America Needs Our Re-Branding Effort, Starting Today
After the election, it certainly became clear (if it hadn’t been already) that America needs to re-unite behind some essential commitment or promise that we all can share.
So I quickly dove into an on-line series that appeared this week in which the editors of Fast Company asked a small team at ad agency Wieden+Kennedy to propose a new American brand or, perhaps more accurately, a re-brand of America that might work for the vast majority of us. The assignment began with a basic truth: before you try to sell something, you need to understand the essence of what you’re selling. So the team wondered: what is the essential truth about America that more, if not all of us can embrace as we move forward? If we could figure out that defining promise, maybe we could re-build a house that we'd all be comfortable sharing on top of it.
I’ll get to the ingenious Wieden+Kennedy proposal after a related back-story about my book.
Some years ago, when I was trying to put into words the essence of the book I had in mind, I had the good fortune to go through a branding exercise. What exactly was my book about and what would it bring to readers that they should want to know more about and weren’t getting elsewhere?
Several basics that I’m still building on came out of that exercise. What we initially conceived as a Twitter handle (@worklifereward) became the first part of the book’s title: Work Life Reward: the Call & Response of a Good Life at Work. We altered the familiar notion of work-life-balance and swaped in the idea of reward because it asked: what (besides a paycheck or a change of scenery or workplace companionship) are we looking for when we go to work? For readers who’d say it’s the sense that what we're doing everyday matters to us and to others, I wanted to explore the way that readers could go about obtaining a reward like that one on a fairly regular basis.
The notion of declaring what’s important to you through your actions at work seemed essential. Also: how what you value most is not a rational choice but a by-product of your head (thinking) and your heart (feeling) as well as your heredity (nature) and environment (nurture). That means "understanding where you’re coming from and want to go" is also key to doing rewarding work.
From this vantage point, it seemed that the pursuit of worthwhile work could be reduced to a few words:
The root is understanding where you come from. You rise to the occasion when you care enough about your on-going priorities to declare yourself through the work that you do. You go home to process and to replenish after work today before returning to it again tomorrow. The Call & Response in the book title is an attempt to capture that cycle in the continuous back and forth that you're having with yourself and with others, both at work and outside of it. When complemented by personal stories, those are the relatively few ideas and words—the essential promise as well as the brand—that readers will be responding to when they decide to read or to buy my book.
Re-branding America also involves identifying an objective or promise that its stakeholders could accept. Simply described, what flag could most (if not all of us) rally around again so we can move forward more effectively?
This is how Fast Companydescribedthe challenge, or what it called “the Brief” for America’s re-branding that it gave the team at Weiden+Kennedy:
“America was never perfect. But historically it’s been this country’s push for progress both culturally and technologically that has instilled in many a pride of being here, or a drive to become a part of it.
“Over the last number of years, issues that have long been a challenge have either been made worse or hit a breaking point—racism, income inequality, voting rights, political division, and the fragility of democracy, among others—that collectively have significantly diminished the American brand.
“We need a rebrand. How do we not only engage and enlighten our audience to once again see the promise of the American brand, but inspire them to help build it?
“We want to reach Americans of all ages, with a particular emphasis on young people who are losing hope in the future, but also older generations who feel like something has been lost.
“Because so much of our talent and power comes from immigration and global partnerships, we also want something that can resonate with the rest of the world.
That said, we’re not here to engage in both sides-isms. Climate change is real. Inequality is real. Black Lives Matter. But we need a message that can resonate beyond preaching to the choir.”
The ad team saw the challenge ahead of them as two-fold: to get Americans to recognize that there was indeed a promise worth realizing in our shared future and then to inspire all of us to realize it.
Beneath all of the lofty notions and the blizzard of words that attempt to define who we are as a people and what we’re supposed to want, the team concluded that America aims to deliver on one core promise: “It’s the place where the most number of people have the greatest chance to reach their full potential.” Of all the countries in the world, America provides the most equal opportunity, the most level playing field, to better yourself.
