Patrick Hanlon
1 min readJun 11, 2021

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This reminds me of when enterprising designers in the 1990s wanted to change the color of UPS trucks from brown to...something else. UPS is one of the most human-engineered companies--they slice fractions of time off driver actions in order to speed delivery. (Stick your key ring over your pinky finger so you don't mistakenly leave truck keys at 5th Floor reception.) Their original external advertising slogan to customers, "We're the tightest ship in the shipping business" (Martin Puris) was also their internal mantra, because they wanted to become the tightest ship in shipping. Their vision was global supply chain logistics before those words were ever put together. Teamed with art director Peter Cohen at Ammirati & Puris, I wrote some television commercials that helped UPS transition from a box delivery company to an active participant in developing the global supply chains we took for granted pre-pandemic. When I included UPS in my book "Primal Branding" I mentioned those spots to Larry Bloomenkranz (before your time Kevin:) he told me those spots were transformational inside the company. Go, brown.

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Patrick Hanlon
Patrick Hanlon

Written by Patrick Hanlon

Author of “Primal Branding,” “The Social Code,” writer on Forbes, Medium, Inc., East Hampton Star. Founder primalbranding.co

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