Strategygram: A Brand's Greatest Adversary

When you see the world differently, you also see your role in it differently. That’s why Galileo’s discovery wasn’t just about the revolution of the earth around the sun, it was about a revolution in what we thought and believed, what we could invent and achieve, what we could become.

Could it be that your brand’s greatest adversary is its worldview?

Consider, for example, two enterprises founded in the mid-1990s, one in Scandinavia and the other in the United States. Both enterprises started around the same time with the same idea: sell books online globally. Books, they reasoned, were small, standardised, mailable items that customers around the world could buy with confidence.

There was one significant difference between the two enterprises, though. The Scandinavian enterprise defined its business from the inception as online book-selling. The American entrepreneur, a hedge fund manager who quit his job because the data he was looking at portended continued exponential growth of the Internet, saw from day one the chance to create the world’s largest online marketplace. For him, books were just the logical starting point for a sequential expansion of his business.

Inevitably, the American was pooh-poohed for his point of view—critics said he would be swatted aside by bigger book-selling rivals already established in the bricks-and-mortar world.

You, of course, know the story. As Wikipedia notes, that company today is “the world’s largest online sales company, the largest Internet company by revenue, and the world’s largest provider of virtual assistants and cloud infrastructure services.” Oh, and the founder, who had to borrow $300,000 from his parents to start his business, became the world’s first centibillionaire.

The intention here is not to argue in favour of big visions and sequenced expansion— we all know the follies of brand over-reach. Rather, the intention is to surface the value of questioning our brand’s worldview and the consequent identity self-definition.

Both the Scandinavian company (which eventually merged and disappeared) and the American saw the same thing: the astounding potential of the Internet. One, however, defined itself only on the basis of what it could do now, while the other defined itself on what could be done ahead too.

What was it that Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Gy?rgyi de Nagyrápolt said? “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”

Data doesn’t speak; your mind does. Having the right data is one thing; having the right conclusion is quite another. That’s what Galileo Galilei taught us: replace dogma with data, delusion with discovery.

A brand navigates by its worldview and the identity self-definition that worldview shapes. Both these intertwined factors set the limits on the opportunities a brand can see and seize. They are also potentially a brand’s greatest adversary because they are as invisible as water to a fish or air to a human being—and as essential.

Nevertheless, when you think about your brand’s worldview, the question remains: time for a discovery?

Sattar Khan

This Strategygram titled ‘Galileo’s Discovery’ is part of the series I’ve created where each Strategygram condenses one strategic thought into one image.

The series is a visual guide to strategic thinking and provides handy image prompts for brand strategy workouts.?

#strategygrams #visualthinking #branddifferentiation #brandexperience #strategy #brandstrategy #clarity #visualstorytelling #story #strategist