The You Evolution

There are a couple things I want to talk about today.

First off, how is a brand made, in general? How do brands such as Coca Cola and Disney gain the prominence that they have in today's market, and sustain the reputation that they've created for themselves over years and years? Is it a combination of luck and hard work, does it just have to be sheer genius, or is it all three?

I've learned from my Blake, Newton, and Disney class (an English class that I'm taking this semester which has been extremely enlightening), most of the origins of the Disney company-- all about Ub Iwerks and the original Disney-Iwerks animation studio, along with how Iwerks was the actual designer of Mickey Mouse. I know that Disney pioneered the use of sound and color in animation films, a feat that was the main attraction for audiences to the Mickey Mouse cartoons, which became extremely famous and were shown in actual movie theaters throughout the nation during the Great Depression. In that time of despair similar to what we're facing now in our economy, Mickey Mouse was there, providing laughs and mishaps, to the delight of audiences everywhere.
So maybe it was just good timing.

The development of the theme parks didn't come until much later after the Mickey Mouse cartoons, along with others such as the Silly Symphonies, were well-established in consumers' minds as a favorable, fun-to-watch entity, Iwerks had left the Disney company, returned, and left again, and several other deals were struck with sound and film producers ranging from New York to California. The parks were just an add-on to the already famous cartoons, a way for audiences to bond more with the Mickey Mouse character they had already become so fond of, but they exploded in popularity and today are the main fixture with which the Disney company is known.
So maybe it is luck after all.

Will people like your brand? That all depends on the time and circumstances in which you project it. The characters you create. The feelings you give people. The experiences you allow them to have. Will your brand become an epidemic of popularity across all nations and become an escape for people across the world, such as Disney has become? Probably not; I'm sure that only happens to one in a billion companies, the really, really lucky ones, with the really real geniuses and the really really hard work. Though Coca-Cola is an exceedingly well-known brand throughout the world, it still is not as prevalent as the Disney brand, and people have arguments as to whether Coke or Pepsi is better, in fact. Perhaps this is because Coke hasn't created any amusement parks, or perhaps it's because they're a completely different product. But they've still managed to become the undisputed leader in their category, and they did that as well as they could.

So maybe the key is just to really think about whether the way you want to project your brand is right for the times, its personality, its experience, its overall feeling. I think (and you've probably all heard this before, but I'm going to say it anyway) that brands are really people, and, as with any successful person, you have to make very clear to other people what type of person you are for them to really understand you. This is what Disney did with Mickey Mouse, and what Coke has done with their brand. The one is a good-hearted, clumsy fellow who gets himself into all sorts of entertaining conundrums, and the second is a happy, colorful, all around do-gooder. So who are you, product? What do you want from us, and more importantly, what can we get from you? Don't just tell us; make it fun, make it obvious, but most of all, make it relatable.

And perhaps, in these times, the key is...just to be yourself.