there’s a phoney kind of New Year’s resolution that only exists as a result of New Year’s Day not matching its claim of newness with its experience. You know the type: vague, abstract, makes you feel ambitious just for having it. Get healthier. Build a great company. Change the world.

The problem isn’t that these resolutions lack ambition, it’s that our short-term actions are often hilariously misaligned with our long-term goals.

Now, here’s something most economists take for granted but most humans ignore: markets are forward-looking. Prices today contain expectations about tomorrow. Want to raise house prices in your neighbourhood today? Announce the construction of a new school to open in three years’ time.

One way to phrase this is that “the future reaches back and grabs the present by the collar”.

So, why don’t we run our lives with the same intelligence as the markets?

Take a classic example. A man wants to be healthy. But every evening in January, he chooses Netflix, beer and junk food. He wakes up full of regret, swears tomorrow will be different, and then—astonishingly—does the exact same thing again! A good, long walk never shows up as an option in the winter.

So, this is why most resolutions fail: they don’t “reach and grab the present by the collar”. They float above life, admired but irrelevant.

There are two ways to change this.

The first way: create a “holy grail”. A goal so ridiculously compelling you’d fight a bear for it. The funny thing is you’re not even supposed to reach it. Its real job is to grab your present by the collar and yell: “Absolutely not, you chaotic gremlin!” when you veer off-course. Think of SpaceX’s holy grail: Mars. Even if nobody ends up gardening on Mars, we still get reusable rockets and global internet. Nice.

Holy grails force certain choices. “Be successful” won’t stop you from doing dumb stuff, but “make all the world’s information universally accessible and useful” will make some ideas just feel wrong.

The second way: make the daily task enjoyable. Humans are weirdly great at this—a species that went from “eat or die” to Michelin-star restaurants, and from “wear this or die” to “this jacket is so me”. If working toward your goal feels as good as binge-watching a Netflix series, you’ll stick with it.

Which brings me back to our Netflix, beer and junk food man. How do we get a good, long walk to show up on his options list?

By starting the New Year, not in the winter, but on that most glorious day: 24 March.

Whenever I talk about the “Made in Italy” brand, people are surprised by the idea that the original mission for Italy’s Ministry of Culture was to serve as the foundation for what would today be termed its nation brand. We tend not to think of our culture as a deliberate construct. It’s something that’s just… there.

So, let’s go back 50 years to look at Italy’s nation brand development.

Back in the 70s, consumers had a very different idea of Italy than they do today. Less Verdi and Versace. More mafia and mummy’s boys. Less Fellini and Ferrari. More Brigate Rosse and bicycle thieves.

Following the theory that everything economic and political is “downstream” from culture, a project was set up to position Italy as the birthplace of everything that is beautiful in Western civilisation.

On this basis, the Ministry of Culture was created in 1974—six years before the launch of the “Made in Italy” brand. During those six years, the desirability of Italy itself was developed through a number of cultural programmes, all connected to each other by the simplest brand concept: 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲.

You can still sense the impact of this today when you see, for example, how Top Gear talks about Alfa Romeo. Every other car is qualified by numbers: torque, top speed, horsepower, acceleration... Then they get into an Alfa, turn on the opera music, and talk about passionate love.

But it’s not only passionate love we’re talking about. Italy is a country of family-run companies, so one tangent became “love of family”, manifested in products we’re proud to put our family name on. Italy is a country of food and agriculture, so another tangent became “love of the land”, manifested in the food we cook from local ingredients.

To push the latter, TV-programmes like “Linea Verde” were created: every Sunday, a TV crew would visit small villages to interview farmers on what they were growing, and farmers’ wives on what they were cooking.

These programmes were initially created because the Ministry of Culture had a very small budget, so they had to piggy-back and do the equivalent of brand collabs with other ministries; the Ministry of Agriculture, in this case. Which is a very interesting way to start up that I don’t think new brands think about enough.

But they quickly realised that the way to your heart is through your stomach (which explains why Artusi’s 19th century cookbook united Italians more than any political campaign). So, food took on a very central role in the nation branding project. After all, we all love our mothers and, when we are born, our food literally comes from her. It’s a very profound relationship. If you transpose “love for your mother” for “love for the motherland”, you can easily see the impact that food can have on the Italian identity, and the power with which it can be expressed abroad. It’s no coincidence there are more Italian restaurants in the world than anything else, and that basic Italian ingredients are to be found in kitchens around the world.

What’s interesting about all this is that, over the decades, this simple brand positioning has manifested itself in ever more complex ways to love Italy, each riding a slightly different tangent of the original concept. And then, of course, there are the countless brands all expressing it in their own way, with their own aesthetics. For every product in the world, there’s an Italian brand that makes it with love, and the list is long, long, long. Just running down the alphabet… Abarth, Alessi, Alfa Romeo, Aqua Panna, Arena Sport, Ariston, Armani, Barilla, Benelli, Benetton, Beretta, Bertolli, Bialetti, Bottega Veneta, Brembo, Brunello Cuccinelli, Bugatti, Bvlgari, Calzedonia, Campari, Carpano, Cerruti, Cinzano, Diadora, Diesel, Disaronno, DoDo, Dolce & Gabbana, Ducati, Elisabetta Franchi, Ellesse, Etro, Fendi, Ferragamo, Ferrari, Fiat, Francesco Rana, Gaggia, Gianfranco Ferré, Giovanni Rana, Gucci, Illy, Italdesign, Kappa, Lamborghini, Lancia, Lavazza, Loro Piana, Luisa Spagnoli, Malaguti, Martini, Max Mara, Miu Miu, Montegrappa, Moto Guzzi, Natuzzi, Nonino, Nutella, Olivetti, Perugina, Piaggio, Pininfarina, Pirelli, Pomellato, Pucci, Prada, Ramazzotti, Riva, Roberto Cavalli, Saclà, Sanpellegrino, Segafredo, Smeg, Schiaparelli, Stefanel, Superga, Tic Tac, Tod’s, Trussardi, Valentino, Versace, Vespa, Zagato, Zanotta, Zanussi, Zegna, …

