I’ve just argued that metabrand gravity is what draws vague concepts and casual commitments toward tangible central ideas.  In Metabrand Green, specialized media properties such as Grist, Worldchanging and Treehugger are examples of business models poised to capitalize on this real market need while solidifying the parameters of what it means to be green.

There is an additional, and in some ways opposite, force within metabrands that offers a wealth of equally-lucrative opportunities and ultimately represents a key mechanism of growth.  If gravity is what pulls already-interested people and companies toward common centers, momentum is what takes those ideas and makes them relevant to outside groups and stakeholders.  This momentum operates at and beyond the casual fringes of metabrand systems by translating and applying core identity concepts in new and often-unexpected contexts.  It is an act of recombination that fundamentally redefines the parameters of who and what are acceptable within the metabrand system.

A compelling case of momentum within Metabrand Green is the US Green Building Council’s LEED standards for sustainable buildling.  The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program has for more than a decade established, audited and enforced an evolving platform of ‘green’ standards applied to a variety of construction projects.  Its regulations cover a range of considerations from site selection to materials to operational energy and water consumption.  Now in its third round of revision, LEED manages six different standard sets to address the unique needs of everything from new commercial construction to residential building to site remodels.

At first glance, an industry standards organization may not seem like the most intuitive source of innovative momentum within a market. Indeed, the USGBC and LEED have roots in metabrand gravity — forming in 1994 as a small band of passionate volunteers committed to the idea of more sustainable cities and frustrated with the lack of progress toward similar goals within established committees.  It intentionally sought to build a ‘multidisciplinary’ coalition of architects, contractors, engineers, non-profit organizations, and more, codifying a common idea of what it meant to construct and operate a ‘green’ building.

From the beginning, however, LEED has maintained and advanced aspirations beyond the centralizaiton of metabrand gravity. It was founded not as a singular consortium within an established sub-industry, but as a “market transformation tool” bent on changing the way a diverse system of actors approaches and acts on construction projects.

Transform it has.  The LEED brand has stimulated interest and affected change in mainstream development markets, far  outside of Metabrand Green.  It has accomplished this by associating its services and its brandmark with values beyond mere altruistic ecological responsibility.  LEED-certified buildings are often somewhat more expensive to initially construct than equivalent structures without certification.  However, they have been consistently shown to operate more efficiently on utility costs, claim a higher market price, and be in greater demand among potential tenants.

As a result, LEED has stimulated a diverse community in which demand is driven from multiple centers: end-consumers interested in a more efficient choice, developers in need of a point of differentiation, and property management companies looking to improve the long-term bottom line.  The LEED framework requires none of these actors to be committed to the same metabrand-influenced central identity idea that drives the USGBC, but it accomplishes the goals of that idea and furthers its influence within broader culture by finding and pursuing common interests.

Metabrand momentum, in effect, thrives on a different kind of middle from metabrand gravity — the fuzzy boundaries between one metabrand and another.  When businesses can rely on idea-driven centers to find points of alignment at the fringes, metabrands change and grow.  There is limitless growth potential embedded in the concept of metabrand momentum.

Metabrands are complex, dynamic systems of people and companies organized around central identity ideas.  To function, they need a network of products, services, and forums to consolidate, clarify, and express those critical ideas.  In short, metabrands have a natural gravity that pulls people and brands together, and that gravity always presents a business opportunity.

For Metabrand Green this manifests in many ways, from clothing to conferences to campaigners.  But the enduring and interesting case of Metabrand Green gravity worth studying here are the specialized media properties that form the central pillars of what it means to be “green.”

To be sure, the true titans of the green media world are hardly Fortune 500 companies.  Publications like Grist and WorldChanging operate as not-for-profit zines driven by volunteers.  They pull from the willing insight of thought leaders and thrive on the enthusiasm of an ever-growing core community of interest.  They sit at the head of a specialized long tail of the green blogosphere, comment-sphere, and Twittersphere.  And they evolve the legacy of old-school, ecologically-aware green media magazines from the Utne reader to the Sierra club.

