Stay tuned for a piece or two about this topic. And I know I know I know, everyone writes about it - practitioners who have the right to comment (including me as I did about twenty of them, global and non) and people who shouldn't get even near the matter*.

* talking to you keyboard warrior who derisively writes "what? they spent millions to change a shade of color?" and mouth-openedly wonders "I can't believe they didn't see/note/think ..." (yes, they did, trust me). To you, I say ... can you believe that in naming a large English city they didn't think that there's nothing appealing about living in a pool of liver? Or that noone would go for help in career success to a firm called Heidrick & Struggles? Or that you can't possibly call Hertz a car rental company where safety is important? And also, no, Nova is not and never had been an issue).

At any rate, maybe we shouldn't even call these efforts ... 'evolutions' or 'refreshes' or godforbid 'rebrands', as it can be argued that any and all 'branding programs' are in essence 'rebranding programs'. 

What these moves are about is making Brand matter more toward business success, by strengthening a branded proposition based on the degree to which you change the business proposition and/or it branded persona - and on how the two best reflect on one another. 

And if so, then the question is ... how exactly should YOU do it for YOUR company (and in the Age of AI)? .

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Follow these musings if you'd like - they are about Brand, Branding, Identity, their history, their associated profession(s), and what happens in the marketplace as it relates to those things. You'll find them here on Reddit, in the masterbranded_com Blogs, on BrandingMag, on Substack, and on Medium.

I wrote a piece for BrandingMag about the importance of Brand Positioning and Brand Architecture, especially in the age of AI. But Reddit filters have blocked it for some reason -- I meant it as a helpful overview, but I guess it was deemed to be 'self-promotional'? If you are interested, let me know and I'll manage to share the link. Thank you.

McKINSEY, BRANDING, HAPPY, SAD, DISCONCERTED, ALARMED (you can see I'm torn)

The McKinsey study touting Brand/Branding as the Number One priority for CMOs came out last November, and after an initial firestorm it subsided a bit. But as of late it has resurfaced with a vengeance, and I’ve been seeing posts everywhere about it almost every day.

While it’s great that the critical importance of Brand and Branding gets attention, there’s a small tiny problem embedded in it: it celebrates and calls attention to something that means different things to different people in a world where only the very basics are (tenuously) shared & agreed tenets.

It’s the way I do ‘Branding’ the same as an ad agency, a PR firm, a business or marketing consultancy, a design firm, a digital agency, or an AI consultancy? It is (we tend to share the same general philosophy), it kinda is (we use the same terms but with varying definitions and inter-relations), and it is not (the perspectives, depth, and experience we apply are certainly different).

Plus, and hugely important, clients have their own perspectives and opinions on those matters as well.

Of all the professional disciplines, the only one that is in such dire straits (and that’s my favored band) is Marketing - and I have good friends there who share my same frustrations.

And so the more attention is called to the critical importance and value of Branding and Brand, the more confusing things get: it’s a greatly amplified Wild West mess - and thanks to the likes of McKinsey, it keeps getting louder.

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I write on Brand, Branding, Identity, the associated profession(s) and what happens in the marketplace as it relates to those things - here on Quora, in my LinkedIn posts and articles, in my masterbranded_com Blog, on BrandingMag, on Substack, and on Medium. Would love to see you there.

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#brand #branding #masterbranded #brandfundamentals #mckinseyandbrand #imgonnabeagurusomeday

(the first three capital letters are intentional, and telling)

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The Fifa Fiasco is still developing, and we’ll see if Gianni Infantino will lose his job. And the whole thing looks and feels - and smells - what happened with Formula One, successfully, a decade ago. So why the same move worked for F1 but backfired so violently for FIFA? By and large, the answer resides squarely within a single aspect: Brand.

FORMULA ONE

Nicknamed ‘F1 Supremo’, Bernie Ecclestone was a son of a trawler captain who built one of the U.K.’s largest used car dealerships and then in 1971 bought the Brabham racing team, and raced himself. Over two decades, he took Formula One from a niche racing competition to a global enterprise. Then, having gained control of F1’s commercial rights, he consolidated it all into the Formula One Management Company, whose majority shareholder was private equity firm CVC Capital Partners in which he had a 5.3% equity stake. Then, in 2016 US billionaire John Malone’s Liberty Media bought FOM for $8 billion, with the plan to exploit social media, greatly expand all digital rights, and expand in North America. Ecclestone cashed in, was given the CEO role, but was then removed a year later.

