Member-only story
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.
Naturally the first thing I thought of was the Nike swoosh. The logo. The Nike logo is a sign, a totem, an Icon. But what I discovered was that icons were 5D and could engage any of our senses: sight, taste, touch, sound and smell. (LEGO blocks are also iconic.) No one was thinking of these specifics in terms of Brand engagement at the time, so it was daunting and confusing. (If the construct I was creating was accurate, those of us in advertising and marketing were thinking about the wrong things.) The second thing I thought of was the Creation Story — we all knew that Apple started in a garage. Google and Facebook started in dormitories. Those stories were legend. Next came Rituals, and Sacred words which later became Lexicon (think Starbucks iced grande skinny decaf latte, iPhone, OpenAI Chat GBT). The next piece of Primal Code was Pagans which evolved into the less political Nonbelievers (Macs versus PCs, carnivores/vegans, solar/carbon). This was all topped off by a Leader.