Humble roots and real leadership haven’t deterred big players from the profit potential of metabrand media gravity.  Treehugger and PlanetGreen are profitable Discovery Media brands, part of the largest non-fiction programming empire on the planet.  NBC Universal, a division of GE, has repeatedly flirted with the idea of green programming through campaigns such as ‘Green is Universal.’  Disney has toyed with the Environmentality brandmark for a decade, oscillating between internal initiatives and endorsed, consumer-facing programming opportunities.  These are certainly not isolated examples.

Classic green media properties, like any providers of specialty content, originate somewhere between a fuzzy conception of wider cultural demand and the passion of the individual writers and editors that mobilize to serve it. They are rarely predetermined articulations of fixed principles for homogeneous audiences.  Rather, they take abstract values and make them relevant through the expression of everyday events and observations.  Concepts such as ‘green’ and ’sustainability’ become articulated through articles on the latest wind power project, tips for operating a more energy-efficient home, reviews of local business’ attempts to minimize footprints, etc.

In short, green media take the abstract, hard-to-define ideas at the center of Metabrand Green gravity and make them both tangible and actionable in everyday life. Through this objectification, they open discrete topics for for evaluation and commentary.  They ultimately become centers for discussion between thought leaders and followers alike; they perpetually evolve with the ebbs and flows of this discourse guided by news events and content production.

This tangible evolution ultimately brings shape and definition to all participants within the Metabrand Green system.  As the metabrand grows, drawing more people and companies together, this centralizing force provided by specialty green media properties becomes increasingly vital.  The effectiveness with which these content producers can both consolidate central principles and articulate them through everyday reporting will determine the extent to which the metabrand identity will form around a coherent identity idea.

Indeed, words like ‘central’ and ‘middle’ may be disingenuous.  Despite the fact that green media operate at the center of Metabrand Green gravity, however, they do not tend to monopolies of thought leadership.  By nature, metabrands are diverse systems prone to internal diversity and disagreement.  As ‘green’ becomes an increasingly ambiguous title claimed by multiple interest areas from organic gardening to cleantech, a long tail of media properties will arrange not around a central middle but rather a multi-centered network of nodes; catering to specific interest areas and varying levels of specialized comittment.  Indeed, it is through this spread of interest that the metabrand gravity of specialized media presents real growth opportunities for business — both in serving an increasingly diverse landscape of media interest and bringing higher-order organization to its content themes and tactical operations.

In sum, enriching the metabrand through centralization and tangibility of abstract concepts is a key profit and leadership opportunity.  This is not the only way to make metabrands grow, however.  The following and final post will explore the opposite expansion tendency within Metabrand Green — momentum that extends centralized ideas to new ideas and frontiers.

The last three posts have outlined a series of critical assumptions about the role of brands in society.  Relying on the observations of others, I’ve argued that the distinction between people and brands is increasingly fuzzy — and that the ties of dependence between them are increasingly strong.

Central to this idea of interdependence is the concept of ‘imagined communities’ that people form when they consume similar things.  These communities are both shaped by and deeply influential to the everyday decisions people make about how to spend their time, money, and attention.  Their very existence propels the brands they rely on.  And their terms are constantly redefined; they are the ever-evolving sum of all of the individual identity projects of the people who drive them.  The net effect is a symbiotic ecosystem of people and brands brought together around a central idea but in a state of constant flux.

Built from a cross-section of business strategy and social theory literature, this idea of people-brand interdependence around an evolving central idea is not altogether new.  It is, however, still dense, abstract, and far more of a novel thought experiment than an actionable insight.  Bridging the gap between theoretical head-trip and applicable framework is a matter of one new and critical observation:

At a macro level, imagined communities start to take on many of the same qualities that traditional brands do. Visual language.  Expectations of experience.  Hierarchy and architecture.  A promise.  Arrived at through a decentralized process of many independent actors, the end result is remarkably similar to the effect of the best centrally-managed brands: a core, compelling identity that inspires loyalty and gets people to act.

