Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Time builds brands
Peter Rahal studied the best brands and found they are all old. The identity can be dynamic as it grows, but the brand has to keep doing the same thing for years with great product and service. The time piece is critical.
Fragile and repeated
There is an asymmetry to it: brands like these are super fragile, and messing around on quality can finish one quickly. David Ogilvy, who built one of the great advertising agencies, reached the same conclusion. People jump around too much, he held, so pick one brand identity and repeat it for decades.
Values from a sculpture
David Protein's values are intelligence, beauty, and discipline, rooted in Michelangelo's sculpture of David and the chisel that made it. The chisel is a crude nail of a tool, but its meaning is intelligence and discipline, and applying those produces a masterpiece. Rahal chose the values because they are close to him: he loves beauty and intelligence, and he loves suffering and discipline almost to a negative degree.
Why did Ogilvy favor one brand identity?
David Ogilvy founded the agency Ogilvy & Mather in 1948 and helped spread the idea of a brand image in a 1955 talk. His 1951 campaign for Hathaway shirts, built around a man in an eye patch, kept the same distinctive look for years. He argued in his 1963 book Confessions of an Advertising Man that every advertisement should add to a long-term image rather than start over.
Why was Michelangelo's David carved from a rejected block?
The marble block was quarried in Carrara and left in Florence after two earlier sculptors started and stopped work on it, in part because of its awkward height and shallow depth. Michelangelo took the commission in 1501 at age 26 and finished the statue in 1504. The figure is about 5.2 meters tall, not counting its base.
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