We are essentializing beings. That is, our way of knowing the world tends heavily towards looking for the essential, the typical, and the regular. We tend to see the general, the core, the one single "thing" that summarizes, encapsulates, or explains what we're looking at. And this is the core thought behind the importance of branding. This post will discuss something that is at the heart of everything we do as human beings. It also shows why we have marketing and branding companies at all. Finally, it shows why I love this business so much. We are essentializing beings. That is, our way of knowing the world tends heavily towards looking for the essential, the typical, and the regular. We tend to see the general, the core, the one single "thing" that summarizes, encapsulates, or explains what we're looking at. And this is the core thought behind the importance of branding. With a person, it's the person's "character" that we can see among all the details of their everyday life. Similarly, with a company, it's the "brand" of that company that we see. This sort of essentializing is not voluntary. We just tend to do it, because of how our human experiencing works. We need some general, reliable data to anchor our experience. We can't function without this keystone. The essence "holds together" our experience by continually tying it together with some key ideas. (If you'd like to know more about this theory of experience, and its origin in Aristotle and Husserl, just let me... read more >
