The Genesis
How a brand's beginning breathes everlasting life into its story.
It’s hard to remember a time when Google didn’t exist, and yet some of us were alive before you could access a catalog of everything about anything, anytime. There was a moment, a generation ago, when a couple of students realized that backlinks to a page on the Internet were highly indicative of that page’s relevance to a certain topic. In this way, the kernel of Google was born, and nothing would ever be the same again.
Now Google is not just a noun but a verb, a tentacular force that touches all of us, every day. Its employees are known as Googlers. They work in offices that resemble adult Romper Rooms, active shrines to the infinite possibility of discovery, innovation and creativity. Google is an institution, a tradition, a culture. Google is its own God, as it was in the beginning.
“Every iconic brand has a creationist myth, a self-fulfilling legend that seems like it just always was.”
Not every brand’s conception is going to be as foundational as Google’s, but every brand-birth is the beginning of a universe of its own making. And it is up to its creators to decide how inventive and mythological that microcosm will be, what shapes and stories it will take on as it evolves through the decades. Even an innovation like Spanx was groundbreaking in that it created a whole new world. Let there be shapewear, said Sara Blakely, and now, we enjoy the possibility of smoother curves and better-fitting clothing. Again, it’s hard to remember what life was like before.
Think of Netflix and its founders’ distaste for movie rental late fees. Think of Apple and its thinking different. Every iconic brand has an origin story, a creationist myth that set in motion the emergence of a self-fulfilling legend that seems like it just always was. This first chapter, this inciting incident, is infused so thoroughly into the beast of the brand that, even when we hear it told for the first time, we say oh yes of course, as if we’d already known.
And so it is worth considering and defining, when building a brand platform, what spawned the existence of the brand. Whether its founders had an epiphany or technology changed the way something could be done, it is important to know the origin of the why, and let it breathe throughout the life of the entity. A brand can and should grow far beyond its upstart stage. And yet, inside every product, partnership and campaign, there is the remembrance of where it all began.