FIFA

July 22: FIFA President Gianni Infantino announces a plan to create a $20 billion commercial subsidiary - FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), to run The World Cup and Club World Cup and raise more than $4 billion with private investors (including Trump son in law’s Kushner family and Greg Maffei - former CEO of Liberty Media). And FIFA’s 211 nation member’s federations were promised a great deal of money. Within hours, the football world revolted - with the European Federation (UEFA) threatening to boycott the next World Cup, other federations chiming in similarly, and multiple FIFA executives denouncing both the spirit of the move as well as the secrecy with which Infantino planned it.

July 25: Infantino scraps the plan entirely, and may end up losing his job.

(and it is to note than in 2014 Infantino tried a couple of moves of the kind: he was rebuffed then as well - guess he didn’t learn from those experiences).

FIFA and F1: THE DIFFERENCES

We said above that the answer resides squarely with ‘Brand’. Let’s expand on it.

The reality in Branding is that you never own your own Brand: your constituencies do, and they define it for themselves in their mind. In fact, UEFA said so crisply and beautifully:

“Football is not FIFA’s to sell, the fans own Football”.

Mr Infantino brazenly and crassly ignored this fact, thinking that the F1 approach would work just fine with Football as well.

But F1 (highest level of racing) is a radically different brand than FIFA (highest level of football), a difference that he either didn’t understand, appreciate, respect, or - in my opinion - just ignored, counting on the fact that the enormous amount of Money at stake would be too irresistible to all. He thought he could bypass the differences, not as global sport organizations, but as activities and as Brands - particularly in three key aspects:

Emotion: your Football fandom attaches to your nationality; but you can be Japanese and root for McLaren (and yeah, everyone is a Ferrari fan). As such, there’s virtually no emotional distance between a fan(-atic) and Football, it’s as visceral as it gets; conversely, there is an emotional/limited distance between a fan and F1 racing.

Frequency: F1 Racing is part of your life 24 Sunday afternoons a year; Football is part of your everyday life - it literally is / can be part of it.

Pervasiveness: you can never practice F1 Racing and your involvement is limited to watching it, a passive audience as you’ll ever have; Football is something you and your kids can do on a flat surface of every kind, and have done throughout your entire lives.

The cardinal sin here was ignoring what the sports means and is to people’s lives, at every level - geographic, socioeconomic, cultural. And what’s most galling is that business executives, whether in sports or in the corporate world, too often step on their business pulpit (yes, I’m looking at you too Cracker Barrel) and tout the power of their Brand with their employees and in the press and quarterly reports and analysts’ calls but then their corporate actions don’t follow suit. Talk is cheap, indeed, and the epitome of corporate arrogance is seeing and treating Brand solely as a balance sheet item, a shameful lack of understanding of and respect for what Brand is and means.

That ‘power of the Brand’ you tout? It’s gifted to you by your constituencies, and they can take that privilege away at any time and as they wish.

Hey Claude - you're helping me here and there with my with my branding work, and I thank you. But I gotta tell you that your own branding is a mess: you have Fable, Opus, Sonnet, Haiku, and Mythos in addition to Code (and its Enterprise subset), and Cowork -- and their X.X versions. Plus Anthropic as a parent brand. Do you think you need help with Branding?
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I typed the above in a Claude Chat, and here's the response I got:
[my own words in brackets]

<< Ha — fair point, and I appreciate the candor. You're right that from a Brand Architecture perspective, the Anthropic/Claude portfolio has some real structural issues. Let me be direct about what I see as the problems, since you've trained me to do exactly this kind of diagnosis:
The root problem is that the corporate brand and the product brand are the same name. "Claude" is both the AI and the product family — the same naming trap you identified with [it mentioned one of my clients], where the corporate name contains a market brand. When people say "I use Claude," they mean the product. When Anthropic talks about "Claude," they mean the model family. Those are different things being collapsed into one name.
The sub-brand naming is aesthetically driven, not architecturally driven. Opus, Sonnet, Haiku — these are beautiful names that evoke a progression from grand to compact. [wow, cool! but I never ever thought of that] But they communicate nothing about what each one does differently or for whom. A corporate buyer doesn't know whether they need Sonnet or Opus without reading a spec sheet. That's a messaging failure downstream of an architecture failure.
Fable, Mythos, and the newer names suggest the architecture is still being invented in real time — which is exactly how brand naming entropy happens. Each launch adds a name without a clear rule governing how it relates to everything else.
Code and Cowork are the clearest names in the portfolio — because they describe a job to be done. Ironically the most functional names are the most useful.
What a proper architecture might ask: Is "Claude" a masterbrand with tiers beneath it? Or is each model a distinct product for a distinct audience? Those require completely different architectures — and right now it looks like neither has been fully committed to.
To answer your question directly: yes, the portfolio could benefit from exactly the kind of Brand Architecture discipline you teach. The irony isn't lost on me that I can diagnose it but had no hand in creating it. What would you do with it? >>
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Fascinating.

