I Was on the Branding Team Asked to Name the Next Recession, Until We All Got Laid off

I’M PROUD OF THE WORK our team did for W\TF\CM\YK\KKYJ & K. It was an honor to have been part of one of the largest holding companies in the world. But all those mergers left us unprepared for this recent downturn. Especially for an account as significant as Recessions & Depressions. 

When an economic system implodes every five to seven years—and people in power defend it as “the wisdom of the free market”—you really need a department devoted to its failings the way newspapers have a staff that pre-writes obituaries.

But when the markets first started to decline, half our team was busy writing sexual innuendos for a TikTok-famous cookie company. Then, before we even had a chance to plan a kickoff call, the indexes were down 20 percent and crypto became about as valuable as an ashtray full of scabs. 

We tried to follow our normal creative process, but the time crunch limited us to eleven mood boards instead of our regular eighteen—and only two weeks to debate whether the brand voice should be “anxiously optimistic” or “apprehensively hopeful.” 

Finally, we were forced to just start riffing off the word “Great.” 

We pitched “The Great Concession,” suggesting this might be the moment everyone of working age just gives up. 

We pitched “The Great Suppression,” suggesting this was employers’ way of reminding people just who’s boss. 

We pitched “The Great Succession,” playing off the television show and suggesting this is the moment our nation falls into petty infighting that tears it apart forever. 

Then Jasper Clark, our creative director, got the first of several Slack messages that changed everything. “Bad news,” he said. “ ‘Great’ is off limits. 

“But the brief…” we said.

“Forget the brief. Higher-ups feel like ‘Great’ is overdone.” 

Thus began a desperate scramble. 

“What if we used the word ‘Correction’?” we suggested. “Like we heard one time on a business show.”  

“What, exactly, is getting corrected?” Jasper asked.

“Uh…our understanding about the value of start-ups?” 

Jasper shook his head. “No one wants to feel like losing their job plays a part in fixing things.” 

“What if we brought back the term ‘Panic’?” we suggested. 

“Like a panic attack?”

“Could help remind people they just have to wait things out.”

“It has to feel significant,” Jasper said, “not just a passing thing.  This can’t just be the Peloton of recessions.” 

“How about… ‘The Pinwheel Recession’?” the youngest member of the team said. 

Even though the concept wasn’t immediately obvious—W\TF\CM\YK\KKYJ & K’s tagline, after all, is “Immediately obvious”—she said it with such conviction that we were interested.

“The idea being…” Jasper asked.

“It’s like when your computer freezes and the pinwheel starts, and you feel that dread that everything you’ve worked for will be lost. You’re aware that all the systems are completely broken and outdated, and that you should really replace them with something new. But everything’s familiar, and it seems too expensive and time-consuming, especially if you can grind out a few more years with what you have. So you just watch the pinwheel spin and know the best you can hope for is that it goes back to being the same shitty thing you’ve settled for.”

We fell silent. Sometimes with branding it’s hard to know if something is awful or brilliant. And the way you figure it out is by looking at the highest-paid person in the room. So we all turned to Jasper. 

“I get it,” he said. “But it’s too depressing. If we could capture all of that and throw in a little hope—something that says hard work and maybe a new productivity app could fix things—we’ll have it.”

He nodded for a few seconds, as if agreeing with himself, and then followed with: “Ultimately, it needs to feel like a wake-up call: serious but also something rich people can buy their way out of. Kind of like a DUI.”

We all started nodding, because that’s what you do when the person in charge likes their own ideas. 

Then we all got a meeting invitation titled “Quick Catch-Up.” We all tried to open the email but found we'd been frozen out of our computers. 

None of us got a pinwheel, but the feeling was there.