Of course, the equal opportunity numbers in America are far from what they should be, but that discrepancy doesn’t mean it’s the wrong, unifying promise. Three years ago, I posted findings from Angus Deaton and Anne Case that the white working class is barely surviving in one America while their college-educated counterparts have at least of fighting chance to make it in the other America. Deaton and Case argued from the data that working class Americans simply “don’t have standing in the labor market anymore.” I think at least some of the red/blue divide in the recent election is because of these Two Americas. It follows that expanding opportunity—or everyone's standing to pursue the American dream—could help to reduce this toxic divide.
On this page, I’ve also argued that essential workers like home health workers and drivers responding to medical emergencies often lack the most basic job benefits, like (incredibly) health insurance. The ad-agency team adds other troubling statistics to underscore our divisions. Nevertheless, solid majorities of Americans continue to want not the greater equality of its workers and other citizens (or that we should start robbing the rich to pay the poor), but that there needs to be far greater equality of opportunity for everyone who wants it than there is today. Make it possible for me to pursue a living wage and a reasonable safety net around my work!
So if equality of opportunity is America’s touchstone, how do we turn it from a slogan into something that more of us can actually experience? In wonderful ad-speak, the team from Weiden+Kennedy says: “For this promise to have an impact, it needs to infuse every brand touchpoint,” which they define as all of America’s “packaging, public relations, advertising, services, partnerships, social responsibility, HR & recruitment, loyalty programs, events & activations, user experience, sourcing & standards, and product portfolios.” In other words, in every area where America (through its government and other institutions) touches American life, it would need to start walking the equality-of-opportunity walk.
To incentivize us, the ad team would appeal to our competitive streak. Both tongue in-cheek and dead serious, they propose an Olympics type competition where random citizens are identified and then rewarded by how they’d rank against other countries’ randomly chosen citizens in “math, literacy, science, poverty [and] happiness.” In other words, with the random selection of contestants, every American would need to have the best chance we can provide for them "to win the gold" in each competition.
“In order to succeed, we’d need to turn our entire country into the equivalent of the Olympic Training Center in Colorado.
“We’ll have to invest in education in order to make sure that all of our teachers are [Blue Devils basketball] Coach K-level good.
“Every single citizen needs to be [as] ready to step in as our good-at-everything [Olympic team gymnast] Kerri Strugs.
“Just think of the partnership opportunities.
“Big sports teams could make some sick mathalete uniforms.
“Mattel could turn all the events into toys.
“And a Wheaties box with a STEM champ on it. Come on.
“Oh, and the TV ratings? Insane.
“Just imagine the American flag rising, anthem bumping, right after some kid from Nebraska [or North Philadelphia] takes the gold in the literacy event!
USA! USA! USA! USA!”
At this point, America will finally have proven that we treasure what we measure, that we’ve undertaken the common effort of raising all boats, and that every single American now, all 330+ million of us, has a least a chance to succeed in this country and help it to become a source of wonder in the world.
You can see more of the ad-teams suggestions by following the link above, but you get their point and might even have felt some of the excitement they’ve tried to generate in their proposal.
Of course, you could quibble with details in this branding effort. Maybe an additional priority with STEM should be the ability to demonstrate vocational skills. Or the state of being we should aspire to might be “contentment” or “empowerment” instead of “happiness.” But again, these are quibbles. If there were greater equality of opportunity, imagine how solvable all our other economic and social problems would seem and how optimistic we'd be when confronting them. We’d be more confident individually and together, and less resentful, bitter and mad about all the chances we didn’t have.
There’s another benefit to a branding effort too, whether it involves a country or a book. Reducing the “product” to its essential promise provides an organizing principle and a lodestar; you’ve set your priority, can navigate accordingly and always measure the progress that you're making. That sort of clarity is indispensible to any "product's" hopeful future.
We Americans need confirm the essential promise of our way of life by having a re-branding discussion, and we need to start that discussion today.
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For those of you who are celebrating Thanksgiving, enjoy the holiday this week. I’ll see you all again next Sunday.
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