My father fell in love with America over a cup of vending-machine coffee at JFK airport.
It was 1968, and he’d just arrived from Egypt — then under authoritarian rule — to start a new life. He’d never seen a vending machine before; to him, the fact that he could insert a dime and instantly get a hot coffee symbolized a brave new world of ingenuity and possibility. “How can you not love a country that can dream up such things?” he’d ask.
That’s the power of the American brand: It inspired my parents to cross an ocean and start a new life, and to see a world brimming with possibility in a cup of airport coffee.
Today, America’s global brand remains just as strong. Immigrants still flock here to start new lives, dreaming of a brighter future. Four-fifths of people around the world still see the U.S. as a reliable global partner, and global surveys routinely rank the U.S. as one of the world’s top countries to visit or live in.
Here at home, though, the American brand is in crisis. Our media is fragmented, our politics are polarized and we feel alienated from one another. Nearly three-quarters of Americans say our democracy no longer sets a good example for other countries; young people, and many older folks too, increasingly reject the idea of American exceptionalism.
This should concern us all. I’ve spent my career helping companies build brands, and I’ve seen what happens when brands go bad. A brand, after all, isn’t just a marketing message — it’s an expression of collective meaning founded in profound truths.
Once lost, though, a brand’s power is not easily regained. Companies that lose their identity and purpose seldom last long — and nations that squander their brand equity struggle and stagnate in similar ways. Take the UK: after the unbridled optimism of Cool Britannia in the 1990s, the country has contracted a bad case of the post-Brexit blues. Pessimism now rules the day: “To be born in many places in Britain is to suffer an irreversible lifelong defeat,” one pundit glumly declared. The country’s brand value fell 16 percent this year, according to one report — more than any other major economic power.
There’s still time for America to pull back from the brink of a similar brand crisis. It helps that despite “United” being a part of our name, our differences are in our DNA. When the Congress of Confederation met in 1782, they coined the national motto “E pluribus unum” — “out of many, one.” That stresses a commitment to unity, but also takes pride in our diversity. Drawing together disparate peoples into a single “We, the people” required us to value both the “pluribus” and the “unum” — and by leaning back into that apparent contradiction, we have a chance to reinforce and reinvigorate America’s national brand.
That means, in part, simply recommitting ourselves to our nation’s founding ideals: liberty, equality, justice and humanity. It also means being willing to admit that we often fall short of those ideals. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr calls this the irony of American history: our nation was founded on uniquely noble principles, but shares the same flaws and shortcomings that have plagued powerful nations throughout history.
But the gap between who we are and who we might become is the genius of the American brand. America has never been a finished project: its exceptionalism lies in its potential and its promise. This means that America’s brand isn’t bestowed on us, from the top down, by political or media elites in Hollywood or Washington, D.C. or Mar-a-Lago. Instead, it’s built by individuals coming together to strive towards something greater than themselves.
In other words, the magic of America — the brand of America — lies in the actions of individual Americans. It’s what happens when people come together to solve problems, create businesses, play, protest, learn, worship, teach or celebrate. We live in an atomized world, and it’s easy to feel disempowered or isolated — but it’s by bringing those individual atoms together, and clustering together around a shared purpose, that we’re able to build and become part of something bigger than ourselves.
My parents knew this. After finishing that first cup of coffee, they went on to build futures for themselves — my dad becoming a successful surgeon, and my mom building a real-estate business from the front seat of her station wagon (license plate: “MOMS DESK”). In their own small way, they helped to make the American brand and its immense possibility real for themselves and for those around them.
Now it’s up to the rest of us to do the same. The American brand is struggling: It often feels that we’re more divided than we are united. But the reality is that for all of America’s flaws, there’s still no greater place on earth to come together with others to build the world that you want.
To revitalize the American brand for a new generation, we need to rise to that challenge. Instead of waiting for our political leaders to usher in a new age of national unity, we need to take it upon ourselves to build the future we want — at the local level, in our families and our workplaces and our communities. It’s by making that commitment to each other, and finding ways to come together in pursuit of shared goals, that we’ll ultimately breathe new life into the American brand.
Michael Megalli writes about how brands built, broke, and can renew the world at brandnewworld.substack.com. He’s managing partner at the Djinn Dept., a strategic consultancy.
