The Character of a Brand

What right do brands have to call themselves virtuous?

Today, brands are scrambling to keep pace with an ever-changing world around them. Their cultural power is waning as they’re forced to compete against the people they once intimately influenced. They’re spending countless dollars on campaigns, initiatives, and consultants to gain relevance and credibility with a much savvier consumer whose expectations have never been greater. And while it has been encouraging to witness the migration of corporate purpose to the societal foreground, it may be yielding a generation of self-aggrandizing brands whose impact is minimal at best.

Perhaps it’s time for a new approach. One that transcends traditional corporate principles. One that adheres to something a little more accessible. One that is tailored to each brand and the areas in which they can have the most meaningful impact.

In this talk, Alain Sylvain, Founder & CEO at SYLVAIN will argue that for brands to truly drive societal progress, they must move away from lofty, virtue-signaling principles that are fixed in an idealized future, and instead adopt human ‘character traits’ that reflect their behavior, and more importantly, the world their consumers want to live in right now.

Through exploring the world of brand, business, innovation, psychology, pop culture and more, he’ll detail how companies can identify the core character traits that enable them to push for progress, how to hold themselves accountable to those traits — and how they can realistically manifest them out into the world.