Love your brand? Set it free.

The holy grail of marketing is for a brand to become part of the zeitgeist; for people to adopt it as shorthand for something they want to say about themselves but don’t know how to articulate. The brands that have crossed this synapse form something of a visual language in which things, not words, are the units of self-expression. It’s about what the product means, not what it does.

In a post-digital world where nearly everything that brand managers once thought true is now false, the equation for brand transcendence into this rarified universe has remained reassuringly familiar, if increasingly difficult to pull of; holistic marketing that breaks through the clutter.

Those brands that today exist as shorthand – from Polo Ralph Lauren (WASP perfection) to John Deere (rural masculinity) to Obama (progressive change) – did not get there by accident. Their ascent began with someone who fervently believed Product X ought to become Symbol Y within Target Market Z. The visionary then rallied the right team and resources to execute a brilliant campaign that made people believe X really does mean Y.

The paradox is that once a brand becomes part of the language, the very people who gave it meaning – the visionaries, the managers -- are disempowered from managing it. The users define the lingua franca which itself will evolve over time in use. Until the twentieth century, “branding” involved only a hot poker and a scared (and scarred) cow. A language is not a closed system.

Just when your brand finally becomes everything you tirelessly worked for it to be, it slips from your grasp.

You’ve lost control; whether you like it or not.

Houston, we have a logo!

The $900 Million HR Department

Amazon has entered into a deal to acquire Zappos for around $928 Million dollars worth of AMZN stock. Zappos is an online shoe store with an extraordinary corporate culture. I'd venture to say that Amazon is paying about $28 Million for the online shoe store, and $900 Million for it's corporate culture.

At most companies, corporate culture is the domain of the HR department, where it exists as a muddled milieu of mission statements and handbooks that nobody reads. In contrast, CEO Tony Hsieh turned all of Zappos into a fantastical, Willy Wonka-esque HR experimentation lab.

Udorse has no qualms about shamelessly stealing some of the Zappos HR Lab inventions as we scale up. One we've already adopted is what we're terming "Ultra High Touch Hiring." We proactively identify specific awesome people we want to hire, and then go after them with everything we've got. In our 1.5 months of existence, this has included flying across the country to hang out over coffee with strong candidates, scouring all our networks for leads, and donating some solid coin to charity [as referral bonuses]. So far, it's working. Some other companies that seem to do Ultra High Touch Hiring [UHTH] really well include Rapleaf, and my former employer Clarium.

I posit that Bezos is far more interested in Zappos the HR Experimentation Lab than he is in Zappos the Shoe Store [though there are obvious synergies between Zappos and Amazon's Endless.com]. Hsieh's Ninja HR skills injected about $900 Million incremental value into a company that otherwise would have been entirely normal. Kudos.

[Special thanks to my business partner Trevor, who inspired this post]

Hopefully this isn't a contrarian indicator...

Recently, I had to make some last minute copies of a bizdev presentation for Udorse. Since I've tired of the generally surly copy attendants at FedEx, I decided to give Staples Copy Center a try. I dropped my disk off, went around the corner for a coffee, and a few minutes later strolled back for pick up.

Instead of the usual grunting and groaning I'd been met with on previous copying excursions to my local FedEx, the staff at Staples had ear to ear grins when I walked back in.

One of them, a guy around my age, was holding up a copy of our presentation in the air, and exclaimed, "YOU thought of THIS!?" It was half question, half boisterous statement.

I replied that I had awesome teammates [now four!] and we came up with the idea together.

After a spirited discussion about the product which I can't reprint here since we're in stealth mode, one of the guys, Newton, said, "This is going to change the world, bro! You guys are going to be on CNN!"

We've received encouraging feedback on what we're up to from VCs, from CMOs, from other entrepreneurs, and from friends. But there was something uniquely powerful about seeing two everyday guys with no expertise in our space and in no way connected to us react so excitedly, so joyously, to a crappy iteration of our concept brought to life in static on some powerpoint slides.

While I have to adjust for the fact that this specific Staples Copy Center was located in the heart of Hollywood [La Cienega and Burton to be precise] and therefore their enthusiasm may have been pent up residual from auditions missed and parts not won, I must admit: It felt damn good to hear.

If we ever do end up on CNN, my first shout out will be to Newton and Andre from Staples on La Cienega.

Company I dig [not digg] -- 1st edition

Bonobos - Their UX rocks, their product rocks, their name rocks.

Miles to go

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

-Robert Frost