The taqueria four blocks from my place has a hand lettered sign taped inside the window. OPEN. MASKS. THANK YOU. That is the entire sign, and it has been in that window since April.
I picked up dinner there on Tuesday and stood on the sidewalk in the cold thinking about the several hundred brand statements I read this year.
A few were good. Most were a paragraph of sans serif over a gray gradient, posted at nine in the morning, forgotten by lunch, replaced in June by a different paragraph about a different reckoning, and never mentioned again.
The taqueria posted nothing. It moved to window service, stayed open, brought two people back in August, and set a folding table by the door with sanitizer that somebody actually refills.
The companies that end this year with their reputations intact are almost without exception the ones that spent it being useful in public and quiet on the internet.
Here is the part that gets lost. Nobody was grading you on whether you said the right thing in March. They were grading you on whether you were still there in November, and whether the people who worked for you were too.
Three things separated them. One, they made an operational decision before they made a communications decision. Salt & Straw shipped pints to doorsteps and worked out the caption afterward. Powell's let people buy books online from a store they could not walk into, badly at first, then better. The message followed the work instead of standing in for it.
Two, they said less than they did. The ratio matters more than the volume. A brand that does four things and mentions one of them reads as modest. A brand that does one thing and mentions it eleven times reads as a campaign, because it is one.
Three, the handful that did speak loudly had already earned the standing. Ben & Jerry's wrote hard things this summer and nobody rolled their eyes, because they have been writing hard things since before most of their audience could read. Patagonia shut down early and told everyone why, and it landed because it cost them something visible.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, and I know exactly how the bad version happens. Somebody asks what we are saying about this. Nobody asks what we are doing about it, because doing is another department's budget and saying is ours.
A brand that does four things and mentions one of them reads as modest.
It is Christmas Eve. Truffles is asleep in the empty box the tree ornaments came out of and Barnaby is sitting in front of the radiator with the specific dignity of an animal who has contributed nothing all year and feels great about it. They have the right instinct. Be warm, be present, say nothing.