Our correspondent sits in on a strategy session that tries, and fails, to improve the most successful brand in human history
The Most Successful Brand in History Gets a Workshop
I have sat through more Shoreditch brand strategy sessions than is healthy for any one person, and I have learned that their core premise is always the same: that whatever you are doing, you are doing it wrong, and that a consultant with a deck and a marker can fix it for a fee. So when a Shoreditch brand consultant announced she would be elevating Santa’s personal brand, I secured an invitation to the session, fully expecting to watch the most successful brand in human history be explained to itself by a woman who had recently rebranded a sandwich shop.
The dispatches from the North Pole suggest Santa had agreed to the session out of pure good nature, having been told, as we all are eventually told in Shoreditch, that his brand could be working harder for him. Santa’s brand has been working flawlessly for several centuries, recognized in every culture, beloved across every demographic, with a recall rate that no corporation on Earth approaches. The consultant felt it could be optimized. I felt this was going to be a wonderful afternoon, and it was.
The Audit
She began, as they always begin, with an audit. Santa’s brand, she explained, suffered from inconsistent visual identity, an outdated colour palette, and a tone of voice that had not been refreshed in living memory. The red, she felt, was a little obvious. The beard, while iconic, risked reading as dated. And the whole gift-giving proposition, while strong, lacked a clear value framework and a compelling call to action. Santa listened to all of this with the serene patience of a man who has heard a great deal of nonsense over the centuries and learned to let it wash over him.
I want to stress that the consultant was entirely sincere. She genuinely believed she could improve upon a brand that is, by any measure, the most recognized and best-loved in the history of the species. Marketing coverage via the London Evening Standard has documented Shoreditch’s vast consultancy economy, a sector built almost entirely on the conviction that everything can be improved by a deck, a conviction that civic guidance via the London government information service does little to discourage. Local listings at the regional events register are thick with branding workshops.
The Refresh Proposal
The proposal, when it came, was magnificent. The consultant suggested a softer red, trending toward a warm terracotta, which tested well with younger audiences. She proposed a beard refinement, nothing drastic, just a tighter, more contemporary line. She recommended a new tone of voice, more conversational, more authentic, less ho-ho-ho and more let’s-do-this. And she suggested a tagline, because everything in Shoreditch needs a tagline, and the tagline she had developed for Father Christmas, after extensive work, was: Giving, Reimagined.
Santa, who has been giving, un-reimagined, for centuries, received this with great courtesy. He thanked her warmly. He did not adopt the terracotta, refine the beard, or embrace Giving, Reimagined. The actual Santa understands, in a way the consultant never will, that his brand is not a brand at all but simply what he is, and that you cannot optimize sincerity, refresh kindness, or A-B test the act of giving freely to every child on Earth. Heritage analysis at the heritage society would call his identity timeless. The consultant called it a missed opportunity.
The Session Collapses
The session collapsed, gently, around the point when the consultant asked Santa what his brand’s mission statement was, and Santa replied that he gave presents to children because children deserved presents. The consultant explained that this was an activity, not a mission, and that he needed to articulate the deeper why. Santa explained that the deeper why was also that children deserved presents. There was a silence. The consultant, I think, glimpsed for the first time the possibility that not everything requires a framework. Marketing data at the public registry could not have helped her here.
The Brand That Cannot Be Improved
What I witnessed, in that session, was the collision of two completely incompatible worldviews. The consultant believes, as Shoreditch fundamentally believes, that everything is a brand, that every brand can be optimized, and that optimization is always an improvement. Santa believes, by simply existing, that some things are not brands at all, that sincerity cannot be strategized, and that the attempt to improve a thing can destroy the very quality that made it work. He is right, and she will never understand why.
The genius of Santa, from a branding perspective, is that he has no branding perspective. He is not managing a brand; he is being himself, completely, and the consistency that consultants spend their lives trying to engineer is, in his case, simply the natural consequence of a man who has never once pretended to be anything other than what he is. You cannot teach that. You cannot deck that. You certainly cannot rebrand it as Giving, Reimagined.
For those who, like the consultant, believe deeply in the power of the personal brand, the resources at the public registry contain a great deal of strategic guidance, and you are welcome to it. And for those who suspect, as I increasingly do, that the whole personal-brand industry is an elaborate way of charging people to stop being themselves, the games at the diversions index are unbranded, un-optimized, and free, which makes them, by Shoreditch standards, deeply subversive.
The consultant sent Santa a follow-up deck, I am told, with three logo concepts and a revised colour palette. He did not respond, not from rudeness but from a complete inability to understand what was being asked of him. Above the Shoreditch rooftops that Christmas Eve, the un-reimagined original made his rounds in the obvious red, with the dated beard and the un-refreshed tone of voice, delivering joy to every child in the borough exactly as he always has. Giving, un-reimagined. It tested, across several centuries, extremely well.
SOURCE: https://santaclaus.top