This may lead some brand analysts to think it’s more complicated than it really is. But the source is still just one concept: 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲.

What can we learn from this? Well, let’s think of your company’s brand team as its Ministry of Culture. As complex as the cultural programme may eventually come to be, it still has to start from a simple, resonant, and original positioning. What’s the one word holding your brand together?

Before I start this essay, I’d like you to take a sheet of paper and write down a list of your five happiest memories.

Take all the time you need for this. The more you remember the way you felt when you experienced those happy memories, the more my point will make sense to you. I say this because humans are quite forgetful. If I asked you for your top five movies, chances are you’d miss some of your favourites, simply because, well, people forget...

Some time ago, I started a lecture on luxury at McCann Erickson asking everyone in the lecture room to do this. Then, we pulled out a few participants’ notes out of a hat, and collectively tried to put a price on the experiences.

The results were quite surprising to all: almost none of the happiest memories were expensive, or even had anything to do with money. Some did come as a long-awaited reward after a period of sacrifice—one of them was winning an olympic medal—so you could say there was a personal price paid there... But mostly the experiences people counted as the happiest memories in their life were free of any kind of commercial transaction.

Why do I focus on this? Because one way to think about the difference between premium brands and luxury brands is that money doesn’t play a role in luxury brands.

That is, premium brands tend to justify the money you pay for their products with very specific benefits. You’ll pay more for this version of the Audi A8 because it comes with leather seats. You’ll pay more for this plane seat because you get 30cm extra space for your legs. That kind of thing.

Luxury brands, on the other hand, don’t go for that kind of measure at all. Nothing specific about the product correlates with the price you’re paying, in the same way that nothing specific about a painting by Picasso correlates with the price you’re paying. It’s just, well, the price you’re paying to satisfy your desire for something deeply subjective, and therefore incomparable to something else.

We’ve spoken in previous essays about the absurdity of putting a Robert Parker-style rating of, say, 93 to Picasso’s Guernica and 94 to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Luxury’s position is that these numbered ratings are just as absurd for everything from wine to jewellery. In other words: it’s not just better, it’s incomparable. That’s why you want it.

So, then, what can brand directors learn from luxury brands?

Well, it’s simple, really: cultivating the incomparable is the very purpose of branding.

I tend to work with this mindset even when I’m working with clients who don’t operate in the luxury sector. Because, once you work from this premise, it’s not just that price is irrelevant for people who don’t care about prices (i.e. the traditional, expensive luxury brands) but for everyone else, too. A swim in an Austrian lake that cost exactly €0 ends up being on of the most luxurious moment in your life.

Your brand doesn’t have to be unique in absolute to get there, but it does have to be the salient option for a specific set of people. The moment you take away the argument that this particular hotel, for example, is the right one for you, you might as well start a price war on booking.com

Now, you have to be careful here, because you might just want to ask yourself if the intangible values you’ve been cultivating are really ownable. Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen hundreds of new brands building their proposition on intangible values. Dozens of brands riding the latest waves of eco-this, or fairtrade-that, or craft-this, or small batch-that. So, intangible values in and of themselves are far from making your product unique or incomparable if they’re clichés.

Think of clichés as a form of commodity. An intellectual commodity. So, a watch made by a Swiss company that talks about, say, heritage and attention to detail is on its way to becoming a commodity if it is indistinguishable from the hundred other Swiss companies talking about heritage and attention to detail. Another grain of rice in a bucket of rice, a.k.a. boring.

So, what to do?

Well, one thing to do is to consider the ways in which someone might just completely love the experience of having your product in their life.

But it’s tricky. You see, to get into the right mindset about how that can even happen, you have to give up on anything that’s measurable. In fact, you probably should suspend the part of your brain that has anything to do with measurability or logic. Which sounds nuts, of course, but once you get into this mindset, you’ll start noticing that companies spend huge amounts of money on things that may be amazing feats of measurable performance, but that nobody is particularly impressed with.

For example, most people who love EuroDisney would probably prefer their rides to last longer. But they would probably prefer the ride on the Eurostar that takes them to EuroDisney to be shorter.

So, if you were the CEO at Eurostar, the measurable and logical approach would be to spend lots and lots of money to get your rides to be shorter. You could easily spend billions doing that.

The alternative I’m talking about would be to get away from these easy (but expensive) solutions, and ask yourself why people want EuroDisney rides to be longer and Eurostar rides to be shorter. And the simple answer to that is that EuroDisney rides are great fun, whereas Eurostar rides are not. So that the successful course of action might not be to spend billions making Eurostar rides shorter, but to make them as fun as the rides at EuroDisney.

