Do We all Agree on What a Brand is?

Jun 9

Defining Henoscene.

The first thing I ensure before I begin building out an effort, is a shared vocabulary. I explore if my team and I are using the same words in the same way.

Words that are integral to the realisation of any effort need to be placed consciously in the space between by everyone involved. Subtle variances in the understanding of fundamental terminology can result in catastrophic disconnects over time. The more the same root terms are used even marginally differently by each team member, the more the very words that were meant to evangelise the effort begin to dilute the overall integrity of the undertaking.

Impact requires integrity, and integrity requires alignment. A team cannot be divided in their understanding yet cohesive in their execution. Henoscene being an impact-first platform, could not afford a lack of cohesion, so I had to judiciously avert likelihood of confusion. Consequently, I conducted language deep-dives at Henoscene, but I frequently do the same for brands worldwide struggling with their sense of Purpose.

Enterprises that have failed to qualify their impact lexicon of key visual motifs, icons, values, beliefs, and words through company-wide consensus often lack the clarity and consistency to evidence authenticity, visibility and accountability. I help teams refine and define the building blocks of their brand's sustainability initiatives and CSR campaigns. I help brands think through and reduce the inflections that could knock a word, concept, theme or focus the brand holds central to its purpose out of its initial and intended orientation and alignment into perverse postures that diminish the enterprise's value.

Words can lose their weight, worth, meaning and allure for all sorts of reasons in CSR and impact communications, because in a blindsiding blink of an eye, a brand's green wording could be called out as green washing. However, experience shows that the words any enterprise uses in the impact space, does not lose substance and gravitas overnight, the erosion begins internally and early on, because the words were not given deep enough roots to support the lofty claims they were expected to fruit. Companies also tend to sip off their own Kool-Aid and fail to see when their marketing jargon is likely to spawn jaded masses. A healthy approach for enterprises facing backlash or scrutiny from the public over their impact choices and outcomes would be to take ownership and evidence conviction when cornered by consequence. To stand up for what one believes in come rain or sunshine, is admirable, shedding agency to assuage external demands and pander to public pressure, evidences a stark lack of character and is admonishable. Bear in mind, when what is shared, gets shunned or silenced, it is critical to hold the line. To cave is to be a coward, and one loses all credibility and respect from people, when one elects to be spineless and dishonourable. Ever more so in the American market, where to go out guns blazing, standing up for what you believe in is at the heart of the cultural value system. While controversies may cost a brand share value or market share in the immediate term, cowardice can invoke the wrath of cancel culture and boycotts.

To discern our impact narrative at Henoscene, we first had to align on what word best exemplified. Here's a run through of the discussions my team and I harboured around whether we should describe ourselves as, a "brand" or an anti-brand? Anti-brands fall into four categories: (i) experts - those that are well informed about the market & practices, hence assume an oppositional stance to the existing paradigm. (ii) symbolic haters - entities with unreliable content, that have built their premise on hearsay, conspiracies, and opinions (iii) complainers - former consumers of failed products and services who have turned to creating their own alternatives and (iv) opportunists - those that capitalise on competitive brand failures by redirecting consumer fallout traffic toward their own alternative products and services. Frankly, anti-brands sounded both alluring and antagonising.

While both "brands" and "anti-brands" are identities, they each depict markedly different values, attitudes, convictions, conscience, and consciousness. It dawned on us that anyone who wanted to realise impact would be welcome on our platform and thus we had to cater to both brands and anti-brands. Knowing how each member of the team internalised what "Henoscene" was, was not, could and should be helped us come together in our definition.

When companies denounce the word "brand," and rebel against the framework they belong to, it can be interpreted as false, because it can be construed as an effort to mask the entity's identity as a corporation. A rose by any other name, is still a fragrant flower, just as a corporation no matter the label it masquerades under, is still a group of people authorised by the state to act as a singular capitalistic entity. So why do the subtle nuances of a label even matter? How an entity describes itself, comes to shape how others perceive it. Perception may be intangible, but judgment has certainly gotten binary, either a company or brand is deemed authentic or disingenuous, sustainable, or wasteful. An enterprise is quickly evaluated based on whether the entity's descriptors are well aligned with its capacity to deliver on what its identifiers promise. Regardless, proactively adopting intentional attributes is the only way to have enough substance and weight to show up on the world stage. A company cannot champion conversation about the social, ecological, political, and cultural contexts it belongs and contributes to without attenuating its boundaries.

