Why Don’t We Have a Global Brand? — II

After the first part, I’m continuing the series with the second.

We value clothes, not ideas.

“People are welcomed by their clothes, honored for their knowledge and sent off by their character. — Mevlana”

Original ideas, creative solutions and game-changing shifts can only ever come from free minds, from individuals who are not locked up behind virtual bars. They are free minds that can see outside the box, with a well-developed ability to look at things from a new perspective, without responsibilities like the top button of their shirt choking their throat. They are not among the slaves created by the modern world, exposed to the sidelong glances of the office fixtures, every move watched from behind frosted glass.

When we look at the motivation behind the office environments created by the world’s most valuable companies today, we can see the change brought about by the leaders of the future: leaders who make no room in their workplaces for the oppressive regime I tried to describe in flowery sentences in the paragraph above, and who believe that world-changing minds can only ever be created by individuals who can think freely.

Only an individual who isn’t judged by the clothes they wear, the beard they haven’t shaved, the last button of their shirt left undone or the names they put in the wrong order in CC, who can focus on their work and is held responsible for that alone, can pull off game-changing work. Don’t take all this to mean that I’m praising a lack of discipline. True discipline is a person’s attitude toward their work, the originality of their ideas and the soundness of their thinking, not their clothes!

“A person’s mirror is their work; words are not to be heeded. The rank of one’s mind shows in one’s deeds.” — Ziya Paşa
(A person’s mirror is what they do, not what they say; because the level of a person’s mind only reveals itself through their work.)

A results-oriented society

“Success is a journey, not a destination. — Ben Sweetland”

For us, success has so often meant getting top marks on exams, making it into university, getting through the reporting period, wrapping up the campaign, closing the books at year end. We weren’t raised to be people who enjoy the process. Creating a brand is partly about loving the journey you go through with that brand. Success is a journey, not a final stop. The work itself matters more than the result.

Shortcomings of the Education System

It’s a fact that today, in our universities, there are professors who teach e-commerce yet say that Facebook and Twitter exist only for chatting and have no other function, and who look down on people who shop online. It’s hard to expect an education system with faculty like that to raise the people who founded Amazon.com. While schools abroad give students start-up projects as final assignments, we’re raising generations who can’t even answer the question of what a start-up is.

All the reasons I’ve listed so far are just the tip of the iceberg. Just as there are many other micro reasons like these, there are of course many macro reasons why we can’t produce a world-class brand. In the third and final post of the series, I’ll address both these macro reasons and the Turkish brands with the potential to become global brands in the near future.

*This post was first published on Marketingholmes.com.

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