What might something like this look like? Well, that’s going to be subjective, but one really good starting point would be to stop thinking of yourself as being in the business of running a train company, but rather as being in the business of making memories.

A couple of years ago, a lot of people were very surprised to read that the richest man in the world was no longer Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but Bernard Arnault, whose company—LVMH—had just reached a market cap of half a trillion dollars. LVMH was the first company in Europe to reach this valuation and, shockingly, it wasn’t a tech company but a house of luxury brands.

Since then, it seems journalists can’t stop writing about the secret formula behind the luxury industry’s success, and LVMH’s success specifically.

All sorts of platitudes have been written about the usual critical factors: high quality, attention to detail, heritage, impeccable customer service, etc. For some, what you really, really need is a great brand story. For others, everything revolves around the brand experience.

While I have certainly advocated for these factors in the past—I wrote a column for Luxury Briefing magazine between 2004 and 2014—today I can’t help but feel like most of the analysis I’ve been reading these last few years is just beating around the bush.

Why?

Because the factors don’t work in isolation. Between story and experience, for example, it makes no sense to choose one. You must work on both, because they feed into each other: the experience frames the story, the story weaves meaning into the experience. Together, they create the emotional resonance you need to achieve your true objective.

So, then, what is your true objective?

Desirability, of course. Desirability is the key to generating deep value.

Here is Bernard Arnault himself, talking about desirability being his prime objective a few years ago: "L’objectif principal n'est ni la croissance, ni le profit, mais le développement de la désirabilité." Our principal objective is neither growth, nor profit, but the development of desirability.

Desirability is a weird thing for your business to hang its coat on, isn’t it?

To start, it’s impossible to measure, which makes it a very difficult topic in any board meeting or shareholder meeting, despite everyone knowing exactly how they feel when desire strikes their heart. It’s the most compelling force in the universe.

So, perhaps we can make a better case for it by analysing its constituent parts. The first part we will call “externally-driven desire”, the second “internally-driven desire”.

Externally-driven desire
Let’s borrow a concept from René Girard: mimesis. Simply put, humans are copying machines. We learn everything by copying those around us. The fact alone that you and I are communicating in the same language is a result of this: humans are born and, by copying the other humans talking around them, start talking themselves. Gibberish at first, then “mama” and “dada”, then the rest.

According to Girard, this mimetic aspect of our nature answers some of the most difficult problems for us. For example, the problem with free will is that you have to figure out what your will actually is. What is it that you want? The solution is written in our evolution as copying animals: we want what others want. Which others? The others we most want to be like.

Mimetic desire is the catalyst of both friendship and enmity. Consider two teenage girls who have grown up next door to each other. They’ve been best friends since they were little, played the same games together, read the same books, listened to the same boybands, etc.

Their desires mimic each other. Sometimes one of them will desire something, which will lead the other to copy that desire, which in turn will confirm to the first one that her desire is correct, etc. People might even laugh about how similar they speak, how they always know what the other one is going to say, etc.

The problem starts, of course, when one of them desires something of which there is only one. A boy in school, for example. Scarcity appears: there is a greater desire for something than the world can produce.

If one of the girls gets to satisfy her desire, this will create a source of envy, resentment, betrayal, conflict. The very force that brought them together, that made them one, now drives them apart. At best (or worst, depending on how you feel about these things…) the girls will become frenemies, spending the rest of their lives trying to one-up each other.

To throw this back into the luxury context, this is how one woman will get on Hermès’s waiting list for a Birkin bag, while the other woman will pay three times the price to skip the waiting list via a third-party broker and purchase the 2023 limited edition ostrich leather model. This will cause the first woman to tell her boyfriend something along the lines of “she didn’t even know about that bag until I told her about it!”

With these words, she will have swapped her standards—and her ensuing desires—for something she believes the other will never have. Notice that, in any scenario, choices are being made reactively, driven by external factors. So, now, let’s look at the internal factors.

Internally-driven desire
Here, we’ll borrow a concept from someone who spent a good 20 years of his life writing about the psychology of desire: Jacques Lacan. What he referred to as “objet a” is the ever-longed-for-and-never-found object (or rather, object-cause of desire) that we feel a sense of loss and nostalgia for, believing we once had it when we were in the state of “jouissance” (ecstasy or bliss) as babies in our mother’s arms, before submitting to language, articulated thoughts, and the messy business of being human.

The “objet a” (pronounced “objet petit a”) is the ineffable object-cause that causes our attention to fall onto something which then becomes the object of our desire. Over the course of our lives, we project that desire onto all kinds of objects and people, believing them to have something special about them that we cannot put our finger on. Quite literally, what we mean when we say that someone has “a certain je ne sais quoi”.

There’s a quote attributed to André Breton that expresses this perfectly: “All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name”. And, since we are seeking an ineffable and impossible object, the more objects we consume that promise to be it—but are not it—the more we desire the real it, projecting our “objet a” onto other objects of desire.