I just got back from speaking at the Brand Led Culture Change conference, where a conversation with fellow speakers led me to share Henoscene's definition of brands, which they were intrigued by. It quickly became apparent that even at an event where we had all convened to discuss brands and their socio-ecological impacts, not all of us defined the word "brands" in the same way, let alone the term, "impact." It further underscored for me the need I highlighted for language to be made mutually self-evident in the space between, as a shared foundation to build forward from. When language isn't given boundaries, checks and balances, it can be misappropriated, abused, exploited and weaponised. While clarifications can feel onerous, exasperating, and may even evidence one's own knowledge gaps, impatient reactions should not hold an entity or individual back from disclosing the meanings that drive forth actions and decisions. To shirk requests for an explanation, is to avoid accountability.

'Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act, and in that action are the seeds of new knowledge.' - Albert Einstein.

My team and I first mapped the negative space around the term, "brand" before populating it with our inputs. We bore in mind how the definition of the word "brand" was distinct to each generation and had evolved with time. In each decade, we could only expect of a brand what we expected of ourselves, and thus how each generation defined a brand was stilted by the level of self-awareness the general populace possessed. Introspectively, as consumers, we could only want the brand to meet us as deeply as we were willing to meet and challenge ourselves. Thus, consumers could ask for no more accountability and agency of brand than they knew to evidence of their own selves. Therefore, the current age of communications and connection is a golden epoch, rich in its potential for collective properity. Individuals today are more willing than ever before, to confront their inner demons, speak their truths, stand for what they believe in, grow, transform, relate, share, connect authentically, and seek help. Consequently, brands and anti-brands, in order to retain employees, reduce churn, attract investors and acquire greater market share must behave as vulnerably and honestly as the most exposed and candid individuals of our time. Brands should not cater to hater culture, profit off the ignorant and espouse the contracted nature of the lowest common denominators, rather choose to emulate individuals who are inclusive, aware, kind, and expansive examples of humanity.

The history of brands and branding can be traced all the way back to ancient Egypt, where marks of proprietorship were emblazoned onto cattle to deter theft, then we carried the emblems of ownership onto lineages in the form of family crests, and onto barrels of wine and beer in the form of seared emblems, and as names onto manuscripts for authorship. From the humble origins of merely denoting who a possession belonged to or could be attributed to, the concept of brands developed during the burgeoning of artisan guilds in China, India, Greece, Rome, and Mesopotamia. Trade routes to distinguish a product's origins, craftsmanship, type, quality, individuality, and exclusivity further made brands a necessary mark of distinction. From the king's court to the peasant's household, brands became a way to distinguish, lay claim, and wield supply-demand mechanics.

Brands then became watermarks during the Medieval period, followed by artist signatures in the Renaissance, and seals that attested aristocratic identity. From tribes and clans to kingdoms, the rise of currencies, flags and eventually stamps with the despot's visage set apart cities, towns, states, and nations. In the zeitgeist, celebrity autographs and signature haptics on gadgets carry through this grand tradition of capitalising on notoriety and familiarity. By making social currency bankable, the mark of a good brand became its capacity for consistency. Relying on pattern recognition, brands, like iconic influencers now resort to repetitive motifs to establish legitimacy and continuity.

These days we intuitively expect a brand to stand for the whole that is larger than the sum of its parts, overriding previous definitions that made a brand synonymous with its constituent parts. Consequently, a brand is no longer a logo, a product, a service, the company, marketing content, design, packaging, colours, fonts, mascots, slogans and name, term or symbol, it is the intangible value that arises from those aspects working in unison.

