America Made a World

America Made a World is a collection of short stories featuring famous, and not-so famous, American brands. The brands featured in the stories play integral roles but not always major ones. Brands enter into our lives and assume a place in the home, pocket, car, on the body or in our stomachs thanks to the fulfillment of certain core needs. The brands in America Made a World create structure, contours, outlines for our lives and in some cases, they can even become our lives. As a professional in branding, I have spent an inordinate amount of time over the past 26 years thinking about and studying the elements that make one brand better than another. One small but quite significant observation is that the less discernible the role a brand plays in our lives, the longer that brand will be in our lives. In other words, the stronger brands are the ones that eventually lose their independence and become part of our "societal DNA." The brand must be injected with the energy, capriciousness and originality of us, the consumers, in order to survive. The brand becomes part of the quilt that we pull together over a lifetime and rather than focus on the individual patches, we cherish the warm it provides. Born and raised in small-town America, it was a great surprise for me when I saw how other cultures take brands, we consider 100% American, and then mold them into something acceptable and understandable for the given cultural and linguistic setting. A brand in one country can be interpreted completely differently in another country. The so-called "brand values" instilled into the product by the brand creator and then passed onto the brand manager become, in some cases, radically altered. The messages that had been inputted for us, the consumers, by the branding team run up against life; and, then other languages happen to the brands, local values and even both political and environmental differences play a role in how the final brand will be both used and perceived.