Interestingly, this eternal chase produces in itself a kind of “jouissance”, different to the original “jouissance” we believe to have experienced at the maternal body, which Lacan calls “surplus jouissance”. If you’ve ever heard older wealthy people talking about how they loved becoming rich much more than being rich, that’s probably what they’re referring to, because it’s as close to self-actualisation as you’re going to get in a material world.

Of course, if you think about it, the nostalgia they have for it is as illusory as the “objet a”: it was never there in the moment itself! Their memory put it there later on.

Real, Symbolic and Fantastic
Now, how does “objet a” actually inform us about desirability? Well, one crucial aspect to it is that Lacan places it at the intersection in the Venn diagram of Real, Symbolic and Fantastic. This in itself gives us an idea as to the reason luxury brands have managed to grow so much over the past half century.

Put simply, it’s cinema.

Our ability to experience fantasy (rather than just, well, fantasise about it) has grown ever more powerful and sophisticated over the past 70 years or so. As a result, our “objet a” seems much more “actualisable” to us, since we actually experience some form of it when we watch movies.

In this respect, notice how little was written in the press about Bernard Arnault’s acquisition of the CAA talent agency, when it really seems quite straightforward: film will be the way for LVMH to sustain the relationship between its luxury brands and the public’s “objet a”. In Gucci’s La Famiglia, we spoke about Cerruti’s and Saint Laurent’s love relationship with film. This is what that relationship looks like when it’s taken to the next level and becomes a core business strategy.

Once you start thinking of the film industry as an industry that actualises our fantasies—bringing them into the symbolic world and making them part of the fabric of our collectively shared reality—it becomes quite obvious that its semantic codes, its narrative structures, its archetypes, all serve to feed our desire.

Put simply, if you want your luxury brand to resonate on an emotional level with the public, film is where you should look for guidance.

So, there you have it: a little analysis of desirability for your brand concept to tap into. Hopefully, it will help you put your customer’s desires first when working out how to develop your brand.

My friend Nick Searle likes to walk. “Likes” is an understatement: he once landed at Heathrow Airport and decided the best way to get to our studio in Hammersmith was to walk all the way.

Many years ago, Nick and I were walking through some surprisingly wild woodlands near Holloway in London. After a while, we ended up walking on a path that was quite deeply sunk into the land and Nick said something that turned all kinds of lights on in my head: “This is why they call it Holloway”.

Of course! I had only ever thought of the word as a name, not as a word... A holloway is a path that is sunken in the land. Hollow way!

Many words are like that, pointing at something more meaningful than might appear at first sight. The German word Stammtisch is a wonderful, composite word. A Stamm is a tribe. A Tisch is table: tribal table. A group of friends regularly get together at the same table in a public place, like a pub or a brasserie. The table becomes their Stammtisch.

One week, your friend Bill can’t make it. Another week, it’s Ben who can’t make it. But everyone just carries on. We’ll see Bill and Ben next week: the Stammtisch remains the Stammtisch. Yes, it’s a table, but the word takes it far beyond the physical table and turns into a phenomenon, like the social equivalent of a whirlpool in a river. You could replace the table itself, you could even replace the individual friends over time, as some of them leave town and new faces show up on the scene. The Stammtisch would still be the Stammtisch. If the word didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it, just to point at the phenomenon.

In French, an amuse-bouche is an amusement for your mouth: something light and playful you’d eat with your apéritif before starting a longer meal, just to get the juices flowing. A few years ago, realising that our branding workshops could sometimes be long and difficult, I decided to open them with something light and playful, and called this part the amuse-tête. You should always open a long and difficult meeting with an amuse-tête, especially if you want participants to be playful and creative.

A few weeks ago, I had to come up with a name for this substack, where we examine how brands can become the opposite of boring. Of course, boring written backwards is... gnirob! Surely, this is the shortest, most economic word to describe the opposite of boring. I have a feeling Hemingway (Mr. Say-It-All-In-One-Word) would approve. Surprisingly, the gnirob.com domain name was still available. So, here we all are.

You don’t have to work with composite words to touch on something interesting. Baldassare Castiglione, who wrote the first book on court etiquette, coined the word sprezzatura, which could be loosely defined as “acting like you just don’t care about such trivial things”. If you translated it literally, it would mean something like “unpriceness”. The word embodies a whole way of being that implies, for example, that you should win a tennis match, but make light of the situation and generally appear as if you weren’t trying very hard. It takes a lot of confidence to do that. Gianni Agnelli, for example, had tons of sprezzatura: he always dressed very smart, but in a somewhat dishevelled, nonchalant way.

I suppose it’s precisely because there are such resonant words at our disposal—words that turn the lights on in your head—that I’m often a little disappointed when I ask companies what the concept is behind their name. In the dotcom era, for example, it used to be quite trendy to give your dotcom a composite name, like Razorfish or Moonpig or Strawberryfrog. Quite often, the explanation behind the name fell far short of the explosive energy that lies dormant in such juxtapositions.

The way I see it, if you’re looking for the lights to shine when people say your brand’s name, you should aim for emotional resonance. This emotional resonance occurs because we hear it and just “get it”. It’s the same kind of resonance that happens when we discover a new word that describes something we recognise—a word that should have existed all along, and now that it does, it helps our mind point at this concept in our heads. Gnirob!

I’ve often spoken about our insistence on discovering a brand’s “aboutness” before we can think of its name or graphic identity. One conclusion this essay is leading me to, is that it’s worth thinking of this “aboutness” as a dictionary definition without a word.

