The Path and The Wind, The Serpent and The Stone
The Brand, the Allegory, the Symbolism and the Story Our history is our story, it’s the nature of our wandering in the winding course of our lives, our explorations and poetic discoveries. The question might come to the nature of the wander—and what is that, just a...
Crowd Control | Brand Workshopping and the Deep Metaphors of Brands
You can always think poetically—"there’s a poem somewhere in this work.” There’s an allegory inside this brand—it’s the tiny enterprise, climbing the massive mountain towards a new vista—a new view to the world, and the community of their offering. There’s no easy...
Listening to the hand
Seeing stories in Brands, Design and Gesture. As a leader of workshops, and team-related branding sessions, I tend to watch my teams very carefully. My last blog spoke to listening, and appreciative observation— how to study the evidences of emotion in the gestures of...
Listening
Paying attention, appreciative perception and the emotionality of listening Isn’t it interesting, the way people lean-in? Leaning-in, they’re paying closer attention— why is that, is it a hearing expression? “I lean-in so I can hear better?” In running brand summits,...
Brand design and feelingness
Emotional strategies in sensate brand integration Brands ask, “touch me more often, be my friend, speak to me, stay in touch.” Talking to an executive brand team, I reach-out in a simple question—“what’s the point here—what’s this workshop really about?” And the...
The Theory of Love, Brand Strokes, Fire and the Filament of Being
A Wanderer’s Journey, Sensing the Heart, in Memory—From Afar In a bitterly cold subway channel, during a time when the ice was hanging stalactitic from the ceiling girders of the NYC Metro—and wind whipped so cold up the railed canyons of the running lines that eyes...
In the realm of the senses, brand space and holistic thinking
I gave a talk at Procter & Gamble’s hall at Building One, downtown Cincinnati. This talk was about spherical thinking, brands and storytelling, a way of looking at the narrative of brands as narrative concatenations—knots and threads of woven tellings, that...
Fire-Breathing Brand and Placemaking Development by GIRVIN
Hello, Year Of The Dragon Dragon, Ubud, Bali There are symbols that repeat themselves, the cycle in, return, vanish and reappear in other places—and symbolic language, as in the earlier blogs on brand archetypes. Isn’t it so that there are devices, objects, that...
GIRVIN’s Legendary Branding | The Hero Brand Archetype
When I was young, my Mother belonged to a Jungian Study Group—she, and a group of colleagues, friends and professionals would meet to explore Jung’s theories. What I took from this—in my pre-teen years--was that there was something interesting there, if they were...
Hello 2024
Brand Magic, the Succession of Time, and the Portals of Perception The very nature of brands is entirely wrapped around people—“who built the brand, and for whom did they build it?” Otherwise, to GIRVIN’s parlance:“what’s the story, who’s telling it, who’s listening,...