We believe every great brand is a spiritual experience. A movement. A brand is the only place in business where your inner world is experienced by the outer world. For too long, we have accepted the belief that these worlds are supposed to be separate. We say no. When these worlds are kept separate, dissonance occurs. Identity crises emerge. Leaders drift from the mission. Employees feel ...
You Don’t Need a Marketing Agency
By Emily Soccorsy + Justin Foster Small business owners are in a bit of a conundrum when it comes to marketing. You can either do it yourself or bring in a marketing agency. Let’s be real. Doing marketing yourself is not an option. Even if you enjoy it, there’s too much. Contemporary branding and marketing is not something you do in the seams and creases of running a business. A marketing ...
What is your brand’s MLE (minimum level of excellence)?
By Emily Soccorsy and Justin Foster A brand is an organic, living thing. It is both a practice and a discipline. And yet there is also a baseline, or minimum, level of organic environmental excellence to create for your brand to grow and thrive. Without this brand primordial soup, you may inadvertently stunt the growth of your brand and reduce its vibrancy and reach. Most people begin ...
3 Corporate Habits that Will Crush Your Entrepreneurial Spirit
We heart entrepreneurial people. We heart them wherever they may be, and whenever they might find us. In the last year, we’ve seen an increasing number of what we term ATLs, or “about-to-launch,” folks who have finally found the corporate structure too oppressive to their souls to abide any longer. As they prepare their escape, they reach out to us. We meet at the junction and help ...
Know Thyself: A 21st Century Branding Principle
One of the most surprising moments of a Root Session is when our beloved client has the realization their brand was already inside of them. We did not tell them what their brand is. They discovered it. How is this possible? It’s been taught that branding is an external thing. Something you want to be, some construct you build, one aspirational and slightly delusional brick at a time. The ...
A Very Different Kind of New Year’s Resolution…
New Year's resolutions are lame. For the most part, anyway. They are generally some in-the-moment super important idea abandoned as quickly as a battery-less toy on Christmas morning. But setting resolutions is fun! At least for self-improvement nerds like us. In looking back over more than 25 Root Sessions, 15 presentations, four BrandLabs, three Synthesis episodes, buckets of ...
What does culture have to do with brand?
We are five years into the Human Age. In the 21st century, leaders must go beyond taking care of their people to embodying a new level of caring for people. Taking care of your people is a minimum requirement - compensation, benefits, work environment. And even in the Human Age economy, there are still plenty of places to work that are sweatshops and boiler rooms - just with healthy food, ...
How do I monetize my talents?
Hurray! You’ve realized we’re not just nutty spiritualists waiting for the clouds to part and money to fall like a tender rain. We are unabashed capitalists. Free marketeers. Supporters of entrepreneurism. With heart. Lots of heart. But at the end of the day, money is one of the spiritual forces of this universe -- constructed by the force, enormity and insistence of the will of human ...
I’m ready to tell my story. Where do I start?
First, congratulations to you. You’ve discovered the work that’s behind you is not the work that’s in front of you. It’s not your life’s work. It’s not what lies at the center of your heart. It is not the impact you want to make. And now you’ve decided the time has come to redress the balance and spend your resources on realizing a new direction. It took a lot of work to get here. ...
How do we create a market position?
Editor’s Note: As we move into the last two seasons of the year, we are answering questions people have repeatedly asked us about branding and marketing. Like “authenticity,” “story” and the term “branding” itself, the concept of having a “market position” is one that causes business folks to lick their lips and lean in precipitously. Most brands attempt some variation of a positioning ...