Josh Pears

This is a branding article about what a logo actually is, why almost nobody knows, and what happens to a business when the foundation is built wrong from the start. This one runs long, but it is worth it. The problem it covers shows up in small businesses in my area almost every week. You might have seen it yourself. You might have done it to your own logo without knowing it. One of the reasons…

It is June 2026 and the rainbows are quieter than they have been in years. Social media feeds that used to turn into a brand Olympics every Pride Month are noticeably subdued. The floats are smaller. The campaigns are softer. The statements are more carefully worded, heavily lawyered, and strategically vague. And a significant number of brands that used to show up loudly are now providing water…

I have been a photographer for most of my life and a brand strategist for most of my career. For a long time I treated those two things as separate practices that occasionally shared a shoot day. Years of doing both passed before I understood that they are not just different jobs. Fundamentally, they are different acts of communication, operating on opposite ends of the same spectrum. Here is…

This is a branding article about Carl Jung, the shadow self, and the version of your brand you refuse to look at. Yes, we are going there. Carl Jung believed that every person carries a shadow self, the parts of their personality they repress, deny, or refuse to examine. These are not necessarily evil parts, just unacknowledged ones, the parts that do not fit the story they tell about who they…

Most brands are in a fight they designed themselves to lose. They found a category that already existed, studied whoever was winning in it, built something slightly better or slightly cheaper or slightly more thoughtfully packaged, and jumped in. They are working hard. They are spending real money. They are losing ground every quarter to whoever has the bigger budget or the lower price point and…

There are 2 things happening to your brand right now that most business owners have not fully reckoned with. They are happening simultaneously, they are both being driven by AI, and they are pulling in opposite directions in a way that should genuinely unsettle you. The Impersonation Problem Someone is impersonating your brand right now, and it is not a person. It is an AI generating lookalike…

I do not know if there was ever a time when a brand could just be something, but I do know that time is not now. Once, maybe a brand could just have a name, make a good product, and let the product do the talking. The reputation spread by word of mouth. The people who needed you found you. Then maybe the brand had to have all that, and also a logo. So the brand got a logo and felt…

Every time a CEO says “we need to rebrand” and means “we need a new logo,” somewhere a brand strategist loses a year of their life. I know because I am that strategist and I have been losing years since 2008. Here is the thing nobody in a boardroom wants to hear: your logo is a signifier. Your brand is the thing it signifies. Those are not the same thing, they have never been the same thing, and…

Canva has 265 million users. Let that number sink in. 265 million people, all opening the same app, browsing the same template library, dragging the same elements onto the same grid, changing the font to something they think is theirs, and publishing the result as their brand identity. 265 million people who have collectively decided that brand strategy is something that happens automatically the…