IT’S NOT WHAT YOU SAY IT IS, IT IS WHAT THEY SAY IT IS

As Dave Trott wonderfully puts it in one of his “in a nutshell” articles in Campaign magazine…

….

“Samuel Maverick was a Texan lawyer, a politician, and a landowner.

In 1856, a neighbor settled a $1,200 debt with him by giving him 400 cattle.

Maverick wasn’t interested in cattle-ranching, so he kept the herd on open range land, waiting to sell it.

The convention amongst cattle-ranchers was to burn their brand into their cows, to make them easily identifiable and prevent theft.

Samuel Maverick didn’t want his cows branded, he didn’t plan to own them that long.

But sometimes a cow would escape and, when ranchers came across one with no brand, it was assumed to be one of Maverick’s.

And an unbranded cow became known as a "maverick" for short.

Pretty soon "maverick" was shorthand for any cow that got away from the main herd.

And eventually, any cow that was awkward or tried to escape was known as a maverick.

Over the years this transferred to humans: someone who refused to belong to a group, or conform, was said to be a maverick.

Pretty soon any free thinker, any non-conformist was called a maverick.

Originally it meant troublesome, but it became a compliment.

Nowadays "maverick" is the name for a free thinker, a rebel.

All this began with a man who didn’t want a brand and refused to have one.

So that not wanting a brand has virtually become a brand.

Because brand is just another word for image and we can’t not have an image of something.

We have to have an image of things, that’s how the mind works.

Image (brand) is just the way the mind differentiates things from similar things.

……

Or in other words, as the title of this post suggests, it’s not what you say it is, it is what they say it is.

Original article by Dave Trott: https://tinyurl.com/4nv9juhf

#mindfulbranding #organizmabranding #marketing #purpose #brandstrategy