These are metabrands: systems of people and products centered on an evolving cultural idea. Applying the lens of strategic brand management makes this abstract social idea concrete, researchable, and actionable.

‘Green’ — environmental responsibility and ecological awareness, expressed personally and corporately — is a particularly compelling case study for this application of the metabrand framework.  It is a system truly decentralized; a disorganized multitude of people and products ranging from activist eco-terrorists to image-conscious Prius drivers.  Expression of green identity is driven by a saturated market of everyday decisions as mundane as light bulb purchases, light switch management, detergent choice, and the substrate of your shopping bag.  But it also reaches into the most basic fundamentals of energy infrastructure and the furthest dreams of technological innovation, and is underwritten by decades of volumes of overlapping rhetoric; of religious responsibility and moral obligation and imminent planetary doom in the face of aggregate apathy.

And yet, the externalized sum of this multilayered cultural chaos exhibits a surprisingly concise meaning, vision, mission, values, and promise.  ‘Green’ is a color, carried on a visual language of earth tones and deepwater blues.  It has an architecture, built on the hierarchies of increasing investment and effective action, ranging from idle greenwash to deeply ‘dark green’ commitments.  It comes loaded with specific experience expectations that range from personal sacrifice and radical politics to economic efficiency and the promise of global security.

Ultimately, metabrand green is an aggregate identity that – like any strong brand identity – inspires fierce loyalty from its core followers, maintains casual relationships with a mass audience, and polarizes those on the fringes.
Unlike centrally-managed brands, however, metabrand green is constantly changing in the hands of every actor that participates in its common identity project.  It traverses an arc on which public policy and consumer preferences are pulling the metabrand from an activist and ideology-driven past, and its precise future is inherently impossible to predict, much less globally manage.

But it is possible to influence from the inside.  Success in a metabrand economy will rely on learning how to operate influentially within—indeed, as a part of—this complex system. In an interdependent and evolving ecosystem of people and brands, the one-way orientation of classic consumer research and reactive product development will consistently fail to capture the imagination of metabrands.

Rather, those who provide leadership within – and thus profit from – the metabrand economy will understand two critical components that distinguish metabrand communities from classic brand relationships: gravity and momentum.  The remaining posts to this blog will begin to explore these dynamics through the lens of specific case studies of individuals and entities that have influenced metabrand green.  Stay tuned.

[If this is your first visit to MetabrandGreen.com, feel free to scan an overview of the project and an outline of the argument here]

I’ve now drawn three fairly esoteric assumptions; namely that: (1) everything is a brand; (2) people depend on this ubiquity of brands to project their basic identities, and (3) ‘imagined communities’ form among groups of people who undertake similar projects. There is a fourth and final assumption to add to this list in completing the foundation of the metabrand idea. It turns the previous logic straight around, and is a great deal more straightforward:

Brands depend on people, too.

This is by no means a groundbreaking assumption. At the most functional level, of course, products don’t survive without buyers. Anyone who’s ever been on either side of a focus group mirror knows that firms invest in this concept earnestly. But to me there is an insight here that is far more than an issue of basic economics; that goes well beyond the static institutions of predictive research, and ultimately ties together the mountains of en vogue marketing discourse about social media and new consumer relationships.

It’s so big, in fact, that it requires a hokey info-graphic to discuss:

The infamous theory of the long tail (coined and canonized by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson, but a topic of discussion in economics since the 1940s) is grounded in a simple realization. In a market where the barriers to entry are negligible and the access of consumers is infinite, any specialized seller will be able to reach and profit off of small groups of buyers with niche interests. On its own, each product or provider within this long tail reaches only a handful of consumers. But the sum of so many transactions amounts to a greater value than that produced by the small number of dominant players at the ‘head’ of the curve who sell massive quantities of general products.  Anderson’s classic application of this concept effectively explained the success of Amazon.com and other online retailers who are able to field a far greater variety of niche-interest items than is practical for traditional brick and mortar stores.

