are we made of what we own? or vice versa?

we've all got our list of go-to websites that we can completely lose ourselves in when we have an extra ten or fifteen minutes. of course when we're still there 45 minutes later and have accomplished absolutely no work at all in the meantime, that's when you know the site's a keeper.

my current keeper of the moment happens to be http://www.onesentence.org/. the site, strangely enough is exactly what you might think, a simple user-submitted list of single sentences. from hilarious to disturbing to jaw-dropping, the list contains entire stories without the puffery, without examples, without adjectives, setting, or backstory. these entries, sometimes as few as 7 or 8 words can represent entire years of a person's life and take no more than 5 seconds to read.

as i think about how much detail and how much personality these singular sentences have, it makes me think of how many tens and hundreds of pages i wrote throughout high school and college that collectively couldn't muster the soul that is contained in some of these posts. to me, that is advertising; taking a hundred page report on why your target is your target, why they buy what they buy, why they like you, what they want to see from you next, where they shop, what they eat, how much they make, what they wish they could afford, what their names are . . . and turning that into 9 words. as impossible as it may sound to take the entire lives of a collective group of people and try to transplant it into a tagline for a product, that is how relationships are made.

we all have relationships with the products we buy, and we purchase those products, most of them anyway, because they fit our lifestyle. whether it be price, color, taste, texture, we buy the things we buy because we like how THEY fit into OUR lives. isn't it interesting then, that the reason they fit so nicely into our lives is because our lives helped form the product.

this backwards-compatability is what is helping to reshape the way we see consumer goods. we can no longer think of the traditional top-down pyramid of CEO to supervisor to manager to clerk to customer. a successful brand has the product and the customer at every level of the game. my thoughts on a model, if there has to be one, is a circle of your business plan with the facets of your business around the outside, and the customer in the middle. the consistent interaction with the consumer at every level will ensure their approval at every step and form a more personal business model that will increase repeat business and spread the word of your company's good character.

character is what we do when no one is watching.