Stuff to make you go “hmmm...”

If you were born after the early 90s, what was once the standard in getting to know someone may seem like abbreviated nonsense. Before social media platforms took hold of most of our lives, AOL reigned supreme as the development of the World Wide Web drove the ubiquity of home computers and a meteoric fascination with online communications. Whether via email, instant messaging, or chat rooms, initiating conversation with another typically started this way. “A/S/L” (age/sex/location) was a new-fashioned colloquialism that offered fast facts on someone.

In his recently released, best-selling memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, Bono describes the extraordinary talent of each of his U2 bandmates as, among other things, masters of their instruments. Of himself, however, he admits that his giftedness is neither instrumental nor vocal but rather it’s his ability to find the topline melody in anything – songs, random ideas, disparate thoughts, and even in the motivations of adversarial world leaders to help unite them around a common cause.

People find change difficult. Especially when it’s abrupt. Like downloading an update that changes your entire user experience when you just learned to navigate the last one. There’s an old saying “the only constant is change” but we believe that in business, brand purpose is the compass you need to navigate the current, even as it changes.