They said they didn’t want leaders, a brand, a message, anything organized because those were the cynical tools of the corporations. Their reasoning frustrated me a little (Okay, enough to shout back at the TV) — because if they did have a cause that was important enough to camp out in the park for, presumably it would be good to make more people aware of it, and to enlist more people to support it. The tools of leadership they were rejecting were also the tools of Jesus, Lincoln, Roosevelt, King– whose success in creating coherent messages and advancing causes the Occupiers might admire.
Well, if they hadn’t noticed, the Occupy Wall Streeters stumbled on some great branding elements anyway. They’ve added two superb Micro-Scripts to the lexicon that are going global, helping millions of people focus on a big idea: “We are the 99%” is one. The flipside Micro-Script is just as effective: The bad guys who’ve gamed the whole system are the 1%. Whether you agree with their math or not, it lays out the problem starkly, smacks of a real fact, and has been picked up everywhere in the media, the blogosphere and private conversations world wide because it’s so simple and repeatable. It’s viral man. The tool couldn’t be any slicker if it was created at Saatchi and Saatchi.
Just goes to show that branding is never optional. Because humans do it unconsciously and instantly whether you want them to or not. When you Micro-Script your message so succinctly and effectively into little story bites that people want to repeat– create true Micro-Scripts– they get picked and used by millions of people who you’ve helped to think and say the same thing. That’s what branding is–whether its for a noble cause or the forces of evil. The Occupy Wall Street people acted naive and silly when they said they didn’t want to put out a coherent message. But they managed to do it anyway–with a few Micro-Scripts for an idea whose time had come.
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