When you’re spending money on a Pentagram branding, you’re spending money to be noticed by a rarefied New York corporate elite. You invite them to those launch

When you’re spending money on a Pentagram branding, you’re spending money to be noticed by a rarefied New York corporate elite. You invite them to those launch cocktail parties, your consultants are dating people who work for them, the rework tells a story your PR people put into something - a Tweet, a cocktail party conversation, a headline in Apple News - that they read. Michael Beirut goes to a lot of parties, he’s out there being noticed, he’s putting his work into a specific, non-public zeitgeist. It is trickle down and it is real. A rebranding is more like a corporate version of the event where a couple restates their vows. It does a lot of work even if it is difficult to articulate as ROI positive, and the qualitative benefits are proportional to how extremely rich you are.