America is a brand in crisis.

Let’s be honest: July 4th is complicated for me this year. Celebrating feels strange when the thing you’re supposed to be celebrating — the values, the system, the promise — feels like it’s under real and sustained assault. I am not feeling particularly patriotic in the flag-waving, fireworks-and-a-parade sense of the word right now. I’ve felt this way for several years now and I know I’m not alone.

And yet. Last week I was in San Diego. And beyond the perfect weather, it felt like home and America in an entirely different and unexpected way.

I’m an East Coast girl. California has always felt slightly foreign to me — a different pace, a different energy, a different relationship to space and weather and the general business of being alive. But everywhere we went there, we were met with abundance and genuine warmth. Like OMG, it’s not just a Southern thing, y’all. With people who were proud of their city and excited to share why — the food, the neighborhoods, the water, the light. Strangers who became friends for the moment. And in almost every venue we walked into, a World Cup match was on, and people who had no particular reason to be in the same room together were absolutely in it together, completely.

That’s America working. That’s the product doing what the promise said it would.

Want to hate America right now? Watch the news. Want to love it? Go somewhere and meet its people.

Okay, that’s someone else’s line, but it’s the most true thing I’ve seen on social media in a while. I’ve been thinking about America as a brand lately — which is, admittedly, a very specific kind of brain disease that comes from spending too long in marketing. But stay with me, because I think it’s actually the most clarifying lens I have for what’s happening right now.

America is the oldest and most ambitious brand promise ever made. Two hundred and fifty years old this week. Which, in brand years, is either a testament to the power of a great promise or a miracle of survival despite the people put in charge of it. Probably both.

Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Government of, by, and for the people. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. These are not small claims. They are extraordinary claims, the kind that, if you actually delivered on them consistently, would make you the most powerful and beloved brand in the history of human civilization. And for stretches of time over this past 250 years, in imperfect and uneven ways, the delivery has been remarkable enough to make people believe. The New Deal, The Civil Rights Act, Title IX, The ADA. These were some of the moments where the institution met the people where they were and created systems to help them thrive. The brand promise actually delivered with real product features.

Right now, the gap between the promise and the delivery is as wide as I’ve seen it in my lifetime. And I say that not as a partisan take but as a brand observation: when the people running a brand stop caring about what the brand actually stands for — when short-term interests override the long-term promise, when the stewards of the values treat those values as optional — the brand suffers. Every time. Without exception. The current president is a disaster. The system the founders built to keep someone like him in check is failing — not because the system is broken beyond repair, but because leaders on both sides have been too greedy, too comfortable, or too calculating to use it. That’s not a political opinion. That’s a leadership failure. And leadership failures always show up in the brand.

What survives a brand in crisis is almost never the institution. It’s the people who still believe in what the brand was supposed to stand for.

Which brings me back to San Diego — not even a World Cup venue. And to the World Cup was playing on every screen in every restaurant and hotel lobby, while strangers cheered for teams they’d adopted twenty minutes ago. And to the server at the cute taco stand who just had to tell us about the best place to watch the sunset (Sunset Cliffs, duh) because she genuinely wanted us to have a good time in her city. And to the feeling, however brief, of being somewhere that was actively just being thing the promise described. Not trying. Just doing what came naturally.

The brand promise of America was never really about the government. It was about the people. The government was supposed to be the infrastructure, the system built to protect and enable the promise. When the infrastructure fails, it’s devastating and it matters and we should be furious about it. But the product — the actual human experience of this place, the communities, the generosity, the stubborn insistence on showing up for each other? We’ve still got it in spades, y’all. It’s still real. I saw it last week through a new lens on a vacation. And I am lucky enough to see it in my own community in Atlanta every single day.

I’m still figuring out how to celebrate this epically big July 4th with a clean conscience this year. But I know how to celebrate We the People — the ones holding the line in their neighborhoods, their businesses, their communities. The ones being decent and generous and welcoming to strangers, not because anyone told them to, but because that’s just who we are. That’s the real brand. It always was. The institution is struggling. The people aren’t. And as long as that’s true, the promise isn’t broken — just temporarily in the hands of people who don’t understand the power of that undeniably amazing brand promise.

Go eat a hot dog, y’all! Happy Fourth. 🌭🇺🇸

The idea that a brand and its leadership are the same thing.

Nope. The most common mistake brands make in a crisis is conflating the two — letting the failures of leadership become the story of the brand, or protecting bad leadership because the brand feels too important to risk. The brands that survive leadership failures do so because someone, somewhere, held the line on what the brand actually stood for — separate from whoever was running it at the time. America has survived bad leadership before. The brand is older than any of its stewards. Cut the idea that the two are inseparable. They aren’t. And right now, that distinction might be the most important one we have.

To everyone keeping the promise alive in your corner of this country — calling your representatives, showing up to local meetings, welcoming a stranger, taking care of your neighbors, voting like it matters (because it does) — thank you. That’s the work. It’s not glamorous. It doesn’t always make the news. But it’s what’s holding this thing together right now. You’re doing an incredible job.Kristin
Creative director. Brand obsessed. Agency life ex-pat. ✌️