I've been in the US a long time, and there are things that don't exist elsewhere. For example, every day is National (Something) Day and in fact multiple things within the day. Today is:

- National Invite an Alien to Live with You Day

- National Legal Drinking Age Day

- National Be Someone Day

- National Craft for your Local Shelters Day

- National Junk Food Day

- National Tug-Of-War Tournament Day

- National No Pet Store Puppies Day

- National Take a Monkey to Lunch Day

- National Get Out Of The Dog House Day

- National Lamington Day (an Australian cake made from squares of butter cake or sponge cake coated with chocolate sauce and rolled in desiccated coconut).

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As such, I have decided to declare today National Brand Health Day and make the Seven Stages of Brand Grief its manifesto.

1. SHOCK: numbed disbelief, as the natural defense mechanism against overwhelming evidence, at seeing that the intended Brand hasn't materialized in the marketplace.

2. DENIAL: the attempt to reject the painful reality by looking at any and all possible positive indicators to shield oneself from the weight of the brand's failures.

3. ANGER: frustration and outbursts directed at the situation, others, or oneself, stemming from helplessness are in fact utterly absent and/or skipped in Branding, because business people (and many marketers) are unemotional and intent on quickly getting to step 4.

4. BARGAINING: 'what if' scenarios in a desperate attempt to regain control or reverse the outcome is the norm in Branding, with business people (and many marketers) over-rationalizing the obvious causes and justifying the results toward adjusting differentiation and distinctiveness and a million other things (as opposed to simply asking: "first and foremost, does The Brand have depth of meaning?").

5. DEPRESSION: a deep sense of sadness, emptiness, and isolation as the reality of the loss sets in is absolutely never the case in Branding because Self-Awareness and the Assumption of Responsibility are in very short supply in the business/marketing/branding professions.

6. ACCEPTANCE: in Branding, the ability to come to terms with reality and learning to move forward is just a fleeting bridge between 5 and 7.

7. TEST/RECONSTRUCTION: new strategies and business/marketing/AI solutions are king, and usually happen milliseconds upon completing Stage 1. They involves either a realistic and constructive look at Brand and its shortcomings (see # 8) plus corrective measures or - and quite frequently proposing to the client a 'rebrand' and new brand & performance marketing campaigns, all of which are always at the ready.

And I'd add one more step:

8. ACTION: let the Masterbranded approach come to the rescue - for assessing 2, asking the right questions in 4 and providing the answers, and doing 7 the Right Way.

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#brand #branding #masterbranded #sevenstagesofbrandgrief

6-4 England, and I decided to scan LinkedIn. Unfortunately, I ran into a post that got me in a ranting mood.

—-

As much as I recognize the obvious complexities, I am soooooooooooooooo tired of the ‘science’ of AI-vs-Brand itself —- AI reading what the company does and what the public sees and does, and the disconnect that exists etc etc etc etc.

Let me ask you, Consultants and Clients:
- you craft a brand concept, and then ...
- it's got little meaning/depth or
- you don’t implement it, or implement it badly
- you don’t monitor it, and so you are unaware of what people think
- and as such you can’t correct anything

If so, why is it such a revelation that AI finds a ‘disconnect’? And why isn’t such resulting ‘disconnect’ just simple logic that any 10 year old can understand? And you WisePundits: when you point all that out, what’s ‘scientific’ about it? How’s that ‘insightful’ in any way?

AI simply reveals The Disconnect clearly and instantly, and quickly punish you. Huge, yes, of course - but that is it, that is all, it's just a functional thing.

So here’s the recipe (keeping in mind what AI is and does and can do and requires):

1. Come up with a meaningful concept.
2. Articulate and dimensionalize it well.
3. Codify it all.
4. Implement it fully (operationally, behaviorally, visually, verbally).
5. Monitor it all.
6. Apply ongoing corrective measures as needed.

Anything I missed? Right, didn't think so.
And, tell me how those six points are any different in nature than what they were in 1995? Right, you can't.

