rawr!
I’m supposed to be writing about brands right now, for Prompts for the Promptless. I have a post that is 90% done, about a game I play in my own mind where I pretend that in an alternate universe, companies are people and people are companies. I imagine strange, wonderful, and frightful possibilities. In the post, I encourage you to blame my parents, for teaching me to equip my mind with a healthy dose of what-ifs. I explain how Russell Brandt would be a Fortune 500 company with space ships circling the towers dedicated to his face, and how Bruce Campbell would have a color scheme that matches a tulip field on the fourth day of fall.
I’m explaining because I don’t intend to post that post.
No particular reason, I just don’t want to finish it. It’s light, it’s formulated, it’s silly, and it’s visual.
It doesn’t match my insides right now. No… right now, my insides are filled with confused text and long-winded vignettes.
There was fire.
I’ve mentioned before how someone once told my mom that my insides were made of fire, and for the last few days, my insides have been recuperating from a fiery storm.
I have a friend who I can only see every so often. When we can sit and talk, I am joyous. When our time together ends, I am sad– like a piece of my heart was ripped away. It inflames my insides, and even when thoughts of cats and parades and bubbles eventually ease the fire– there’s still ashy, smoky residue to deal with for days.
The pain makes me want to not have friends.
A Lesson in Loss Aversion
Loss aversion is something you learn about when studying decision theory and economics.
It refers to the preference of avoiding loss over acquiring gain. In a video game, it means picking the protection spell to use at a later time over a boost of energy. In life, it’s like choosing not to enjoy ice cream because the joy could not possibly offset the sadness of the ice cream that will inevitably melt onto the floor.
The very idea explores the concept that the pursuit of the positive isn’t worth the possibility of the negative– which, of course, is something I do not believe.
But tell that to my brain, will you?
Humanize, Dehumanize
The game I alluded to in the beginning rests on the idea that everyone is already a brand. Companies pay a ridiculous amount of money to marketing firms in order to humanize them, and that humanization process is something we call branding. We are humans, so we are– in ourselves– a brand.
We have color schemes and slogans, even if it’s not immediately apparent to us. Your color scheme is not necessarily the colors you wear. It’s the colors you emote. Your slogan is not necessarily the thing you say most, it’s what people “take away” from a conversation with you.
On that note, my eponymous blog is (to me) a fairly accurate realization of what I would look like as a company. I own precious little green, and I’m so rarely outside that most people wouldn’t associate the color with me logically– but I think if you closed your eyes, and imagined me, you’d arrive at similar color choices. It’s a bit fanciful, a bit overwhelming, a bit vague, a bit ridiculous, a bit practical, and — hopefully– a bit welcoming. My tagline covers all those points.
It misses the bit of me that “feels too much”, though. Sometimes I hesitate to post things that fit in that category. It doesn’t fit the brand and, to me, a reader would be blindsided by it.
Then, of course, I remember that my blog is my blog and it is already, in fact, absolutely littered with my outpourings of emotion.
My readers are troopers! You dance through my emotional rainstorms in a way that would make Gene Kelly envious.
One of my earliest posts (with only 4 likes and no comments) is about my emotional cartwheeling. In that post, I wrote:
But the truth is, for me, the peaks and valleys of my emotional cartwheels usually come at moments of emotional insight and community. And I wouldn’t trade those moments for anything.
Thank goodness I didn’t let fear of brand-dilution keep me from posting that because today, it is exactly what I needed to hear.
I don’t like it here at the bottom of my cartwheel, but I wouldn’t trade the consequences of my community or the source of my insights for a life permanently stationed at the top.
Would you?
_____________________________________________
The best thing about Prompts for the Promptless is that there are no rules! That’s why this post counts. Check out some posts about branding where people were actually able to stay on point:
- The Matticus Kingdom – Classic
- Serendipity – Charter
- This Typing Makes Me Look Busy – Brand Schmand
- Fish of Gold – FOG’s 7 Steps to Marketing Success
- Draliman- A Brand to be Proud Of
And it’s already time for next week’s Prompts for the Promptless, with the theme of Ostranenie. Learn more here: https://thequeencreative.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/for-the-promptless-s-2-e-9-ostranenie
___________________________________________
If you were in an alternate universe where companies were people and people were companies, what color scheme would you be? Does your blog reflect the brand-that-is-innately-you? Do you think the branding of this blog correctly reflects what you find here?
