Written by John Perich
Photo: © Depositphotos.com/michaklootwijk
“What,” I asked, “are brands?”
It was a rhetorical question and my audience knew it. I stood at the head of the glossy conference table, my blazer vibrating imperceptibly, and squinted against the late afternoon sun. The men and women seated before me, in levels of comfort and attentiveness inverse to their rank, looked at me, or past me, politely. I let the moment breathe before continuing.
“You are the executives of a consumer-packaged goods company.” Again, a rhetorical device: telling the room something it already knew. “You each focus on a business need required to deliver products to retail and to capitalize on their success. You each contribute to the company’s revenue in a distinct way. It would be impossible for you …”—Marketing Strategy, yoga-fit and unsmiling—” … to do your job …”—Supply Chain, with the build and features of a pile of Legos—” … or for you to do yours.”—Human Resources, a nimbus cloud in a fuchsia jacket. “You are not interchangeable parts.”
I had captured half the room now. The buzzing within me ramped up one notch.
“And so, because of your compartmentalization, because of the sheer Babylonian scale of your enterprise, your success is not entirely in your hands. Your fortunes rise and fall with the fortunes of a company that could crush you in its sleep, were it given legs and urges. You need it more than it needs you.”
One of the younger executives in the back—a vice-president, reclining in muted cynicism; probably one of those English majors who found himself in middle management in his late thirties and kept his faith by thinking himself above it—recognized the shades beneath my tone. The rest of the audience nodded or held fingers to philtrums, deep in thought, perhaps only subconsciously registering that something was off. A cop siren dopplered through the street twenty floors below.
“With all these disparate roles, how does a company such as yours march in one direction? How do you distinguish? How do you signify?” Another pregnant pause. I raised a finger theatrically, careful not to jostle the contents of my sleeve. “Through stories. A brand is a story that a company tells to the world.”
They got it. The earlier suspicions melted. This was something they recognized.
“What are some examples of stories? What are the types of stories that resonate?” Hands shot up. I gestured to one.
“Man versus nature!”
I nodded, and pointed to another volunteer.
“The heroine maintains her virtue and is rewarded through supernatural means to triumph over circumstance and her enemies!”
“Excellent, a classic. What else?”
“Like—there’s this image? An object, maybe? Like, something commonplace and innocent? But it stands for a lost innocence in turn, you know? So, by contemplating the object, we’re cast on this whirlwind of nostalgia that forces us to … right?”
“Perfect. Give me one more.”
“Iron Eagle 2.”
I nodded again. “Timeless stories, all. They have a cadence and tone that everyone in the West recognizes. They are the stories that tell us how to act and what to value. And a brand is that story.”
I advanced the Power Point presentation, which had remained on its first slide—a glistening, near-anatomical closeup of a scarab beetle—for the last few minutes. Slide two was a collage: young people smiling; old people sitting on a porch rocker holding glass bottles; a family at a preternaturally clean fast-food restaurant; the white cursive logo on the red background; the macro shot of fizzing caramel cola and bobbing ice cube floes.
“A brand we know.” I paused long enough to let the slower folks in the room figure it out. “Who wouldn’t kill to have that level of brand recognition? To have one’s work associated so closely with friends, peace, family, love, nostalgia, freedom? To be such a semiotic shortcut in the brains of millions of humans that it became the instinctive choice—a reflex, like blessing someone after a sneeze—when ordering soda?”
The buzzing within had spiked at the word kill and I talked longer to drown it out.
“You tell the story enough times and it becomes a shortcut, a synecdoche, for a whole host of experiences.” I meandered to the window, twisting the shades closed. “Cinderella. The Brave Little Tailor. The loaves and the fishes. The sailor kissing the girl on V-J day. A brand can have that level of cachet, too, in the hands of the right storyteller.”
With the shades drawn, the room fell into a drowsy afternoon sienna tone. I advanced to the third and final slide: a chalk outline on pavement, spattered in blood.
“There is no more powerful story in the West, or any culture, than murder.”
And the moment was nearly ruined, almost totally, by that smirking English major VP, who raised his hand. “What about … you know?” He gestured with his fingers.
I stapled on a fake smile, close-lipped, and conceded. “Fucking can be powerful as well, no argument. But even within sex, at least as it exists in stories, there are the elements of murder. Think about it: the deceptive approach. Drawing one’s intended away from witnesses. Finding the vulnerable areas. The struggle of flesh on flesh. The release. The stillness.”
Some murmuring and shifting in seats from the rest of the crowd. Maybe they hadn’t expected me to go there, but some of them felt rewarded by it, and those who didn’t acted as if they had. The mandate had been to Reinvent The Brand, so they’d contacted a hip, edgy agency, capable of pushing the envelope. I could almost hear their thoughts in the muggy afternoon air: this is how the cool people talk. We’re okay with this.
The English major nodded. “The French actually call the orgasm le petit mort, or ‘the little—'”
I plowed on. “Murder is the most powerful story in the human catalog. The ending of a life. The ultimate transgression against the social order. We fear it, but we’re fascinated by it. We want to approach the edge of the unknowable without tripping in. Bookstores are packed with murder mysteries and tales of true crime. Every local news broadcast leads with tales of killing. We consume and recount the stories of murder because we think we can master death thereby.”
Supply Chain raised his hand. I didn’t mind. At this point I had them. “What,” he asked, “does this have to do with our brand?”
And here I couldn’t help but smile, perhaps a bit too wide, but the buzzing was almost overwhelming. “What if a brand could tell the most affecting story we know—the story of death? The story of murder. The story of helplessness in the face of violence, of an innocent’s ambitions being brought to a climax and then dashed in blood. What if people used a brand as a mental shorthand for chaos and ruined lives, for senseless killing and wanton destruction?”
“Used it as a weapon?” asked the HR executive.
“Thought of it in the same way as we think of weapons. Thought of it as a threat in the wrong hands, or as justice in the hands of the righteous. The life-taker, the blood-letter, the ender-of-days. Any agency can get a brand to resonate, to tell a story. I’m talking about getting a brand to resonate with the oldest and most powerful story there is: a story that stops any audience in its tracks and compels their attention. They will never look away. They will never put it aside.”
Dead silence. The executives glanced at me, at each other, at the clock on the wall, at the last slide of the presentation.
Marketing spoke first. “You’ve certainly given us a lot to consider. We appreciate you coming in, especially on such short notice, and putting this presentation together. I think—and I don’t want to speak for the whole room—I think we were expecting something that spoke more to the unique challenges our line of household cleaners faces in an increasingly environmentally conscious market, especially considering …”
She trailed off as her eyes registered my grin, now too wide to be contained. She knew, in that primal way that precedes language, there was something to fear.
“I apologize for the misunderstanding.” I took my place at the head of the conference table once more. The buzzing was deafening, but perhaps only to me. “You’re not the client here. You’re the creative.”
And I opened my blazer and spread my arms, and they poured out in their countless swarms, slicing through the air with wings like razors, wings that divided space from space, chittering and relentless, the scarabs whose hunger could never be sated, filling the room like smoke, from the darkened windows to the locked doors, feasting, frightening, recounting the one story they knew, the only story ever told.
***