No Brand Is a Brand — What a Store in Ginza Taught Me About Something I Wrote in 1996
Ginza on a weekday afternoon. Chanel. Dior. Louis Vuitton. Gucci. Cartier. Bulgari. Glass, gold, polished stone. If there's a street on this planet that has turned the logo into architecture, this is it. And right there, among them, a big store with its name across the front. Muji. Short for Mujirushi Ryohin. No brand, quality goods. I laughed. Out loud, on the sidewalk, like a tourist who just got the joke. Because I had written that joke, more or less, in 1996. My master's thesis at the University of Florence was on advertising and branding, through the lens of the sociology of communication. Its core argument was simple. You cannot opt out. Choosing not to have a brand is a brand. Silence is a message. The person who says "I don't care what I wear" is wearing that sentence every morning. Muji was born as a supermarket house brand in 1980. Forty products. No logos, no packaging theatre. The slogan was honest to the point of being funny: cheap, for a reason. But look at who they asked to build "nothing." Ikko Tanaka, one of the great graphic designers of Japan. Kazuko Koike on the words. Takashi Sugimoto on the interiors. The best minds in the country, gathered to design the absence of design. Within three years it had its own store, and it was already a style. People didn't buy Muji in spite of the missing brand. They bought it because of it. The absence became the signature. And here's the part I love. In those same years, the same retail group behind Muji was bringing Hermès into Japan. No-brand on one shelf, all-brand on the other. Same owners. Not hypocrisy. Just people who understood, better than most, that both are statements. Steve Jobs knew it too. A black turtleneck, jeans, sneakers, every day. The anti-fashion uniform. Except the turtleneck came from Issey Miyake. Even "I don't think about clothes" had a designer. Now, the part that changed. In 1996, a brand lived in places you could control. The ads you bought. The press releases you sent. The catalogue, the shop window, the spokesperson. You wrote the message, and for the most part, the message stayed written. That world is gone. Today the brand is the post you published and the one you didn't. The photo someone took of you at a conference. The comment under your CEO's interview. The review, the screenshot, the silence after a bad week. For companies, and just as much for people. Every one of us now carries a public persona whether we built it or not. You can't control that anymore. Nobody can. But not controlling something is very different from ignoring it. If you don't shape your brand, it gets shaped anyway. By the algorithm, by the loudest person in the room, by whoever happens to be telling your story when you're not. So where do you start? For a company, write down in one sentence what you want to be known for, then make sure everything says it, from the website and the sales pitch to the w