Brand building.
Initiating a movement.
Starting a revolution.
Each of these is a cousin of the same gene pool. And each is an act of (brilliant) defiance.
This is the subject of this week’s new One Minute Wednesday.
The History of Brand Building
Let’s look at history (and for each of these creators, movements, and visionaries listed below, they created a brand in the bigger scheme of things):
- Picasso defied traditional approaches to art, anatomy, and form.
- Cubism defied “mathematical reason” in perspective.
- The Beatles defied the convention that “guitar music was on its way out.”
- Van Gogh defied conventional approaches to painting technique, color, and how we view the world.
- Quentin Tarantino defied the tradition of storytelling sequence in Pulp Fiction.
- Martin Luther King defied the rationale that human history must dictate the potential of the future.
- Andy Warhol defied all norms and built an art empire on a foundation of soup cans.
- Motown defied any music precedence to introduce a new category of popular soul music that defined generations to come.
- Steve Jobs defied the perception that graphical user interfaces were unnecessary.
- Miles Davis defied convention and broke the rules of jazz before they were known to be rules.
- Celebrated architect Frank Gehry defies predictable architectural practices in order to introduce beauty in the world.
7 Steps to Defiance, Brand Building, and Rebranding (or Confessions of a Curious Mind)
- Find some product or service that “must be done that way.”
- Discover if there is, in fact, a better way.
- Test out that better way.
- Confirm or refine your suspicions
- Share this discovery with the world.
- Connect with other suspicious minds.
- Spread the word.
That’s defiance in a nutshell. It applies to branding, to rebranding, and to startups.
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Hello world. Here we come. 😉