From a perspective of ubiquitous brands, the magnitude of the long tail becomes yet more immense and suddenly interdependent.  The dominant players at the head end, whether Amazon or Costco or P&G or Google or Twitter, are everyday looking more like malleable platforms which thrive on their ability to efficiently aggregate the activity and reflect the interests of the rest of the branded economy.  And the diverse tail which they collect becomes a rich mix not only of specialized products and services but of commentators, bloggers, buyers, reviewers, and participants whose public and active contributions hold the system together.

In this side-by-side ecosystem of people and products, brands depend on their consumers not just for directly-invested time, money, and attention, but for actively upholding the imagined communities which give brands the reason to exist in the first place. These communities provide the fundamental inspiration and impetus for brands to create products, and they are the decentralized authority that grants legitimacy to the brands which do.  They unintentionally decide what brands are needed and what brands need to go.  They represent the sum of millions of very visible hands that shape the undeniably real — if hardly rational or tangible — parameters in which all businesses operate.

I believe this deep interdependence between brands and people is what drives our economy and our propels our cultures. It certainly graces every recently-celebrated star of the marketing case-study runway, from the cult of Apple to crowdsourced Fleuvog Shoes and Threadless Tees to maker culture and the ever-evolving Open Source movement that has peppered the digital universe with so many apps and mashups.  But I also believe that it plays a fundamental role in every line of business from religion to rocket science, and I think we need to start studying it within the context of the specific imagined communities which are particularly dynamic and internally symbiotic.  Imagined communities like Green.

To bring you up to speed if you’re just joining us: this blog is devoted to the open development of the idea of the ‘metabrand’ and what it means for the world of sustainability — particularly the business of green. You can catch an overview of the whole project here, and read the most recent post here. We’re just getting to the thick part.

Academic discussion about how people come to see, understand, and articulate themselves falls into many silos, ranging from mythology to behavioral psychology to sociology’s discussion of identity politics. I make no claims to expertise in any of the above, but I’m most familiar with the latter — and I believe there are some compelling insights worth slogging through on the road to an intelligent argument about metabrands. Most notably: this body of literature supports my assumption that brands (as defined here) are the building blocks of personal identities.

To social theorists, the idea of the personal brand isn’t new — it just has a different name. Stuart Hall (1990; 1996), John Thompson (1995), Manuel Castells (2004) and Ulrich Beck (2002) have all discussed individual identity as an ongoing ‘project’ that is constantly adjusted in response — and often in direct opposition — to outside forces and cultural trends.

Essentially, they argue that your identity isn’t a fixed object baked into you at birth. It’s not tied to your gender, nation or occupation alone. Instead, identity is like a ‘narrative;’ a story we constantly construct based on the many influences in our lives. Gender, nation, and occupation certainly play a role in the plot — but they do so alongside thousands of other actors, ranging from the idle interests we pursue to the over-arching power structures we subconsciously react to.

These individual elements are sometimes referred to as ‘particularistic’ identities because they are, well, particular to specific ideas. The identity I build for myself as a cyclist varies somewhat independently from my project to understand and portray myself as a brand strategist, a backpacker, a fiancé, an indie rock nerd, a coffee snob, an ex-Seattleite and an Angelino in training. Some of these are projects I work on actively, others I rarely think about, but all of them have one thing in common: they’re propelled by my everyday decisions of what to do and not do, read and not read, wear and not wear, buy and not buy.

Identity, then, is fundamentally a matter of consumption. The projects we undertake to define ourselves are driven by the thousands of minute choices that we constantly calculate; choices which inevitably play out in the marketplaces of goods, time, and attention. We ‘brand’ ourselves — not only through the overt badges we wear, but through the kinds of things we bring into our lives. Project identities are defined by the basic things we do every day, which depend on how we spend our money and time, and thus ultimately rely on the complex world of brands.

