Curated thoughts. Updated when something deserves it.
“We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.”
Anais Nin, attributed.
Every brand discovery process I run confirms this. The CEO is convinced the brand is one thing. The CMO sees it as another. Customers experience a third. Nobody is wrong. They are reading the same brand from different lives. Strategy starts here, in the gap between what people see.
Most positioning fails not because it is wrong, but because the company never lived it. A positioning is not a sentence. It is a discipline. The first hire after a rebrand should be someone who can defend the new sentences when the old ones try to come back.
[Video. Iceland, August 2017. Aerial shot of a glacier melting into the sea, recorded with a Mavic Pro.]
I flew over this for ninety seconds and what struck me was not the scale, but the quietness. Big change tends to look loud in slides. In real life, the biggest things move silently. I think about this every time a brief asks for “disruption.”