The immoderate brand

Rainer Paris recently published an essay on Soziopolis (www.soziopolis.de) that, at first glance, seems to have little to do with brands. Mediocrity and the Pitfalls of Perfection. An Apology is about elites, perfection, and performance-oriented societies. Yet it is worth reading from the perspective of the branding world. Much of what Paris writes about the relationship between the top and the middle also describes a logic that shapes brands and those who create them.

The starting point of his essay is simple. Mediocrity enjoys little prestige. Those who are considered mediocre are rarely admired. The term does not merely describe a position; it already contains a judgement. Mediocrity is what remains behind the top. It marks the distance from the elite. For precisely this reason, Paris argues, every discussion of mediocrity reveals something about the society in which it takes place. It presupposes rankings. It presupposes the idea that some people, organizations, or achievements deserve more attention and recognition than others.

Few fields of social life are more deeply shaped by such rankings than the world of brands. Brands do not simply differentiate. They evaluate. They create comparative spaces in which some companies appear more successful, some universities more excellent, and some cities more attractive than others. A strong brand only makes sense against the background of weaker brands. A leading university presupposes universities that are not leading. A global brand derives part of its meaning from the fact that most brands are not global brands. Brands therefore do more than create orientation. They create hierarchies.

From this perspective, the brand appears less as an instrument of communication than as an instrument of social classification. It organizes attention, visibility, and recognition. Above all, it organizes distinctions between top and bottom, strong and weak, leading and average. Brand literature is almost exclusively concerned with the top. Its heroes are successful brands, iconic brands, global brands. Its case studies focus on exceptions. Attention is directed towards the few organizations that have become benchmarks within their category. The vast majority largely disappears from view.

Yet this is precisely where most companies, universities, cities, and regions spend their entire existence. They will never become global market leaders. They will never dominate international rankings. They will never fill textbooks. Nevertheless, they perform their tasks. They educate people, organize mobility, create jobs, conduct research, generate identity, and make social life possible. This is an observation that may be uncomfortable for the branding world. Modern societies do not function because a few actors are extraordinary. They function because countless institutions work reliably without ever belonging to the elite. The middle is not a marginal phenomenon of society. It is its foundation.

A substantial part of Paris’s essay is devoted to the pursuit of perfection. Perfection, he argues, is not an attainable condition. It is a horizon. There is always a better solution, a more precise analysis, a more convincing formulation. Anyone who fully orients themselves towards this ideal can easily become trapped in a spiral of permanent self-overextension. Every success creates new expectations. Every improvement becomes the starting point for the next improvement.

The parallel to the world of brands is obvious. A strong brand is never strong enough. Its awareness can grow, its visibility can increase, its differentiation can be sharpened, and its reputation can be improved. Rankings are recalculated, competitors catch up, expectations rise. The logic of branding knows no natural point of rest. It is driven by the assumption that things can always be better.

This does not only apply to brands themselves. It also applies to the people who create them. They, too, are part of the culture of prestige that they simultaneously analyze and reproduce. Anyone who advises brands constantly evaluates visibility, relevance, differentiation, and strength. The industry lives from making differences visible. But it also lives from enlarging those differences. It has its stars, its bestselling authors, its agency legends, its thought leaders, and its keynote speakers. It produces its own elites and its own forms of visibility.

The history of brand management can therefore also be told as a history of permanent self-escalation. What matters is not the quality already achieved but the continuous shifting of the benchmark. What counted as success yesterday already appears today as the starting point for new expectations. The brand is expected to become more visible, strategy more precise, differentiation sharper, consulting more effective. The finally-good-enough disappears behind the assumption that things can always be improved. If one reads Paris consistently against the backdrop of the branding world, an uncomfortable question emerges: is this still professional ambition, or is it already that form of “exalted overreaching” that the Swiss psychiatrist and existential analyst Ludwig Binswanger described as the consequence of excessive aspirations? In that case, the height of ambition would at some point have grown faster than the ability to acknowledge what has already been achieved.

At this point Paris becomes particularly interesting. His defense of mediocrity is not directed against quality. It is directed against the idea that quality exists only where excellence can be claimed. He reminds us that trust rarely emerges from extraordinariness. It emerges from reliability. The reputation of a university, a company, or a city depends less on spectacular claims than on the ability to fulfil expectations over long periods of time. Many strong institutions owe their authority not to originality but to stability. They do not convince through constant reinvention but through the ability to perform their tasks reliably.

For this reason alone, Paris’s essay deserves to be read in the branding world. It draws attention to a blind spot. The world of brands tends to view itself from the perspective of its summit. It celebrates the exception and forgets the rule. It admires the elite and overlooks the middle. It talks incessantly about excellence and remarkably little about the conditions upon which excellence itself depends.

This leads to a modest proposal. Since the modern branding world evidently assumes that social value is primarily determined by top rankings, the idea should be carried through to its logical conclusion. Every organization and every individual should receive a publicly visible rank. Universities, companies, cities, schools, hospitals, professors, mayors, brand consultants, and communications executives would be continuously evaluated and arranged within a single comprehensive hierarchy. Those who belong to the top ten percent would retain the right to speak of excellence, uniqueness, and world-class status. The remaining ninety percent would simply have to accept their mediocrity.

The advantages are obvious. Nobody would need to reflect any longer on whether their work is meaningful, responsible, or socially useful. Nobody would need to explain why an institution matters. Its ranking would be sufficient. Trust, reliability, and the common good could be discarded as outdated concepts. In their place would stand a single universal metric: rank.

Only in such a world would it become fully visible where a significant part of contemporary brand culture is already heading. Its true obsession is not quality but position within a hierarchy. The mediocrity that Rainer Paris defends appears in a different light. It is not the opposite of quality. It is the opposite of excess. It is the ability to remain within measure. And that, perhaps, is what the branding world lacks more than excellence.