Imagine a world where your company’s product has been included in the dictionary, but there’s been a printing error and the only thing on the page is the word’s definition. Where the actual word is supposed to be, they just left a blank space. The emotional resonance of the word you might come up with to fill that blank space is probably worth looking into.

And, vice versa, if your company has a name, but you’ve been struggling to find what it is that consumers buy into when they buy your products, it’s probably worth imagining how a dictionary definition might read next to the word.

Demna’s 𝘓𝘢 𝘍𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘭𝘪𝘢 concept for Gucci got a lot of attention for looking less like a fashion collection and more like a line-up of film characters. The runway was full of instantly recognisable types: the mob wife, the power dresser, the hyper-polished social climber, etc. What made it interesting wasn’t the clothes themselves, but how quickly you understood the characters behind them.

This is something people who really “get” luxury have understood for a long time. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s the reason Nino Cerruti hired us back in 1999. When I started working for him, I had zero experience in fashion or luxury, but plenty of experience art directing campaigns for films.

I often heard him comment on the fact that he loved designing costumes for films, because he liked dressing a personality more than a walking body on a catwalk. Interestingly, another brand we worked on for many years—Saint Laurent—have now turned this into their MO: their partnership with A24 has them designing costumes for one cultural hit after another.

People don’t buy products because of what they are. They buy them because of who they become. Estée Lauder said it a million times to all her employees: you’re not selling the product, you’re selling the person she wants to be.

There’s always a gap between someone’s current self and their ideal self, and that gap is where most buying decisions really happen. The gap opens the gate to a cinematic world your brand takes them to, in which they get to play with their identity. Bernard Arnault talked about it in many shareholder letters: the job of a luxury brand is to build desirability, and what people desire most isn’t the object itself; it’s the feeling of being the character who owns it. A handbag isn’t leather and stitching. A watch isn’t metal and gears. They’re props in the film someone projects to themselves about the character they’re looking to become.

One way to think about it is to imagine the consumer as Mario, the Nintendo character, and your product as the fire flower. Nobody wants the fire flower for its own sake. They want the fire flower to turn Mario into Super Mario. That’s, well, that’s the point! And yet, most brands are still obstinately selling the fire flower.

The customer isn’t really asking, “What do I get?” They’re asking, “Who will I be if this works?” That gap, between their reality and their imagined identity, is where your brand’s world exists. When a brand fills that gap, the decision to buy feels obvious.

The reason 𝘓𝘢 𝘍𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘭𝘪𝘢 works is not because the styling is clever, but because the identity is clear. You see the character, and you know whether you are that person, want to be that person, or wish you were brave enough to be that person. That clarity creates desire faster than any list of features ever could.

For anyone building a luxury brand, the takeaway is simple: offer a version of the customer they want to exist in the world as. If you can describe that version clearly, people move toward you without much convincing. If you can’t, no amount of better copy or prettier branding will fix it.

People don’t buy the product. They buy the Self that comes with it.

One of the things I get most challenged on is the idea that if you sell a simple, emotionally resonant brand concept, you can ride that wave for many, many decades and work on lots of different iterations of the concept until you just own the category entry point.

The reply I often get is that this approach is fine for products that have something you can actually differentiate on, but that it doesn’t work on products that are near-commodities.

So, let’s look at one sector that has these commodity-like features: tyres. Just as we talked about last week in the context of Dick Fosbury (who only won one Olympic medal for his high jump because everyone immediately copied his Fosbury Flop), this is a sector where everyone ends up copying everyone else very quickly, and offering similar products for similar prices.

And let’s analyse one brand that succeeded in this sector 100 years ago by owning a simple, brand concept for many decades. I’m talking about Michelin and the concept that took them to the top: “movement”.

In a world saturated with brands that peddle complication, distraction, and short-term hype stunts, there is something disarmingly elegant about the story of Michelin. For over a century, this company has done one thing exceptionally well: they sold “movement”. They engineered it, wrapped their brand around it, and built a globe-spanning empire out of the single, rolling idea that people just want to go places.

The genius of the Michelin brothers wasn’t so much in the fact that they sold better tyres (although they did). It was in the fact that they understood what tyres make possible: the act of moving itself. In other words, they didn’t just make great tyres; they made the conditions for those tyres to matter. They engineered the demand for movement, which in turn created demand for the one product they were obsessively focused on.

Let’s dive in.

1. The Accidental Industrialists

When the Michelin brothers took over their grandfather’s failing rubber factory in the late 1800s, it was a mess. Workers hadn’t been paid, the product line was a bizarre smorgasbord of farm tools and rubber hoses, and bankruptcy was hovering like a vulture.

Neither brother had any experience with this. Édouard was an art student. André, an engineer. Both preferred Parisian culture to factory squalor. Yet they were both relentless, intelligent, and allergic to mediocrity.

They began by ruthlessly cutting unprofitable product lines. But it wasn’t until Édouard wrestled for half a day with a passing tourist’s punctured bike tyre—a glued-on Dunlop monstrosity—that the future truly announced itself to them. After fixing the tyre and test-riding it, Édouard realised that pneumatic tyres were infinitely superior to the solid rubber tyres most people endured. His insight was brutally simple: make them easier to fix, and people will want them. The tyre they developed was baptised “the detachable”.

