the flywheel for brand building

A flywheel, based on Walt Disney’s original concept (seen in the infamous diagram below) was to find new opportunities to build upon the love that people have for the set of characters they’re introduced to however they’re introduced. It couldn’t feel like a money grab. Look how that panned out for the comic book industry in the late ‘90s. No, it... See more

rather than observing and following online trends, brands are fully capable of creating their own, treating social media culture as its peer and equal, rather than a source of culture-mining. What it achieves is a kind of dignity that is hard to come by in the current climate of incessant algorithm-stroking. It reads as effortless, not desperate.... See more

In other words, brand can be thought of as the capstone atop McGrath's framework—an unnamed source of stability, coherence, and discipline. The virtuous cycle, or flywheel effect, this addition creates is why it’s the capstone. Brand brings coherence to innovation; innovation brings essential new vitality to the brand.

At its core, this is already how transformative corporate brand work gets done. The most successful brand transformations aren’t solo CMO projects; they’re upstream CEO-CMO partnerships. The CEO brings the business strategy, ambition, risk tolerance, and commensurate authority over innovation resources. The CMO brings customer intelligence,... See more

what would it mean for brands to stop pointing to culture, and to start being it? To do so, they would have to go far beyond marketing, to offer meaningful modes of participation. Is it even possible for companies to be in service of something greater than themselves?

Every insight, every behavioral cue, every loyalty signal risks being swallowed by the assistant layer sitting between you and your audience.

This is the architecture of an AI operating system for daily life. And it raises existential questions for brands:

• Who owns the persistent record of customer context?


• How do you build loyalty when memory and

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I keep asking people to get more specific about the culture they’d like to see. What do you think it would be good if there was more of? What do you wish people were spending more of their time on? Instead of building a culture-agnostic platform, can you find a way to support that? To encourage that?