It happens to us now and then: a brand we love is suddenly gone. How does that happen and why? Who's in charge of brand funerals, and what is the process of allowing a brand to die? Can a brand live forever? What does that take? Good questions.
This morning, I found out, in a passing manner, that a good friend of mine, with whom I had worked quite often, died. He died alone and was only discovered after a neighbor saw his mail piling up on his porch. Then a well-being check, and then the discovery. Over the years, he had stopped going out, communicating with any of us, and choosing rather to become a recluse, leaving his home only for cigarettes and food. He was a brilliant mind, a kind soul, and a daily fixture in the lives of many of us as we wrote, inhabited stages, and sat in rooms and debated the long, slow death of the American theater.
It troubles me because he was a voice and a man of integrity who directed great shows and guided young writers on their paths to success. He was always that delightful combination of curmudgeon, misanthrope, and toastmaster. He could talk for hours about plays, writing, and theater, but he preferred not to. So, conversations with him were exciting because you had to keep him in the room. I remember now that when you spoke to him, he was always in a doorway, about to leave, but first, one more thing. And the conversation would go on and on, always rich and full, funny and thought-provoking. But always with one foot out the door.
There was that pull in him that I am very familiar with. The need to be away from the crowd, but loving being with the crowd. The desire to be home, alone, with a bourbon and a book, but looking around a room of artists and never wanting to leave. It's a strange pull that I live with, and he, sadly, died with.
I don't have time for this, and that troubles me almost as much as the loss itself. I need to write this, do that, come to grips with AI, and now, a guy that I worked cheek by jowl with for many years is gone, and I feel like I don't have time to give him more than a few sentences. He was here. Now he's gone. And, of course, my ThoughtLab mind turns to brands.
It happens to us now and then: a brand we love is suddenly gone. How does that happen and why? Who's in charge of brand funerals, and what is the process of allowing a brand to die? Can a brand live forever? What does that take? Good questions. Maybe we'll get to some today.
How a Voice Goes Quiet
Nobody announces it. That's the thing nobody tells you about losing a voice, whether it belongs to a person or a brand. It just stops, and the absence arrives without ceremony.
My friend didn't disappear overnight. Looking back, it was a long, slow withdrawal. First, the calls got less frequent, then the shows stopped, then the conversations in doorways grew shorter, and finally the doorway itself was just a doorway again with nobody standing in it. The mail piled up on his porch for days before anyone thought to check. That's how quiet his going had become. The world had simply adjusted to his absence, the way you adjust to a draft in a room, until adjusting becomes forgetting.
Brands do this too. Not the dramatic ones that go down swinging, getting written up in trade publications with the kind of coverage they never got while they were alive. Those deaths, at least, have the dignity of being noticed. The ones that trouble me are the ones that go quiet, the way my friend did. Gradually. Willingly, almost. A voice that was once sharp and present softens, then hedges, then stops saying anything you could hold onto. The posts get sparse. The point of view disappears. The brand starts sounding like it's reading from a script written by a committee trying very hard not to offend anyone, which produces language that couldn't offend a throw pillow. And we all know how fussy throw pillows are.
And then one day, you realize you haven't heard from them in a while. The mail is piling up.
What Kills a Brand From the Inside Out
The easy answer is disruption. The market shifted, the competition got smarter, the technology changed, and the brand simply couldn't keep up. That's a tidy story, and it's sometimes even true. But it's also the answer that lets everyone off the hook, because it locates the cause of death somewhere outside the building, in the market, the timing, and the forces beyond anyone's control. Convenient, but not always honest.
The harder answer is that most brands that go quiet do it to themselves. Not dramatically, not with any single catastrophic decision, but through a long series of small withdrawals that nobody names as they happen. They stop taking positions because positions invite argument. They stop using a distinctive voice because a distinctive voice might alienate someone. They round off the edges, soften the claims, and sand down anything that might cause friction, until what's left is so smooth and so agreeable that it slides right through the mind without leaving a mark.
It usually starts with fear dressed up as strategy. The brand had a point of view once, something specific and ownable, and then the room got nervous about it. Too narrow, someone said. Too risky. What about this audience, and what about that one? So the point of view got broader, then broader still, and somewhere in all that broadening, it stopped being a point of view at all. It became a posture. A holding pattern. A brand-shaped object where a brand once was.
My friend had a point of view. Sharp, specific, occasionally uncomfortable, and completely his own. He didn't lose it. He just stopped bringing it into rooms. And eventually, he stopped coming to the rooms altogether. The difference between him and a brand is that a brand has a choice about whether to keep showing up. He, for reasons I'll probably never fully understand, felt that he didn't.
The Doorway Problem
There is a particular kind of person who is always about to leave. You know the type. They arrive at a party already thinking about going home, spend the whole evening with their coat somewhere nearby, and yet somehow end up being the last one out the door. They're present and absent at the same time, one foot in the room and the other pointed toward the exit, creating a strange energy that draws people to them. You find yourself wanting to keep them there, wanting to be interesting enough, wanting to say the one thing that makes them decide to stay a little longer.
My friend was that person. Always in the doorway. Always with one more thing. And the conversation that followed was almost always worth the effort of keeping him there.
Some brands have that quality, and when they do, it's magnetic. They don't chase you. They don't flood your inbox or follow you around the internet like a lost golden retriever. They show up with something worth saying, and then they go quiet again, and that restraint makes you pay attention when they do speak. The voice has weight because it isn't always talking.
The trouble comes when the brand mistakes restraint for withdrawal. When the doorway becomes a habit, and the habit becomes a wall. Staying interesting requires staying present, at least enough to remind people why they wanted to keep you in the room in the first place. A brand that goes too quiet for too long stops being intriguing and starts being forgotten, which is a very different thing, and a much harder one to come back from.
The Takeaway
My friend was a brand, though he would have hated me saying that. He had a voice, a point of view, a loyal audience, and a presence felt most acutely when absent. He was the kind of person whose silence changed the temperature of a room. And in the end, he chose to go quiet, slowly and completely, until the only evidence that he had ever been present was a pile of mail on a porch and a hole in the conversation that nobody had quite gotten around to naming.
Brands don't get to make that choice, or rather, they shouldn't. A brand that goes quiet isn't being mysterious, disciplined, or interestingly restrained. It's dying in slow motion, and the market, indifferent as any good audience eventually becomes, will adjust to its absence the same way it adjusts to everything else. Quickly, and without much ceremony.
The question worth asking, before the mail starts piling up, is whether you know what your brand sounds like when it's fully in the room. Not the committee version, not the legally approved version, not the version that couldn't offend a throw pillow. The real version. The one with a point of view sharp enough to start a conversation and a voice specific enough to be missed when it goes quiet.
At ThoughtLab, that's the work we keep coming back to. Not just building brands, but building brands that have the constitution to stay present, stay specific, and stay themselves even when the easier option is to soften, hedge, and slowly back toward the exit. The world has enough brands that are almost saying something. What it needs, and what we help build, are the ones that actually do.
My friend deserved a better send-off than a few sentences squeezed between deadlines. This was the best I could do today. I think he would have stayed in the doorway long enough to read it.