From there, they sprinted. André, the engineer turned marketer, spotted an upcoming long-distance bicycle race and declared they had to win it. When his brother hesitated, citing lack of time and readiness, André replied, “We are the only ones with a detachable tyre. All competitors will waste hours fixing their wheels except ours. This is an advantage we have and may never have again. Figure it out!”

They hired a retired racer, won the race by a landslide, and went from 12 tyres in stock to 10,000 riders using Michelin tyres within a year.

2. Everything for the Tyre, Tyres for Everything

From the start, the brothers chose focus over diversification. They would not be a rubber company. They would be a tyre company. Every other rubber factory at the time was dabbling: shoes, hoses, balls. Michelin built their business on monogamy. Their motto: “Everything for the tyre, tyres for everything.”

They saw the bicycle boom, built a product for it, and then leapt to the automobile before it even had a market. When others saw cars as a novelty, André saw them as inevitable. “The car will replace the horse,” he declared. They poured profits from bike tyres into car tyres, in a country that may have had as few as 350 vehicles on the road.

This wasn’t blind optimism. Just a different way of looking at things: the Michelin brothers knew their tyres were better, so, all they had to do was get more people moving to grow the demand.

3. Selling Movement

Here’s where the genius begins. Most companies make a product and then shout about it. Michelin made a product, then built the world where that product could thrive.

They encouraged driving. More driving meant more movement. More movement meant more wear. More wear meant more tyres.

It started with spectacle. They entered races. Sponsored air shows. Built demo rides with wooden wheels and pneumatic tyres so that attendees could feel the difference. They let the press cover it for free, and when that wasn’t enough, André wrote columns himself. Michelin Mondays became a fixture in the French press: guides, routes, inns, meals, mechanic locations.

Then came the maps. They made the first accordion-folded maps.

Then came the road signs. They built tens of thousands of road signs across France. Each one said Michelin in small letters next to the destination city.

Then came the masterstroke: the Michelin Guide.

4. The Michelin Guide: Movement Disguised as Hospitality

Launched in 1900 and given away for free for 20 years, the Michelin Guide was a 400-page red book filled with maps, inns, mechanics, and restaurants.

One way to think about it was as a tyre catalog without tyres. A Trojan horse for travel. Its logic: make people want to drive. That’s it. Make them drive further. Give them reasons to move.

And it worked. By 1912, 12 guides existed in multiple languages. Seven thousand pages in total. Nearly 275,000 copies distributed that year.

From this guide emerged the Michelin star system: one star meant “a good local meal if you’re passing by”. Two stars meant “worth the detour”. Three stars meant “worth the trip”. The destination recommended by Michelin became the excuse for the journey itself, and the journey wore out your tyres.

Through this mechanism, and through the fact that the automobile itself was an aspirational product, the Michelin brothers were selling aspiration, taste and prestige. And in doing so, they embedded themselves inside the ever-growing culture of movement. Their big insight was that great publicity required a simple concept, and well-run systems—not one-offs—to back it up. 150 people worked on the guide. 12,000 readers mailed in annual questionnaires. Michelin opened travel bureaus to plan your entire trip for free. Why? Because movement was the business model. Michelin didn’t sell rubber. Or even tyres, if you think about it. They sold a future of ever-increasing movement.

5. Summary: One Brand Concept, Infinite Leverage

The story of Michelin is, at its core, a testament to the long-term power of a single, clear brand concept. Most companies change slogans like you change your socks. They chase trends, pivot directions, and pollute their messaging with confusion. Michelin never did that. From the moment the brothers committed to detachable tires in the 1890s, they locked onto one idea—movement—and they never let it go.

Every action, campaign, product, or innovation traced back to that central concept. If it didn’t encourage more movement, they didn’t bother. If it did, they pursued it relentlessly. The Michelin Guide, the maps, the road signs, the races, the innovations—each was a spoke in the same wheel.

Success, in Michelin’s case, came not from diversification but from a monomaniacal focus. While competitors played the broader rubber field, Michelin made tyres, and they built a universe around those tyres. They made tyres cultural, aspirational, even glamorous. Not by changing the product, but by embedding it in the rituals of everyday travel, leisure, and ambition.

In today’s business climate, this strategy is almost countercultural. But it works. Pick one thing. Commit to it. Wrap every brand touchpoint around it. Let the world change, and grow by staying still.

“Movement” was Michelin’s brand concept. And they let it roll for over a hundred years. This is how you build a brand that lasts.

A few weeks ago, a client whose company we worked for a couple of years ago, expressed her amazement at how we had formulated a successful brand concept after just a few workshops and study weeks, when—after working many years in her sector—she herself hadn't been able to work it out.

The compliment was touching, but the actual answer to the question is simple.

Imagine two animals eating lunch. One is a wolf, the other is a human.

The wolf eats because it’s hungry. Its body has some nutritional needs that manifest themselves into the kind of things it feels like eating. It doesn’t know its carbs from its ketones, but it has 𝘷𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘴. So, if it feels like eating a rabbit? Boom. Rabbit time!

The wolf has zero formal knowledge about nutrition, or even what goes on inside its body. Its 𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗶𝘁 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 of what to eat works OK.

