What Inspired Me To Write ‘Primal Branding’?
Recently, Ian McKenzie in London wrote, “Hey Patrick, I was down a YouTube rabbit hole one day and the guys in the video were discussing your book. It’s on my Mount Rushmore when it comes to books about branding. What inspired you to write it?”
I have answered this question several times in podcasts but I don’t think I have ever written on the rearview mirror. (It’s easier to talk through than to write out. #sloth) But here’s my response to Ian: I was working on a client project in 2001 and wondered why people were passionate about some brands but not others. (In some podcasts I have mentioned that the client was LEGO and Nadine Corrigan and Christian Korbes were my client partners. It was Nadine and Christian who suffered a meeting where I placed votive candles down the center of the conference room table in a dark room and gave a monologue on belief and belonging that became the premise of Primal Branding®. Good times.)
At that time, people talked about Nike “tribes” and the “Apple cult” but nobody really knew how to replicate the mysteries of those Brands other than by outright imitating them — which is not differentiating. So, I deconstructed what I thought were powerful brands (cf. structural anthropology) and looked for what they had in common.
