A friend warned me about the soul-sucking tendencies of some advertising agencies, and it got me thinking about soul-sucking versus soul-pumping projects.
I don’t have good defenses against soul-sucking. I think it’s a consequence of the state of openness I have to be in to do inspired work. I’m ok if the work itself has a soul, because then soul flows into me, instead of the reverse — but when a client is trying to fake a soul and forces everyone to work in a strictly systematic manner without any guidance of meaning, it is soul-killing.
It is a matter of truth and lies. If a brand has a real perspective on truth, we’re free to just say the truth from the brand’s perspective. We can speak from that place, nearly spontaneously, and feel pleasure in seeing things in a new, and sometimes better, way. I’ve tried and seen it for myself: some brands show us new truths.
But if a company’s brand is a big lie it is the same as it is with all lies — whether the lie is a matter of fact or of a whole life — we are forced to pay excessive attention to all the details, keep our story straight, make sure we don’t self-contradict, calculate up the effect of each little detail and make sure it’s properly manipulative. This is the soullessness people feel when they call something “corporate”.
To tell coherent lies is both difficult and exhausting and compromising, and frankly I’m not smart enough to pull it off. I’m spiritually honest partly because I’m too dumb to be spiritually dishonest.
At any rate, lies are not an option for me. I have to look out and see the world according to the brand, and be able to simply say it as I see it, and work with my eyes and intuition wide-open. The world serves as my reference. I don’t have to memorize what the truth is supposed to be.
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Brands are not invented any more than truths are.
But that does not mean they are not collaborative or personal. They are highly personal, but communicable, sharable, truths about value and fact.
The usual language of perspective maps perfectly to what I am saying:
There is a factual state of affairs. It is what it is. We, however, are intellectually mobile. We are situated within a situation, and we play a part in the truth of this situation through our active moving about and looking. We are free to move about and see things from many angles, like photographers. Like photographers we will and should prefer some angles to others because of what they emphasize or reveal. If other people are willing to stand together with us and look out at what we are seeing, they can see what we are seeing for themselves. This sharing of seeing is vision.
But, continuing the photography allusion, if we doctor a photograph, the picture is not an image of truth, but a made-up thing that does not represent reality. You won’t find the truth of a doctored photograph no matter where you stand. It’s just an image. So a vision is not a verbal image, painted in the air arbitrarily for others to imagine. It is a showing — or potential showing — of a new way to actually see things, by someone who has already seen it.
We stand on common ground, seeing from the same point-of-view, the same perspective. And from where we stand, we will naturally approach the situation from the same angle.
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Obviously, there is one purely theoretical “Truth”, represented by innumerable concrete human “truths”. These human truths are all we have, but each must attempt to be as faithful as possible to the one unattainable but indispensable Truth. The faithful (and futile) pursuit of Truth is what separates human truths from lies.
For every human truth there is an infinite number of lies, many of which are told out of innocence. Often the subjective liar does not know subjective truth even exists, and has never developed subjective honesty. Many people equate truth with objectivity, and this can turn truth into a perspectiveless inventory of discrete facts, connected with near-arbitrary spasms of logic, so the whole looks like a cubist nightmare. Or worse, the whole thing can be perfectly consistent and arguable and really come from one perspective, but a perspective where people have to stand on inhuman ground to see it. We cannot care. We are not at home. We adhere to an alienated truth, and our hearts have to be elsewhere.
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We’ve got to learn to discern between human truths and human lies, especially in the subjective realm.
A true brand is the subjective truth of an organization that gives objective truth coherence, relevance and moral meaning.
A bullshit brand is an assertion about an organization that is either not true, or not relevant, or not valuable. People don’t believe it, or they don’t care about believing it. If nobody cares, the brand is bullshit.
A real brand is felt.
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We can’t go on thinking we can invent brands, or assemble brands like machines. True brands are discovered like the personality of a baby or a fact, and developed in some direction or another, hopefully toward even greater truth.