When the parts of a brand work well in unison they create a competitive moat, because a ubiquitously recognised name turns synonymous to the product it represents, e.g., we use Kleenex and tissue interchangeably. Prolific notoriety can act like a barrier to entry for emerging brands in the same product category, but at Henoscene we had to ask, "Is being distinct in our expression enough in today's ecologically denuded, socially disenfranchised world?" What of our moral responsibility and ethical duty to society and the biosphere that supports our activities? We had to contemplate our expression against the grain of what had preceded us, because language tends to forge associations based on past use cases. However, we also had to forecast what a brand or anti-brand could come to embody given socio-economic and environmental macro trends in 2023.

A brand is a fiction that is substantiated by both the company that gave rise to it, and the stakeholders who engage with it, because without cultural context, and public perception a brand would not epitomise collective value. Through the iterative process of 'performance, feedback, revision' every successful brand goes from being emotionally, psychologically, and experientially directed by one, to being appraised by many. This means people wilfully decide to pay a premium to belong to the narrative that a brand asserts it wants to shape, i.e. consumers choose to subsidise the cost of building and reinforcing the image, message, beliefs, values and personality of the brand while also benefiting the brand's profit margin, because by being aligned with the brand, they believe their identity is enhanced in the world.

However, identity proves insufficient at times, and people are now more conscious, and aspire to surrender or shed identity or ego through spiritual practices. Brands now must discern how to mirror people in the "woke" era, to feel authentic, relatable, and personable while not limiting their scope of expression to an identity that fails to adapt with the times. As brands became more dynamic, interactive, and human, the definition of the word shifted again from representing an attitude, and a heuristic convenience (a way of simplifying consumer decision making within a product class) to a promise (that is consistently delivered upon) and finally a sense of purpose. Simon Sinek's Golden Circle theory elaborates that a business needs a reason to exist beyond making money. Sinek urges brands to prioritise communicating the passion behind their mission by claiming, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

Shifting out of marketing jargon into meaningful language.

Brands born out of pain points experienced by their respective founders, become inextricably woven with their creator's humanity, which can instill a deep sense of purpose, but it can also prove limiting, if the founder is not doing the self-work to evolve past their own limiting beliefs, thoughts, opinions, and constructs. Yet, in emulating the core of the individual that gave rise to a brand, brands have begun to enter the discourses that people engage in socially, culturally, economically, politically, and environmentally. A brand's need to evidence a willingness to learn and change with the times, or proactively own their choice to remain unchanging is now a public expectation. A brand is held to the same standard of scrutiny and accountability as an individual person in the court of public opinion. At Henoscene, we felt compelled to ask what people were truly looking for from themselves and from brands given all the compounding global crises we are collectively facing. Why is accountability, credibility, integrity, and transparency important in 2023? Perhaps because it is a matter of life and death. Lives hang in the balance due to the climate crisis and biodiversity loss worldwide.

My team and I began brainstorming sentences, phrases, ideas as it occurred to us. Here are a few statements that got transcribed to the whiteboard: "Any living and non-living entity with a distinct identity or finite boundaries, capable of effecting change for the better or worse by virtue of how it elects to find expression in a local and/or global context is a brand." With this definition, we qualified that individual species could be treated as brands, as clients.

"Any recognisable identity's ongoing, uniquely positive, contribution to the world." This statement alluded to brands leaving a visible stamp on the world, a stamp created through an action state. Brands had to embody a verb, put their body behind realising an outcome that would come to delineate their presence from other entities. Since we were exploring negative space, I asked if a brand could be "a distinct mark left behind by the unique shape of an entity repeatedly impacting a social, cultural, environmental, political or economic landscape with its unique weight distribution?" In other words, could a brand be the legacy its enacted purpose leaves behind? Not purpose as a promise, but purpose as the cumulative curve of impacts realised.

