On Thursday I was walking to lunch when I happened past the Ira Keller Fountain and stopped.
Originally called the Forecourt Fountain, it was created by the famous landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. I still remember when it opened in 1970. My friends and I were among the multitudes who happily splashed about in its cool cascading waters. That was part of Halprin’s radical proposition – that the fountain was meant to be actually waded in, not just politely observed.
As I looked at the fountain these 39 years after it was built, I was struck by how mesmerizing it still is. With its multiple layers and the different angles of water produced by the horizontal and vertical facets, everywhere my eye went there was something enticing and rewarding. I felt like I could stand there for another half-hour – long enough to be significantly late for my business lunch.
How many things in the world do that?
As I tore myself away, I started thinking that brands need to aspire to be like Lawrence Halprin’s fountain. Why can’t a brand deliver meaning to the world at this level? Why can’t a brand give people something more than just the utility of its products or services?
Halprin was tasked with producing a piece of civic landscape architecture. His fountain could have been just as functional and forgettable as most, and he would have essentially earned his fees. Yet he gave something to Portland that cannot be measured in mere dollars and square footage.
Brands have the same opportunity. Whether it’s Patagonia or Apple or Ferrari or a Michael Graves teapot from Target – any number of brands have proven that a brand experience can be imbued with lasting value and meaning beyond just earning its price. It’s a matter of intention, determination, and heart.
– Doug
The whole way GM handles marketing would be fascinating in an academic way if it weren’t for the fact that you, me, and everyone else who pays taxes is going to suffer because of it.
Our thinking about 
not shallow. They are anything but shallow. And we will neither hire employees nor work with clients who believe people are shallow.
If we assume that people are hungry for meaning, as evidenced in everything humankind ever builds, from towering Mayan ruins and gothic cathedrals to the elaborate ornamentation of everyday objects such as a Haida spoon, then doesn’t it make sense that the act of consumption itself would be a meaningful act?
What Elliot and Davies are calling attention to is the change that’s occurred over all these millennia. And that involves the source of the meaning. Because an anthropologist will tell you that the culture a person was born into used to be the source of meaning. The culture used to give us our ethos (an understanding of how to act in the world) and our worldview (a picture of how the world really is). But in the post-modern era, fewer and fewer of us are given an ethos and worldview, and more and more of us are left to compose our own.
combination of many symbolic systems. It can be the values we learned from our parents and family, plus the insights we choose from various religions and spiritual practices, and maybe some philosophy courses we took in college. And maybe from the novels we read, the music we listen to, the art we see, the friends we keep, the places around the world we visit, the careers we work in, the movies we watch.
So our theory of brand culture proposes that today, in this current smorgassbord of beliefs and values, where people are shopping for both their values and their identity (sometimes quite literally), brands can step up and be a source of meaning. And when a person chooses to have a relationship with a brand, they are using that brand as a symbolic representation of themselves. They are using that brand to represent their own ethos and worldview.
ID-ology 