"Branding isn’t a paint job": 5 questions with Peter Tashjian

I think the greatest brands are the religious ones: the cross, the Star of David, the crescent moon. None of them began as “brands” of course, but they work the way the best brands do. They present a belief system that holds power across generations, create a sense of belonging, and use symbols as a visual shorthand for everything they stand for. Every modern brand is essentially trying to reverse-engineer this same kind of religious power by organising its beliefs, behaviours, and identity into something coherent and compelling to audiences.

If you go even further back, you probably get to universal symbols that definitely aren’t brands but worked the same way. Elements like fire and water. Celestial objects like the sun and moon. Pure forms like a circle or sphere. These were a pre-linguistic visual system of sorts that tapped into the human desire for warmth, safety, community, control, survival.

Treating strategy and creativity like they’re two different species. Great design is always strategic because it’s solving something. The best strategy always has a creative spark in it. When they’re siloed, both suffer. The creative feels thin, or the strategy arrives DOA. I’ve never believed in the handoff model where strategy makes a box and creative colours inside it. The breakthroughs happen when the two bleed into each other. So when I see people treating them as separate lanes, my instinct is always to merge them again.

I’m not sure how much I subscribe to defined personality types, but INTP’s are supposedly most comfortable with conceptual and analytical thinking, which I think rings true for me. But a great brand also needs a much more intuitive, off-kilter, or emotional dimension to really feel alive. That’s the power of an agency. I’m lucky to work with partners and designers who approach problems from different angles and with personality types. When it all comes together, you get work that makes sense but is also felt deeply.

I wish people understood that branding isn’t a paint job. When it’s done well, it’s closer to defining a belief system: an organising idea that shapes hiring, culture, operations, product, everything. Advertising is easier to grasp because it’s outward-facing and built to sell. Branding is the consistent idea that is beneath all the different offerings and campaigns. You can feel this in the world’s strongest brands. The products and advertising may change year to year, but the underlying idea never wobbles. That’s what we mean when we describe brand as a “North Star.”

Probably something that acknowledges how random life feels and how it only ever all makes sense in retrospect. I’ve never written down a life goal. I just handled today, stayed open-minded about tomorrow, and tried to make good or at least not disastrous decisions along the way. So maybe I’d call it: “Gee, That Wasn’t in the Plan.” Or maybe: “Ok, So How Did I Get Here?”

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