Skies that become ceilings
Building the sky is the easy part. The ground is the work.
I like fireworks.
The ones you keep in your memory, not on your camera roll. Because we all know that trying to record or capture the sky on New Year’s Eve—or at a great party—is a waste of time.
And the other kind, too.
The ones we build inside a presentation. The ones we detonate with every click of a mouse.
A brilliant idea. An huge purpose. A new positioning. An impeccable brand book. A vision capable of making everyone in the room feel, for forty-five minutes and with the right soundtrack, as though we’re about to change the world.
I’ve built those too.
Because for a while I thought that was part of my job: getting people to lift their heads and look up. Making their eyes—and their faces—light up.
Then I started thinking about how fleeting that moment really is.
Building that sky is easy. Colors. Sound. A few special effects. Some carefully crafted words.
All of it fitting neatly into forty-five minutes.
The thing is, many of those skies eventually become ceilings. Cages.
Because before asking someone to look up so you can paint an explosion of meaning above their head, perhaps we should first ask whether there’s enough ground beneath their feet for them to lift their chin without feeling overwhelmed.
Knocked flat.
Because a vision can be beautiful. The music can be inspiring. The manifesto can ignite people. And still be impossible to sustain.
For a long time I thought my job was to build skies.
Now I know it’s something else. It’s about building the ground. Paving it. Stone by stone. Decision by decision. Session by session.
During the process.
Not on presentation day. Not with the feedback and the final approval. During the process.
So if you’re not willing to fire up the concrete mixer and start paving that ground over time... you and your client are fucked in trouble.
And if you think I’m talking about lowering ambition, not at all.
I’m talking about giving ambition somewhere to stand. Giving it ground.
The Ground
The ground doesn’t appear the day a manifesto gets approved. Or when the Board gives you a thumbs-up and a reassuring pat on the back. Or when the new positioning comes back from the printer, ready to be pinned to the meeting room wall.
Ground doesn’t emerge by spontaneous generation.
It appears when there’s no meaningful distance between what you say you are and what you actually are.
Which sounds simple enough. Except we’re inconsistent by nature.
Everything else —everything else— is fireworks.
If you think I’m a fireworks hater, keep reading.
You’ve probably worked with, or met, CMOs who kept looking far beyond the deck, searching for a sky worthy of spectacular fireworks. And you’ve probably seen Boards that were remarkably good at building ceilings for those CMOs.
And for you, if you happened to be part of the equation.
They never quite say no. They just make sure every decision fits perfectly inside the same Excel cell.
You’ve probably also seen brands obsessed with the display window.
The postcard. The finish-line photo. The award. The explosion. The illuminated sky. All while showing zero compound interest in the journey.
The journey that consists of repeating. Getting it wrong. Correcting (or iterating… that little word, if it suits you better).
Trying again. And above all, turning a promise into something that starts looking a lot more like a habit.
So maybe strategy isn’t there to convince anyone.
Maybe it’s there to help an organization sustain, six months from now, what it was capable of saying out loud for forty-five minutes today.
Because anyone can write a purpose. The hard part is making sure that, on any given Tuesday in March, at 10:15 in the morning, someone makes a different decision because of it.
That’s ground.
Everything else...
is fireworks.
Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas
cultooruido.com