Fans of Dante Alighieri’s epic deadlands romp, The Divine Comedies, are well versed in hell’s 9 circles: limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery. How the Purgatorio he failed to put brand manifestos on the list is hard to fathom—because, as every writer who’s ever been given the Sisyphean task to come up with one knows, it’s a gig that goes deep south far more easily than anyplace else.

Okay, check that—no accounting for either taste or masochism—because the Reductionist is one of the few that actually likes working on these tricky devils, especially if it involves the writer/director package. Maybe more in the aftermath than the instance, when what lingers isn’t the pain of facing down Hemmingway’s “white bull,” the vast and desolate wasteland of the blank page, but rather, the golden glow that comes from spreading one’s writerly wings.

Assuming, of course, all has gone well. When not, as the Brainchild team observed on LinkedIn last Tuesday,  a “thing of beauty” becomes a pile of smelly dog excrement, floating in a soggy pool of the highly flammable accelerant called “brand purpose,” then lit on fire.

You want to know the very clear, if not obvious, reason too many of these anthems incline to the latter? Quite simply: a failure of magic.

At the risk of biting the hands that feed, that generally happens when someone with a grand title in the creative food chain fails to let that magic happen. As a result, the product winds up drifting into the other levels of hell that Dante somehow forgot: mediocrity, unoriginality, pretension, being boring, being cloying, and, perhaps, the most damnable of all, trying too hard.

How to avoid this sinful waste of perfectly lovely opportunity? As we say in advertising, your actual miles may vary, and all I can speak from is my own experience. But here’s a few hard-earned lessons learned:

First, understand that a brand manifesto is a form of persuasive communication, a.k.a. an “ad.” As such it needs to be grounded in a clear objective, have an honest reason for being, be more than an exercise in corporate mirror-gazing or agency pitch pandering.

Second, to avoid the ultimate no-no—manifesto as organizational propaganda—it has to be built on truth.  And not just any “truth,” but one that’s interesting, human, and, as in all things competitive, unique.

Third, and completely counter-intuitively for a word-fest genre, a manifesto needs to be relentlessly single-minded. You doubt this, look at the most successful examples—Apple’s Think Different (“Here’s to the crazy ones”) or, as the estimable Bob Brihn likes to point out, Dow Chemical’s “Human Element” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i2ojduUdy4). Of course, he’s CD/art director so what does he know?

Fourth is for clients: it ain’t your job to come up with either that core truth or that single-minded message. And the reason is pretty cool: you’re living it, making it true, making it happen. You are not, however, standing at an objective distance, with the right perspective to crystallize it. 

Fifth, the good news for clients, is that you don’t have to solve the problem for us. What we do need, not an easy give for people with your job description, is the gift of your time. Although a eureka moment in those conversations is rare (sometimes does happen), without getting your sense of things and being able to dive in with questions is a massive disadvantage.

Sixth is for the writers: this is about being lyrical and visual, not contrived and artificially poetic. You don’t have to take my word for it, here’s what no less a light than Gerry Graf put out in the world: https://adage.com/article/agency-news/slap-globals-mini-musical-indictment-agency-manifestos/2308901

Last is for all of us, from the words and pictures team up to the CEO: be very, very, very, very gentle in editorial. Again, this is personal experience speaking, but when I’ve been tasked with the review part, I always start by seeing the work as a tapestry where flow, cadence, transitions and connections are all in play. And we all know what happens when you start pulling on threads. 

Need to end it here, because, no coincidence, I actually have one of these bad boys striding Charon’s foredeck as we speak. Reminds me of what Dante, his own damned self, had to say:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!*

Ciao, baby!

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*Midway upon the journey of our life/I found myself within a forest dark/For the straightforward pathway had been lost/Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say/What was this forest savage, rough, and stern/Which in the very thought renews the fear. PS: Ain’t the interwebs a wonderful thing?