Today’s post comes from Bridgz senior copywriter John Andreini.
One of the chief tenets of brand building is to make it easy for customers to engage with and experience your brand. No one would be at all surprised to hear a company CMO or CEO say, “Our brand has to be accessible, easy to relate to.” 
But what if it wasn’t? What if a brand was difficult to know? Inscrutable, yet intriguing?
This is the question that Grant McCracken, a research affiliate at MIT and the author of Chief Culture Officer, asks in his Harvard Business Review essay, Medieval Marketer.
In medieval times, it seems, people were accustomed to looking for meanings embedded in things, hidden messages. “The medieval world took for granted that the universe was filled with secret messages, placed there by God and correspondences on which the world was built,” writes McCracken. This changed dramatically in the twentieth century with the rise of modernism. The new rule was, “Keep it simple, stupid.” Everything was pared down to the essence of simplicity and practicality. Hidden meanings were seen as arcane and distracting.