I’m certainly not the first to notice that this applies to the realm of green. Ignatow (2007) and Hobson (2006) have each argued that ecologically-responsible identities are built on daily consumption decisions. Hobson summarizes: “the governing of consumption and the governing of the consuming self are not separate but highly mediated and contingent processes,” in which “ethical consumption is placed in its context of everyday expression” (2006: 296).

This argument will be particularly unsettling to the convicted. It essentially attacks a worldview based on pre-formed beliefs (”I want to save the planet”) which follow direct logic pathways to rational consumption decisions (”therefore I’ll change all my light bulbs to CFLs”). Instead, by thinking of personal brands as project identities, we’re assuming that these social ideas grow and evolve over time as we consume — and that consumption decisions are based on far less rational or altruistic social ideas in the first place. Indeed, we’re assuming that the identity ideas driving consumption are formed and projected by the experience of consuming in the first place.

This experience, of course, never takes place in isolation. It was Benedict Anderson (1983) who first wrote about the idea of an “imagined community” arising from common consumption; namely the reading of newspapers. Michael Billig (1995) built from that argument to talk about “banal nationalism,” the idea that people feel like part of a nation (and thus express a national identity) through the everyday (‘banal’) activities they undertake: the papers they read (and know that others are reading), the flags they fly (and know that others are flying), etc. Others have since reinterpreted the concept to fit a variety of other particularistic identities, most notably as “banal globalism” (Szerinsky & Urry, 2002) and “banal cosmopolitanism” (Beck, 2002).

The point beneath the jargon: people feel like part of a social group even if they don’t directly interact with other people in that group. These imagined communities revolve around specific identity ideas which are held together by everyday consumption decisions. The sustainable/environmental/”green” community, like any other imagined group, isn’t propelled by a coherent platform of normative and essential beliefs. It’s a loose coalition of billions of daily decisions that constantly evolves through products, media, places, and people. It is, like any other personal or social identity, inherently dependent on brands.

It would be an easy leap (if a gross overuse of dense academic terminology) to extend these ideas to an argument about ‘banal environmentalism.’ At this stage, however, I’m less interested in pontificating about the social ramifications of the system than I am compelled to explore the practical mechanisms that make it work. And for that, we need to flip the perspective to understand how brands depend on people. It’s a discussion that will wait for another day.

In the beginning, a brand was a red-hot iron that burned a farmer’s name into the backside of a bovine so others would know whose it was. The word then came to refer to the symbology of any commodity—governed classically by the holy trinity of name, logo, and a hefty canon of rules for their use. Now those strict guidelines are dissolving as our experiential and information-driven economy infinitely multiplies the situations in which brands are encountered and understood.

In short, brands are complicated. Taking a minute to define them is an important first step in creating a new argument about them. We’ll start with what the experts say.

David A. Aaker—prolific brand author, professor, and vice-chair at Prophet—is an undisputed guru of the brand strategy world. He refers to a brand as a “mental box” which holds a “set of assets (or liabilities) linked to a brand’s name or symbol that adds to (or subtracts from) the value provided by a product or service.”  In other words, brands aren’t just singular, static representations of products. They are a currency of many assets which amount to value; an intangible and often unstable value that intimately impacts the worth of durable goods and actual services in a market.

These assets are more than name and logo. They involve a whole set of expectations around the senses. Brands carry a ‘visual language’ that ranges from color palate to architecture, and often come with powerful associations of sound, taste, and touch as well. Layered on top of these diverse sense-responses are an even more abstract layer of emotional attributes—brands develop reputation, attitude, voice, and personality. Brands represent the depth of relationship that products have with people, and in this context they take on qualities that can only be described as human.

Alan Siegel and Walter Landor, both decorated veterans of the brand strategy world who built successful eponymous firms, have described brand as an ‘identity’ and a ‘promise,’ respectively. My own brand mentor, Sasha Strauss, has said: “a brand is a shared, desirable and exclusive idea” that becomes embedded in things—not just tangible products, but people, services, and experiences too.