This has the advantage that it doesn’t need to be taught very much in order to feed itself, which means that its survival is not dependent on culture, or any kind of knowledge distributed in the minds of other wolves.

But it pales in comparison to the nutrition science—i.e., the formal knowledge backing up the human’s diet—which can extend the human’s life by many decades and branch out into sciences like pharmacology and healthcare.

When you eat something, biologists, chemists, physicians and nutrition scientists have a pretty good idea of what goes on in your body, and can use this knowledge to cure you from diseases as well as optimise your diet so you increase your ability to live a longer, healthier and happier life.

This kind of 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗹 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗹𝗲𝗱𝗴𝗲 has turned humans into the most successful animal on this planet.

And it does the same for brands and businesses: plenty of businesses operate just fine with a tacit understanding of what it is their clients want, and how to give it to them at a profit. But they pale in comparison to the formal brand knowledge that leads the most successful brands on Earth to occupy a space in our hearts and minds.

So, one way of conceiving the branding process is as the process of converting tacit understanding into formal knowledge. Essentially: 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗸. Turning what they know in their bones into language. Repeatable, communicable, scalable language.

Which is how you go from chasing rabbits to building a global chain of Whole Foods.

One way to gauge the value of your brand is to ask a very simple question: would people miss it if it was gone?

More generally, who do people miss, and why? Let's see if we can learn something here.

In the last few years, the most famous person passing away was probably the Queen. She was unique, iconic and irreplaceable. The fact alone that nobody ever needed to say which queen they meant tells you just how unique she was.

Have you ever asked yourself why the Queen always wore single-coloured outfits? And so bright! How many people—other than David Bowie—can you imagine looking great in a Kermit green suit the way she did on her platinum jubilee?

The reason is very simple: standing in a crowd, wearing a bright, single-coloured outfit made her instantly distinctive and vividly memorable, even from a distance. Different in a sea of sameness.

The photo below was taken at England’s World Cup victory in 66. There are only two things to look at in a sea of indistinguishable people: the England team in red, and the Queen in gold.

As she hands out the golden trophy, she looks like the source of gold the trophy is made of. In effect, they're winning a bit of her glory. Whoever made this styling decision deserved an instant knighthood.

Can you imagine what this picture would have looked like if the Queen had just worn some outfit similar to the other women in the crowd?

Of course, it's easy to think this is just about appearances. But, as I have often argued in these essays, a brand's appearance is a by-product of what it is. In other words, you can get extra leverage if your distinctiveness and your differentiation line up. At the studio, our most successful brand identity designs have always been the ones most tightly connected to what the brand is about. If we know what it is, we know how it should look.

Why is it important that these two aspects should be lined up?

Because time is a friend to authentic brands, and an enemy to phoney brands.

Put simply, it takes decades for something unique and iconic to become irreplaceable. And it’s impossible to sustain a public image for decades without aligning how one is with how one appears.

Different in a sea of sameness. It's worth repeating this in the context of the question asked above: would people miss us if we closed shop? In a world where almost everything is interchangeable, people miss that which:

1. is unique.
2. looks iconic.
3. has grown to become irreplaceable.

The lesson is so simple that it’s going to sound self-evident: build something unique, and make it look iconic. Sustain that effort for a few decades and you, too, will grow to become irreplaceable.

Back when I was working on film campaigns, one thing that ended up really frustrating me was how ephemeral the projects actually were.

A film would come out in a few months’ time, we’d build the campaign for it all the way until it premiered, then it would play a few weeks in the cinema, and then just… disappear 🙄

Only very occasionally would we get to do something over the longer term, as happened with Fight Club, which spent very little time in the cinemas but did outrageously well in DVD sales.

When I made the transition to luxury brands, some of our first clients were jewellery brands (Asprey, Garrard, Boucheron and later Fabergé…). One client in particular was very focused on engagement jewellery, which is probably the one sector that is mostly affected by the 95/5 rule, which we could summarise as follows:

As much as people might like looking at your engagement rings, most of them are just not at a point in their lives when they’re about to get on one knee and propose.

Your ad may be really good, but at least 95% of your audience are just not in the market for what you’re selling. Which is a challenge.

But once you accept it as a fact of life, the great thing is that you'll learn two things that luxury and heritage brands can really benefit from.

First: since only 5% of your target audience are currently in the market for the product you’re selling, your job is to sell to the other 95%’s future selves, i.e., the “future version” of your customer who will be in the market for your product at some point in the future.

So, do the kind of creative work that will be:

a) memorable enough to still be in the mind when the future arrives

b) linked to your brand’s concept, so they don’t think of other brands when they enter your category entry point.

Second: since future buyers are being targeted with your adverts today, the effect of great work is cumulative. Its impact compounds over time. So, your job is to do the kind of creative work that isn’t just focused on longevity, but that benefits from this compounding effect. The longer you manage to ride the wave of your creative campaign, the more effective every single advert will be in the future, as it’s standing on the shoulders of ever-growing giants, so to speak.

It takes a certain kind of creative character and mindset to keep iterating a unique concept over many years in a way that seems fresh and new, never mind the many decades of consistency we tend to associate with the most successful luxury brands. The public may not get bored, but the marketing team certainly will. Building up fast hype just feels so exciting, and it probably shows up more impactful in short-term sales figures than slowly building the cultural halo some products get to acquire over many decades.

