When Young People Make Brands

Young entrepreneurs are the best, aren’t they? I find that I’m connecting with newer brands a lot, as more and more of my peers come of the age where they can create through their own companies. It’s pretty clear to me the power this will have in the next five years over what’s being made.

And with that, a great story by Rob Walker in the New York Times Magazine on young entrepreneurs, counterculture consumerism, and the evolution of lifestyle branding. Good read!

My thoughts while reading this were conveniently colored by the experience I had on Saturday night, when I very randomly caught a “Rocket From the Tombs” show in Brooklyn. Now in middle-age, the context of their once obscurely infamous mid-seventies proto-punk style was completely lost in translation. I thought to myself, "This feels like a corporate branding hustle." It’s the same type of misstep that Walker notes is something youth see through in a second with corporate marketing that comes from the wrong place. And more or less, the topic of Walker’s article is about how Millennials are so schooled in the language of branding (“Their apprenticeship was the act of growing up in a thoroughly commercialized world”), that when they get to express themselves as entrepreneurs, they’re redefining what branding is. The verdict seems to be that it's coming from a more honest and authentic place.

And so Walker takes a good look at a sampling of twenty-something lifestyle brand entrepreneurs (using t-shirt brands as his control group). Part of the driver of change is that it is second nature for Millennials to understand that brands start with an idea, then create a product to express that idea. And definitely, things like elevated expectations as consumers, a global marketplace, a post modern world view and the miracle that is the Internet also get in the mix to create change. And a bit on how it’s showing up:

"Many of them clearly see what they are doing as not only noncorporate but also somehow anticorporate: making statements against the materialistic mainstream — but doing it with different forms of materialism. In other words, they see products and brands as viable forms of creative expression."

So these rebellious brands are rebelling by making more connected products, a more authentic vision, and then communicating with their customers using new Web tools and a general style of openness (see The Hundreds MySpace page and blog style web site). I like what I'm seeing.

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