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Bottom-Up Branding 1.0
Humans have been using design and branding to signify who we are, what we believe in, and where we belong for almost as long as we’ve been modern humans. As far back as 10,000 years ago, we started to construct symbols to communicate our beliefs through the construction and the design of religious symbology. And we began to do this all over the planet. It wasn’t relegated to one place in the world. Somehow simultaneously homo sapiens began to design symbols to silently telegraph what we believed in. Almost every tribe on the planet has participated in some form of organized worship. Now, while we might have very different beliefs about this higher power, whatever religion we adhere to, so many of our behaviors in participating in those religions are similar. The way we worship, where we worship, the fact that we tend to worship in buildings, the ability that we share to have rules and regulations about food, about hair, about marriage, about burial, all of these things we’ve constructed.
They are constructed behaviors that symbolize and honor certain beliefs that we have. I think that this behavior takes its origination from the need to feel safe and secure in these groups. So if we all share the same symbology, if we all behave in a similar way, we feel safer and secure in this group that because we all believe in this thing at the same time together, we won’t fight over it. What’s really interesting in our history is that most of our original conflicts come from different religious beliefs. And because we had these different religious beliefs and we had so much certainty about that belief, we began to fight each other over whose belief was more right than the other. Our first flags were created to be able to identify on a battlefield what side we belonged on literally and figuratively.
Because we were able to communicate with these symbols, we were able to create more recognizable consensus and so more people could join these tribes just by this sheer virtue of perceiving these telegraphed symbols. So that’s the origin story of our history with branding, and we’ve been using these symbols ever since. I consider those early constructions very bottom-up, literally and figuratively. We created these symbols for each other, by each other, for free. They were distributed and shared for free among each other, in an effort to communicate messages, ideas, beliefs, behavior. It’s really only in the last 250 or so years that the corporation appropriated a lot of that behavior in the construction of symbols to create recognition, widespread recognition, for branded products.
Bottom-Up Branding 2.0
It’s really only in the last 10 years that we have begun to see that model, that top-down model, begin to flip back to bottom-up again. And that is really the thing that excites me almost more than anything today.
What’s happened is that technology has allowed us to communicate instantaneously. The speed in which we can communicate our ideas is allowing us to be able to make much quicker changes, much faster decisions, and to be able to opinionate in a way that allows others to know what we have discovered in our own investigations, in our own research, and in our own experiences. And so in that last 20 years, and really in the last 10 in particular, we have been able to share our knowledge about whatever it is we’re buying and experiencing in a way that impacts a lot of people in a really, really quick amount of time. And that has created what I consider to be a real democratization of design and branding in that consumers (people) have so much more power than they’ve ever had before in the relationship that they have with the corporations that they are buying things from.