Be a good brand consultant. Understand what AI is and does. End of story. (and end of rant)

England and Argentina was an epic game, and we can extract some underlying life and business parallels.
Both teams exhibited grit and discipline, but it's a chosen stance what governs and gives them dimension: 'I don't want to lose' vs 'I want to win'. One is fueled by survival (I won't be defeated), whereas the other is fueled by self-reliance (I will make my own destiny). Both England and Argentina had grit and discipline for 102 minutes, but lived them, alternatively in the duration, based on and directed toward different endpoints.
As to football itself, I must note this:
- 87:49, the score is 1-0. Messi crosses, right-footed, in the very middle of the box where a tall England defender (with Lautaro behind him) head-clears it.
- 91:25, the score is 1-1. Messi crosses, same EXACT play and location as four minutes earlier, right-footed, but two yards further than the middle of the box where a tall England defender (with Lautaro behind him) just misses the header, and Lautaro behind him scores.
If Messi would ever tell me that in that moment he thought "four minutes ago my cross was just a couple of yards short, and now given where the defender is I slightly changed my aim" ... THAT would be the greatest play in the history of the game.

THE WORLD CUP 2026

I've been involved with branding global sports events, and when I first saw this one I was on the fence about using a 26 supergraphic plus the real Rimet Cup (which, interestingly, depicts the goddess of victory Nike). Then I started to see it applied, and ... I think it's beautifully and sensibly done, feels simple and effortless, doesn't try too hard, and it features loads of interesting interpretations and the allowance for different cities to make the logo theirs. I'm old enough to have lived in and worked in the Corporate Identity era - up to the mid 1990s when we evolved into the broader/deeper Corporate Branding - and this work is an extremely skilled Corporate Identity program, nothing more. And I love it.

Interestingly, the original FIFA press announcement had said "... an innovative design language anchors the FIFA World Cup™ emblem for 2026 and beyond". And so there's speculation that FIFA may want to go to a singular logo, then 'customized' somewhat by the host country; you can see here some sketches I found online. Brand-wise on these events, there's three approaches:
- always the same (like the Champions League);
- always the same but with a fixed element (like the suggestions below, or in fact like the Olympics); and
- always different (as the World Cup as been thus far in its history).
At Interbrand, we followed Always Different for Korea/Japan and for Sochi, but always the same (other than date and location) for the Ryder Cup. (where we also slaved over drawing the Cup itself).

Do you have an opinion?

As of late I keep seeing promotional/advertising messages that rely heavily on a part or feature of a logo. I get it - banking on a visual recognition, and exploiting it if possible. My opinion of these:
- NBA: I'm on the fence on this: it should be all or nothing - just 'play' with it across the board, or no no no; and would Jerry West be happy or ticked off?
- Verizon: I didn't mind this, personalization message, was clever and not trying too hard graphically/visually
- Kellogg's: this is a straight "do you recognize me" play; a large cropped part of a logo, I've seen it countless times, whatever
- Domino's Pizza: don't like it, corny, and it reminds me of < m.m.good > from Campbell's Soup)
- Coors: commercials during the World Cup featuring Andrés Cantor's famous "¡Gooooooooooool!" call
- Pepsi Max: clever yes, but ... do you end up promoting your competitor really?
- Ferragamo: clever, corny, and see below

For me, some are better than others, and I dislike when they tried too hard. Would love your branding thoughts.

As to ...
- Adidas: I <did> that (see what I .. <did> there?) many years ago as a joke to a friend who worked there. It's for sale adidas, reasonable price, DM me ok?
- Masterbranded: I'll use it next time that I pitch a lingerie brand

--
Such clever ideas - I think I'll make a series of them and try to sell them to the brands' owners. Let's start with fashion and perfumes, given that Ferragamo started it - things like:
• Armani -- ARM (for the NRA-devoted), MAN (for the MU fan), MANI (hand perfume), MA (for the man still living at home)
• Bulgari -- BVLGE, for the pre-ozempic you 
• Burberry -- URBE (for the city man), BERRY (a fruity scent)
• Chanel -- HA! (for the attention-seeker)
• Coors -- too forced for me, World Cup-related ads featuring soccer commentator Andrés Cantor's drawn-out "¡Gooooooooooool!" call
• Dior -- IO (for the self-centered individual), or (for the alternative-focused individual)
• Fendi -- FEND (for those who do not wish to be accosted), END (to ease breakups)
• Gucci -- CCItua (only a a Roman would understand this one)
• Piaget -- AGE (for senior citizens), GET (for the overachievers), GE (if you bring good things to life)
• Prada -- RAD, for the radical in you
• StLaurent -- UREN (for the fetish lover)
• Versace -- RSA (the official anti-apartheid fragrance), ACE (for the tennis enthusiast)
• Vuitton -- VU (for the farsighted man), TON (for the one who has everything)

Any addition?