But if you want to move a mountain with the slightest whisper in 50 years’ time, it’s the long stories—like Hermès's Birkin bag or Garrard’s engagement ring for Diana—that will teach you how to get there. In this sense, your creativity is valued not in your ability to create new things, but in your ability to make old things feel new and exciting again, and again, and again. Turn boring into gnirob.

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy famously wrote: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

It strikes me that the opposite is true for brands: “All unhappy brands are alike; each happy brand is happy in its own way.”

The sea of sameness is where brands go to drown, flailing about in an eternal struggle of high effort and low returns, because deep down we all know the consumer doesn’t really need a 101th “craft” IPA brand, a 101th “small-batch” gin brand, a 101th “fairtrade” coffee brand, a 101th “organic” cotton basics brand.

Uniqueness is the key reason consumers recall, recognise and resonate with brands in the first place. Let’s call these the three R's of the happy brand: 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹, 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲.

𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹
What do you blurt out when the bartender asks you what you’re drinking? The options are numerous, so what made you go for a pint of Guinness? A brand should do everything to cultivate a unique category concept in the consumer’s mind, and then develop this concept into the main reason why someone should buy something from the category at all. So, for example, it’s not so much that customers buy from UPS or DHL, but that they buy into “safety” or “speed”, and that their choice of courier is a side-effect of that “category in the mind”. A differentiated brand concept gets you there.

𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
Consistent brand marketing generates recognition, which pays off greater and greater dividends over time. You can see this clearly with really big brands: they have the advantage of standing on the shoulders of giants. They can even afford to be quite boring (!) for a while and still generate the recognition they need to continue, because they have the leverage of recognition they’ve accrued in the past. Distinctive brand assets get you there: you must look like you and nobody else but you. If I added “pooh-pooh-peeh-dooh” to the previous sentence, you would immediately recognise the song and make the association with Marilyn Monroe: that's a distinctive brand asset for her.

𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲
Without emotional resonance, none of the branding work you do will forge a memory path in the consumer’s mind. In fact, if you’re competing against a much bigger brand with bigger pockets, emotional resonance is the only leverage you have against them. Creative campaigns get you there: they multiply the value of your work to compete against their big budgets. So, your campaigns must trigger an emotional response. It sounds painfully obvious to point this out, and yet 9 out of 10 brands score a big fat 0 here.

With all three R’s, 𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗤𝗨𝗘 is what you must aim for:

- Aim for 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹 with a uniquely differentiated brand concept.
- Aim for 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 with work that consistently develops your uniquely distinctive brand assets.
- Aim for emotional 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 with uniquely creative work.

Do all three, do it for a while, and soon you’ll find a way for that flywheel to spin, and keep on spinning.

When I was a kid, we used to go swimming five times a week. After swimming, my parents didn’t argue with me about wearing a woolly hat. They didn’t lecture me about ear infections or wind chill or “you’ll thank us when you’re older”. No. They deployed psychological warfare.

They held up two hats. A red one. A blue one. “Which hat do you want to wear today?”

Notice what was missing? The option to say, “Neither, you tyrants”.

The decision was mine, but only within a beautifully curated sandbox of inevitability. I wasn’t choosing whether to wear a hat. I was choosing which colour of hat. Democracy, but make it decorative.

Now, let’s take this parenting masterclass and wander over to the cola battleground, where grown adults on LinkedIn are passionately debating who “won” the latest Pepsi ad featuring the iconic Coca-Cola Polar Bear who defects and chooses Pepsi in a taste test.

Most commentary zooms in on distinctive brand assets, because that’s what Pepsi did. The way I see it, that’s like arguing about where the coin disappeared to when a magician opens their hand. The real game isn’t about distinctiveness, but positioning.

Let’s establish something that shouldn’t require a marketing PhD: Pepsi works best when it plays the challenger. That’s its natural habitat. Ever since the “Pepsi Generation” era back in the 1960s, Pepsi positioned itself as the alternative to the establishment cool of The Coca-Cola Company.

Pepsi is the rebel. It’s been the rebel for so long that it now has a mortgage and mild back pain. Which may be the reason why we forgot it was the rebel. But here’s the irony about being a rebel: a challenger brand cannot exist without a category leader. You can’t be rebellious in a vacuum. If there’s no empire, there’s no rebellion. You’re just… loud.

So, Pepsi needs Coke for its own strategy to make sense.

Now, for the challenger model to thrive, two things need to be true:

1. The cola category must keep growing.

2. Consumers must feel the choice is red hat or blue hat. Pepsi or Coke. NOT some other, new kid on the block.

Because the real threat isn’t Coke. It’s the expanding parade of “better-for-you” alternatives like Poppi and Olipop, and “unhinged” brands like Liquid Death.

From this perspective, the polar bear ad didn’t just poke the Coke. It reinforced the idea that this is still a two-horse race.

So, did Pepsi benefit? Yes. Did Coke benefit too? Also yes. Market leaders quietly enjoy when challengers keep the category culturally relevant. It’s free cardio.

In the end, Pepsi didn’t steal the hat. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to remind everyone the only options are the two hats on the table. And that, my dear brand strategists, is how you keep people’s ears warm.