natalia ilyin

WAX, Twist, Thirst/3ST, The Royal Order of Experience, Xpatriate, The Luxury of Protest, Opolis, Plural, Studio on Fire, Knock Knock, Office, 50,000 feet, Air Conditioned, Blender, Bustbright, Cue, Grow, Hunter Gatherer: When exactly did design firms start to think of themselves as bands?

Current design business names produce a jangle of non-meaning. and, taken as a whole, shore up what "serious business" has thought of us all along: Much as we talk "innovation, strategy and sustainability," the three current buzzwords, we're just a bunch of clever creatives after all.

Designers have ached for years to be taken seriously by mainframe business. And yet, in our attempts to show how "current" we are, we undercut our own value by giving our principals "fun" titles and naming our businesses inpenetrable names. We set ourselves up as the great brand experts, and then marginalize ourselves through the choices we make in self-description.

As you know, Burma is the country currently known as Myanmar. It is called Myanmar right now because its military dictatorship knows that you associate the word "Burma" with the words "human rights abuses," and so, in a nice branding coup, they changed the name a few years back. Now if you see "Made in Myanmar" on a sweatshirt you're buying, well-- where the heck is that and who cares? Which is what they want. I needed to say this first, so you'd be reminded about Myanmar. But this post is really about something else.

It is hard to think that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the jailed pro-democracy leader who has been living under house arrest for fourteen years in Burma, faces a sentence of five years in a disgusting Myanmar prison because a sprightly young American named John Yettaw decided what a fine thing it would be to swim across the lake that acts as a moat to keep people away from her. True, he was arrested, too. But I have little pity for him.

This thoughtless action provided just the pretext the Burmese military dictatorship was looking for, and it promptly arrested Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi for violating the terms of her house arrest, some say in order to lengthen her imprisonment, since her house-arrest term was coming to an end in a very few years.

As a person involved in refugee relief on the Burmese border, I am often astounded at the continuing smiling naivete and thoughtless actions of my fellow Americans when it comes to involving themselves in the life of another country, the politics of which they do not understand. We've been accused of this ever since "The Quiet American" came out. But really. How long must we not grow up?

This charming capacity for ignorant blundering is not only the province of the odd swimmer. I recently had a smiling software executive assure me that her company is selling their "people-tracking" software in Burma. "Oh, yes," she twittered, "We have a growing presence in Myanmar." Does she get that she is saying, "We're thrilled to be a part of the largest crack-down on human rights the world is currently enjoying?" No. She doesn't get it. She's swimmin' across the lake. She's beaming as she backstrokes. She's causing causing real, human misery and she's masking it as market share. She knows not what she does.

In our world, ignorance is not bliss. It is a refusal to respect other people's rights. It is a left-over colonial attitude, and I don't care how "innocent" you are, if you blunder into Myanmar without doing your homework, or worse, not caring to do your homework, you are reenacting the worst of colonial imperialism mixed with the worst of our American refusal to grow up. There is little more repulsive than an aged virginity : our naive ways do not excuse our irresponsibility.

Although I am a person deeply involved in helping businesses figure out who they are, how they differ from their competitors and why anyone should care, I have recently developed an antipathy for calling that business activity "brand work" or "branding." Just in the last few weeks, I have begun to associate "brand" and all the swish and swash books about it with an era just gone by--an era in which free-market economics ruled and "lipstick on a pig" was the grin of the day around the marketing meeting table. Since the Obama election, the word "brand" just somehow has an aroma of obfuscation, of finding ways to sell people things that are bad for them, of lying to the customer. I don't know why. It just feels that way to me. (more…)

The other day I was sitting in a meeting with my brand analysis hat on, listening to Pam, my business partner, present a plan for brand alignment to a very bright client. I like listening to Pam’s presentations because her mind works so differently from mine. I always learn something. This time, though, my attention was distracted by a person sitting near me. The thinning, spikey hair with the lightened tips. The slim, rectangular glasses. The worked-out, aging body clothed in the latest techno-wear from REI, chosen to give a sense of health and youth where health and youth are ebbing. Behold: The Branding Hack. (more…)

I'm snowbound on a small island. In New York this snow would have been plowed and dumped in the river by lunchtime on the day it fell, and nary a reservation at Nobu cancelled. Not here. No, here in the land of the hearty Northwesterner, land of anorak and parka, land of flannel and technical fabric, we have buses sliding down slight inclines. We have cars without snowtires trying to make it up hills, the drivers' faces cartoons of surprise at sliding backward. (more…)