We are living in revolutionary times. Just like the printing revolution and the industrial revolution before us, our current digital revolution is completely transforming our society. In many ways it’s only just begun, but already we are witnessing the old pillars of mass media, big business and centralized government crumbling around us. We don’t know exactly where it is going but we do know that things will never be the same.
And new brands are at the heart of this revolution, taking down the old power structures with Weapons of Mass Disruption (WMD).
Last century, mass media was the conventional weapon of choice for big business and government. It gave rise to the mega-brands of the 20th century. The brands with the money, the power and the connections won.
Today, those conventional weapons can still pack a punch, but they are no match for a WMD. And anyone with a good idea can build one – at a fraction of the cost of conventional weaponry.
A WMD, is made up of three things:
Ideas, technology, communication.
Where these three things intersect is where all the interesting stuff is happening today – great ideas powered by digital technology and communicated peer to peer. It’s totally flipped the paradigm.
But the real reason these new brands connect so explosively lies a little deeper, at the very heart of brand.
Now, a brand is nothing more and nothing less than the feeling you have for an entity beyond the commercial transaction.
That’s it – it’s just the feeling.
How we feel about something comes from a combination of nature (the innate, biological behavioral programming of our species) and nurture (the prevailing attitudes of the society we grow up in).
Last century, we were nurtured by mass media. We were trained to desire brands that were no good for our health or our planet, to exalt style over substance. And the mega brands we lusted after brought with them mega production, mega pollution, environmental degradation, climate change, sweatshops, massive global inequality, ideological wars, genocide, and a spiraling depression and suicide rate.
Our ‘nurture’ was out of sync with our ‘nature’.
Our nature tells us that we are a social species – we intuitively know that we do better when our cohort does better. But the mega brands were in it for themselves, creating an obscene division between rich and poor – where the world’s richest 85 people now hold as much wealth as the poorest 3.5billion people on the planet.
No wonder we were ready for a change. The digital revolution is giving us the chance to evolve our culture into something better.
And at the core of a WMD is a rare, unstable and supercharged latent energy waiting to be released.
In a thermonuclear WMD it is Uranium.
In new brands of the new economy, our ‘Uranium’ is Creativity.
Creativity should be at the core of your business, of your brand. It’s not some sideline activity. It drives everything forward. It has since the dawn of time.
Our Creative Human Spirit is the defining feature of our species.
Building brands that are in sync with our creative human spirit is the key to our future. For the sake of humanity, for the sake of the planet and every species on it, it is incumbent on all of us to tear apart industries built on greed, power and deception and make things better.
The power to build explosive brands is now in your hands. Use your WMDs to build brands that are good for humanity and good for the planet, and you will stand out like The Proverbials.