I grew up in Guadalajara watching my grandmother run her little mercado like a one-woman circus — loud, colorful, personal, and impossible to ignore. People went to shop, but they really came to see her. That was my first experience with "branding."
By my twenties, I'd traded the mercado for Manhattan and was writing brand strategy for companies with eight-figure budgets and zero personality. And I was damn good at it.
But somewhere between the corporate style guides and the stakeholder decks, I noticed the brands that moved people weren't the biggest ones.
They were the weird ones. The specific ones. The kind with a voice. The ones that knew exactly who they were and refused to apologize for it.
I wasn't always the creative strategist handing out megaphones to the spicy underdogs. I was the drone writing brand bibles for companies with unlimited budgets and nothing to say.
From the Mercado to Manhattan (And Back Again)
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