When people ask me what I do, I not-so-jokingly say “I make propaganda you can believe in.” Often, this new acquaintance will proceed to ask me how they can “rebrand” some aspect of their company or personal reputation. Increasingly, I find myself saying that you have to stop thinking about personal or organizational “brand” if you work in anything aside from “thought-leadership” or social media “influencing.”
If you work in banking, healthcare, journalism, higher education, government, or other “institutions” of society which have increasingly suffered from drastically declining rates of trust in recent years, “rebranding” your organization has hit a glass ceiling of utility.
You need to rethink the story of your industry entirely, not just your individual organization. You need to think beyond brand.
It is very hard to think beyond the individualism that contemporary marketing has trained us to think in. Every company has a “brand” story or a “founder journey.” The rise of social media usage in the past 15 years and the institutional wrecking ball that was the 2008 Financial Crisis turned all of us into self-promoting side-hustlers when day jobs proved unstable. These individualized brand stories often work well for consumer goods that promise to reify our identities: this WeWork will help you help save the world, Tom’s shoes will solve poverty, this “clean” makeup will prevent environmental devastation.
Yet the instinct to humanize and individualize everything has caused us to neglect the master stories of how things work, why those things are good, and then why a particular organization services that goal more excellently. Increasingly, conspiracy takes hold: all higher ed is a woke waste of time and debt, all banks are evil globalists, all healthcare companies just want to make money off your body. And not without grains of truth.
Individual brand stories may work for consumer goods but don’t work well for organizations that represent what I call “institutions” — sectors that provide essential services to human flourishing be they education, access to capital, healthcare, or governance. Each bank, school, hospital, pharmaceutical company, or government agency may have their own compelling story of why you should choose them — they care about health, environment, knowledge, utility, diversity, etc. But new questions have emerged: should I trust certain investment firms when they take such profound risks? Should I trust pharmaceutical companies who seem to answer to shareholders more than my well-being? Should I trust hospitals when they seem to care about the bottom line? Should I trust a government agency if it seems more beholden to special interests than average citizens?
We live in a moment where attacks on these institutions aren’t on an individual brands ability to deliver to their consumers and constituents, but on the “first premise” questions of the institutions’ utility as a whole. Is or why is capitalism and global investment good? Why should we have or not have health insurance versus healthcare? What is the point of higher education? Should government agencies exist to regulate us and how are they created? How does it all work?
This is why we have to think beyond brand.
Brand Nostalgia
New York Times columnist Pamela Paul recently reflected on the brands that dominate American storytelling in “The Brand Stories of Our Lives.” New Hollywood shows tell the genesis story of Nike Air Jordan’s, the creation of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos by a Frito-Lays janitor, or how an American hustler got the rights to Tetris out of communist Russia. They all have a kind of nostalgia for a bootstrapped vision of American individual business success.
Paul reflects, “These are stories in which regular people could still make it — and make it big.” Yet these are all in consumer industries — shoes, food, gaming. These are people taking something ordinary and making it extraordinary— often through branding itself.
Individual brand stories, whether its Seventh Generation toilet paper or Dr. Bronner’s soap, take for granted the strong “sector-wide story” of consumer capitalism that legitimates them: that buying something can reaffirm your identity, make you feel part of something bigger or “do well by doing good.” This can work on a daily purchasing level.
For things that may have a more systemic impact on us, telling the “brand story” of your bank, the “founding narrative” of your hospital, the “value of higher education” at your university, or “why to trust this government agency created in the New Deal” just doesn’t necessarily build trust in that individual firm when the entire sector is under attack. James O’Keefe, formerly of Project Veritas “undercover journalism” fame, has gone after “woke education,” Big Media’s coordinated anti-Trump agenda, and welfare agency corruption with his hidden camera “guerrilla journalists.” His stories are not about the value of that particular school, news organization, or government agency, but about education, news, and government as a whole.
No amount of individual brand resuscitation is going to save you when the attacks aren’t on your brand, but on your entire industry, the entire institution.
Stories of overhauling a healthcare system to actually provide for humans, providing news that doesn’t have an “agenda,” making a banking system that isn’t predatory, proving higher education doesn’t have to bankrupt us, or creating a functioning bureaucracy are not American stories we like to tell — if we even have them to tell! These are deep stories we must explore. They also might reveal how we can functionally improve these institutions as whole when we realize the stories we’ve been telling about them may be inauthentic or untrue.
In many cases, a bank, an insurance company, a hospital, a newspaper, or a government doesn’t need to detail their own individual stories or value systems, as their marketing or communications departments are trained to do. These institutions need to tell a story about capitalism, health, news publishing, or democracy itself which goes far beyond individual storytelling about an organization’s impact on the economy, ESG, DEI, healthcare outcomes, objectivity, or “results” from a niche government initiative. It goes against the grain of contemporary marketing which has tried to “personalize” very large organizations and their leadership.
This effort requires a sector-wide collaboration in retelling what capitalism is or should be, the point of national healthcare, and why government bureaucracy is a good thing — if we even believe in those things at all anymore.
We need to tell the story of institutions and why they matter—not just the individual organizations that compose that sector.
Advice on Returning to Institutionality
So what should individual organizations do when they find themselves attacked for being “woke” or part of some kind of “global conspiracy” or part of “the deep state?” The trick is to think not as an individual firm— heretical I know— but as an institutional collective.
Get real. Look in the mirror. Is there some truth to this story or attack? Are you screwing over your customers in some way for the sake of profit? Be honest. Don’t take for granted that institutions can and do collapse under the weight of their own greed or misdirection. Yours can too. Maybe it should.
How does the common man think your institution works? What is the "deep story” about how insurance works? Investments? Regulation? Education? Do people think its just one big money making endeavor? Or is there other kinds of value being created?
Work together. While you may be competitive in every other way, you must talk to the leadership of other firms, schools, groups that also offer services in your industry. Is there a collective story there? They are likely having the same story problem despite throwing all the resourcing of contemporary marketing at it.
Tell a master story, not of your brand. How does modern capitalism actually work? How does healthcare work and is it just insurance? How does a regulation become a regulation? What is the point of higher education, even if it is world class, if it keeps you in a lifelong debtors prison? People want to make sense of an increasingly complex world more than they want to know about your new DEI initiative.
On a personal note, I find that many institutions have been hopelessly caught up in turning everything into capital when there is and should be limits to capitalizing certain kinds of value. Certain things have value that cannot be monetized, but are essential to the creation of capital. Workers must be healthy in order to create capital. Investment funds can only create value for the top 1% for so long before money basically seems to be as invented as monopoly money. Regulation needs to save people from predatory industries who put shareholder value over human value (looking at pharmaceuticals, big agriculture, and pesticides!) — lest people fall into cultural and physical despair.
So go out, young marketing executive, CMO, or CEO, and think beyond brand. Think grand historically. Think big.
Conspiracy is an attempt to flatten complexity so we can live in an increasingly complex world without losing our minds. Can you create a better and truer story before the conspiracists do?