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Johnnie Moore has a good post on emergent branding and the perils of management trying to impose affinity on employees. It’s all worth reading, so I hope he doesn’t mind me skipping to the conclusion, which really resonated with me:

You know, I think it’s quite hard to articulate and stand up for a less formulaic, more emergent way of approaching brands.  Because there is this constant pressure to come up with easy answers, and to avoid paradox and at all costs keep out of the discomfort of not knowing.

When I was in Paris a few weeks ago, I had a meeting with a PR person, wherein we discussed the whole metrics silliness that grips marketing and PR. After agreeing that a headshift away from the metrics mindset was needed, I was asked what was going to happen to make that headshift happen. I said, quite frankly, that I did not know. “Well,” came the reply, “I do not accept that answer.”

Some people cannot accept this uncertainty, but the fact is that whether they can accept it or not, and whether they find the acceptance easy or difficult, some things in life are uncertain. Is it this very metrics mindset that makes such uncertainty so hard to swallow?