Brandy Cerne

Brand sustainability comes down to two things:  relevance and differentiation.  Something either affects a brand's relevance; is it meaningful to my life today? And its differentiation; is it unique and can I identify that uniqueness? Everything falls into one of those two buckets as it relates to brand.  The goal is to be high

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Your premise is the specific, defensible purpose for a project or your overall platform, pulled from your personal vision for your audience . Most work is too generic to resonate, too forgettable to become anyone’s favorite. But by developing our premise — and forcing ourselves to test just how differentiated it truly feels to others — we stand a g... See more

And while dropping off a full bottle of expensive booze at every table seemed like an unreasonably extravagant gesture, it was actually cost-effective. After an elaborate multicourse dinner (and usually plenty of wine), few people were interested in drinking more than a sip of that cognac. Yet the feeling of abundance was there.

Relationalism asserts that human beings are both fundamentally broken but also splendidly endowed. We have egoistic self-interested desires, and we need those desires in order to accomplish some of the necessary tasks of life: to build an identity, to make a mark on the world, to break away from parents, to compete, create and to shine. Our savage

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A child is born with both ego and heart and soul on full display. But for many people, around adolescence, the ego begins to swell, and the heart and soul recede. People at this age need to establish an identity, to carve a self. Meanwhile, our society tells adolescent boys to bury their emotions and become men. It tells little girls that if they r

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what I absorbed was that 1) my parents had social lives, and sometimes those social lives complimented my own (the blessed dinner party that included parents of friends my age) and sometimes they trumped them; 2) sometimes being a part of something meant just showing up every week and doing semi-boring stuff, like setting out the cookies before cof... See more

Being free is, in part, achieved through being connected.

To me, a membership is something you pay for to get access to a benefit you’re after. That benefit can be a community of your peers, but it doesn’t have to be. For example, you might have a Costco membership, which gives you access to the store, but there’s no Costco community.