In other words, everything is, to some extent, a brand. As the ingredients of what makes up a brand become more complex and abstract, the entities which brands describe are also diversifying. Politicians brand themselves meticulously, and rely on far more than policy to do it. Performers do the same. Even geographic areas (cities, regions, countries) begin to act as brands to attract visitors and investment.  Through branding both intentional and indirect, we associate very different imagery with the idea of Napa Valley than we do with the Australian outback, regardless of whether we’ve actually visited either place.

In sum: from singed cow hides to Twitter feeds, brands have always been about the use of symbols to represent ideas. They use the senses to make products, services, people, places and experiences stand out in our minds. When they do well, they create preference, loyalty, and a relationship with people. Indeed, by taking on abstract personality traits and values, brands act like people.

I believe this is truly a two-way phenomenon, and this is where my argument begins to take the concept of ‘brand’ to a new place. I believe that the identities people create are increasingly similar to the identities brands create.  And I’m not referring to a limited class of self-promoting celebrities and job seekers, but to everyday people making everyday decisions of what to buy, wear, do, and not do.

I believe that people are acting like brands.

This isn’t a revolutionary concept, but it is a new way of thinking about the identity projects we all undertake in daily life. The next post will casually explore –peruse, even – this idea as it’s understood by social theory. Ultimately, I’ll argue that (A) people build and project their own identities (e.g., ‘I’m environmentally responsible’) out of things they consume every day, and (B) people form communities (e.g., ‘we’re green’) around common identity-consumption decisions. Stay tuned.

This blog is a collaborative effort to develop an idea that brings together many disciplines.  Over the next six weeks, I’ll be exploring the outline below in detail, hoping for productive feedback at every step.

The concept of a metabrand is simple — it’s a group of people and products that are organized around an idea; a whole system that starts to act like a traditional brand does.  Think hipster coffee shops.  Social media sites. They’re made up of infinite ingredient parts but when you zoom out, they behave alarmingly like a traditional brand does in everything from experience to expectations.

How we get there and what it means, however, are more complicated matters.  Here’s the logic that I’ll be following in future posts (I reserve the right to modify this as the argument progresses, but I’ll be open about it):

My assumptions:

1. Everything (and everyone) is, to some extent, a brand.
2. Individuals rely on product brands to express their identities (‘personal brands’)—not only via actively displayed badges, but also passively through everyday choices.
3. Communities form out of collective brand/identity decisions. People are compelled by other people who make similar personal brand choices. They feel like part of a group based on the types of brands they choose (or don’t choose)—regardless of whether they actually interact with other members of that group.
4. In a long tail economy, product brands are increasingly fragmented and decentralized.  This long tail is only possible because of (and thus totally dependent on) relationships with specific communities of people.

Therefore, my argument:

Communities of people and the brands they define themselves with are drawn into a symbiotic relationship centered on an evolving cultural idea; what social theorists call a ‘project identity.’ These dynamic systems of people and products are more than a category. At a macro level, they start to behave as brands do — they adopt common attributes of voice, experience, visual language, personality, and even hierarchical architecture. These systems are metabrands.

Which implies many things, but at least two hypotheses I’ll focus on for now:

1. Metabrands are driven by the dynamic between consumers and producers, leaders and followers. Changes to the metabrand happen when one actor goes in a new direction and others follow; metabrands grow when these new directions appeal to actors outside the system who decide to join.  Being a metabrand leader means understanding the core of the idea and the limits of how far it can be extended.
2. Metabrands experience both gravity and momentum, and there’s money to be made in each. At the center of the system, metabrands naturally converge on the core organizing idea — the more coherently defined and clearly articulated, the more people will be drawn in. This centralization relies on loyalty and consistency, and it’s where traditional brands thrive. Momentum, on the other hand, comes at the fringes, where the limits of the concept are pushed and the entire system expands. This demands constant adaptation and calls for a fundamentally new understanding of brands.