The past six months have been rather concerning to me. In the context of the project, now in its fifth year, I have spent this time thinking about our branding.
Issue 1: Our business strategy is to compete against an industry, not against individual firms in that industry. As a small, so-called 'independent', business, we leverage on exceptionally loud and cutting branding in rather textbook fashion. This has become more important over the years, as we have adapted to the internal weaknesses of:
Issue 2: cash crunch (also textbook),
Issue 3: management being banned from 'social media and other media outlets' (surprisingly un-textbook, given how by the book everything else is; but unsurprisingly, due to internal dispute). Then again, indie-brands are supposed to innovate by discovering myths which are non-canonical, or low-beta, I suppose, so maybe we are still rolling by the book.
One of the conversations that came up in 2018 or so, was a question from a friend about how much of the corporate brand is its own identity, and how much of the corporate brand is my own, as its primary operator.
In 2019, we acquired a weak staff member, and I directed the rest of the team to consolidate its efforts around repairing this member. Meanwhile, I did not apply any higher priorities to the team, as I evaluated that their primary competitive concern was to assimilate the new staff, or to eject them. So I had a bit of extra time this year to improve my own personal physiological, social, and home economic disciplines, and a bit more time to reflect on work without involving the rest of the team.
Partly, I thought about my friend's question. Here's what I think so far.
Our core (B2C) brand, and accents are:
- infrastructure as a service (high availability)
- function defines form (per price point: value-for-money over absolute quality)
- ultra-capitalism (to the point of dada)
- brutalist visual aesthetics (active un-foo-foo-ing)
Expressions of the above include:
- hashgame: #workharder #workharder247 #weworkharder #alwayson
- print copy: 'work, die, repeat', 'ordinary food/coffee/endings'
(The B2B brand and overall operations are mainly still under R&D, so I shall not comment on that here.)
With regards to my friend's question, I asked myself if I live differently from the brand. And the frank answer is, I think the brand is supposed to be meaner than I am. (Let's not associate being a nice person as being a good thing - I'd like to absolve myself of moral responsibility regarding normative comments on that aesthetic for the purpose of this discussion.) The corporate brand is supposed to be hyperbolic.
As I paid a bit more attention to my health and personal organisation over the past few months, I didn't ever feel that I was getting enough done at the office. I don't actually work very hard, in some months of the project - though in other months I might be working nearly all the time. So I think my personal brand is a lot more balanced (not-so-dada) in terms of messaging, than the corporate brand as I designed it. Moreover, while the corporate brand is very talky about being ordinary, I personally am generally talky about how weird I am... and about how weird my work is. So again, I think my own brand values diverge from those of the corporation as I have designed it.
Businesses are by definition vehicles. In this case, the vehicle has to drive more safely than I am used to running, but it is supposed to drive a lot faster.
Anyway, to cut this short, it's been six months of paying a bit more attention to my wellness, and I'm afraid that my corporation has suffered for it. So hopefully the gains I have made in shoring up my personal health and household, will now translate to more resources for me to funnel into the construction of office work over the next six months. I really do need to remind myself on a daily basis for a few weeks to #workharder.
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