“you can have good, cheap and fast…
but not all three”

-Conventional Wisdom

Challenge accepted.

Having personally captained over 50 brand launches & rebrands for a mix of ad agencies, startups and global brands throughout a career that now spans 27 years (yep, 27 years! I got my start in “the industry” as a mere 20 year-old in 1997 - time flies baby!). The Brand creation process is often painfully slow, incredibly expensive and vulnerable to a huge contingent of unknown and complex variables outside of our control that might make the effort irrelevant in the end anyway. The crazy part? Absolutely no one I know likes to work that way… but they keep doing it anyway.

A few years ago while I was leading a small but mighty in-house team in a rebrand of the then ascendant Mercato (case study linked here), after the departure of our gifted and charismatic CMO, our CEO let us know it we had a clean slate - but it had to be done and launched in a single quarter.

**GULP**

Traditionally speaking, a rebrand of that scale would involve internal workgroups, dedicated resources , outside vendors and their procurement, and require a minimum of 3 three quarters (9 months) to push the brand piglets through the python. We had 3 months and not much else. We were busy. Maxed-out busy. But we were also an agile minded startup. Maybe we could break the rules? Make the process work for us and not against us? That’s what we told ourselves as we dove in with the guiding principle that we could compress steps but not delete them.

We needed market research to give us context (actionable data)
We needed strategy.
We needed skill and scrappy grit.
We needed a flexible process that made life easier not harder.
Most of all we needed heaps and heaps of speed with the talent to land accurate shots.

As creative director, I like to joke that “deadlines cure ADD”:
( SIDE NOTE: I personally believe that the hyper-flexible, free-ranging mind of the creative soul blessed with ADD is God’s gift to humanity… and deadlines are God’s conciliatory gift back to the professional creative… It’s rigged game, but we play for keeps).

We worked, hard smart and very very fast. Philosophically, we pivoted from a transactional emphasis common to the grocery category to a human centered approach that focused on our relationship with the communities that we operated in that were sustained by people, not algorithms. (If you are reading this and working in a financial institution - we should talk…). Creatively, the emphasis on people was a game changer. The work sprung to life in truly captivating and differentiated ways.

I would love to tell you a happily ever after story. But the Pandemic ended, the cultural zeitgeist of fear and greed driving the category faded and the billionaire’s club who previously over-funded a once white-hot category lost interest, made other bets and moved on in search of their next We-Work style experiment. Almost everyone lost their jobs. Myself included. It sucked to create something so compelling only to see it crash and burn with people’s careers I truly cared about still inside.

Despite getting punched in the face and working so hard and for so long without sleep I had seizure that was a precursor to suffering a massive stroke, I learned a lot from my time at Mercato. I grew. I knew I could do it even better. Faster. I studied the process. I looked at the structure and the outcomes.I filled the pot holes that messed with our need for speed. The way that strategy seems to be segregated from creative development bothered me (But paradoxically, all the gifted strategist I know are creative weapons). So I broke that rule’s precious little neck to liberate the process. I experimented with agile based sprint methodology and broke even more rules. I haven’t worked an all-nighter since and God-willing I wont suffer another stroke. I’ve done a LOT of brand sprints since then. Going from 3 months to 1, and I just wrapped up two brand launches in under ten days.

It can get pretty manic and requires down time to reset. But my favorite version of the future is the one with the wild look in her eyes and a mischievous penchant for possibility and mischief, not the rigid orthodoxy of conventional thinking in love with the past at the expense of the future.