Many are charting the weight distribution of the "why" that propels a brand through its Environmental, Social and Governance pillars to discern if its load hits the road in a level or imbalanced way, but I felt more called to discerning a brand's elasticity of spirit and ability to show up for what is needed as the need arises. How could we curate an objective platform for brands to either lessen or magnify their impacts credibly? How could we disrupt enterprises from doing business as usual and set up them to succeed in doing business as needed? Plenty of examples of enterprises adapting to the dictate of the emergency during Covid, we had Anheuser Busch work with the Red Cross to deliver sanitiser to communities in need, a commitment that made sense since they manufacture alcohol. Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci, and other fashion brands committed to producing masks and distributing them, which was aligned with their fabric manufacturing capacities. Dyson, created CoVent, a ventilator system to help treat Coronavirus patients, as it was a technology company that understood air circulation and flow.

The application driven approach and malleability that brands have begun to evidence is what inspired the name Henoscene, which comes from Henosis, greek for a fundamental unified reality, and cene, which comes from Kainos, which demarcates a geological era. We wanted Henoscene to represent unity, after an era of duality, the Anthropocene, the Age of Man, where everything has felt like a whiplash swing between irreconcilable polarities. We knew we had to bookend the extractive, exploitative, myopic, linear Age of Man run by the oppressive patriarchy, known as the Anthropocene, but for that our brand had to be so much more than a purpose. We had to be a whole new era. We had to be the solution state realised. Why? Well Einstein voiced this perfectly:

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. - Albert Einstein

Our definition may seem ambitious to those who continue to contemplate attaining an inclusive future through the same individualistic, ego-centric, arrogant male lens that brought about the current era, the Age of Man, but rest assured our strategy isn't to go at this alone. We work cooperatively and collaboratively with all our stakeholders to achieve that which can only be co-created by the collective. In essence we gave rise to a label we ourselves would forever belong to, because Henoscene's etymology implies consensus, that we all agree upon and belong to one reality. We cannot attempt to give rise to Henoscene or exemplify its integrity without knowing our place in the family of things. We are a part of and not apart from, and in knowing that, we can stop trying to save the day as heady, self-absorbed heroes drunk on our own power, instead, show up to simultaneously empower the hero in every individual. Wait. Wasn't this the plot of a superhero movie? Where either one person could have all the power, or they could be distributive, and everyone got to be a hero? Or maybe I am confusing it with the Mean Girls ending with the prom queen crown being scattered into the crowd. Irrespective the metaphor holds, stop hogging the limelight, stop trying to be saviour or the martyr, just be one of many that cares for each that makes the many. After all, as individuals we can each only tell stories that happen to us, but together we can shift the narrative for all, which will be a legacy recalled by all.

At Henoscene, we wish to serve as an objective, conduit and platform that helps deliver what the name promises, an inclusive reality that accounts for both people and planet, as one, but we need brands, nonprofits, government agencies, consumers, patrons, donors, creative agencies, celebrities, creatives to all show up for the same outcome. We cannot do something for us all, by our lonesome. So, join us, and together we can realise anything we cooperatively collaborate on under the lens of real-time transparency.

Our mission is to help brands champion rich, lasting legacies of relevant and indispensable social and environmental impacts. We define brands as any entity that has enough name recognition to result in a return economy (i.e., circularity) that is regenerative and capable of inciting real-world change that affects both individual lives and entire ecosystems. Whether you are a non-profit, a government agency, a corporation, a celebrity, a philanthropist, an influencer, a creative, or a storyteller, we need you to show up, in ways that reclaim, restore, and replenish the world and its many inhabitants both human and wild. It is time to co-create impacts with other stakeholders, our platform awaits your deliberate passion, so why not sign up for our launch? This is not about purpose, and we are neither a brand nor an anti-brand, we are instead a platform, for the purpose performed by others. We offer you the tools to establish a solution era, by championing any brand with a positive social and ecological solution.

If you'd like to learn about industry and brand impacts, both positive and negative worldwide do follow us on Instagram @henoscene. Feel free to raise questions. We are working with AbInBev on some incredible solutions that we will be going live with, that you can advance in the world with us. Keep in touch, our lines are open, and we are eager to ensure that words used by brands are backed by tangible, provable actions, that increase in resonance, significance and value with time.