One Word Anti-Equity

A fun game for the whole office or family.

When we worked together at Saatchi & Saatchi, my partner Tom and I started this  deliciously, subversively entertaining way to pass time.

As creatives in advertising, our lives revolved around Brand Equity. Generally defined this referenced a collection of attributes that defines the brand.

Usually a set of three words that embodies the brand’s essence.

The pillars of its identity.

All our work was evaluated in part by our adherence to the equity of whatever brand we were working on.

Take Nike, for example. They went up against competitors by focusing their brand equity not on the product itself but rather the person wearing it. Their core attributes? There are many takes on this, but for arguments’s sake…

Unrelenting. Athletic. Authentic.

So, Nike’s anti-equity then might look something like: Lazy. Apathetic. Unoriginal.

These words are just painfully dull and unexpressive. OUR anti-equity words would be something more like…

Sloth-like. Droopy. Wannabe.

As a rigorous exercise in extreme reductionism, we would limit our people anti-equity to one word. Tom’s for me: Mousy. Mine for him: Sloppy

The goal is a distinctly discerning blend of accuracy, pithiness, and overall uncompromising gestalt.

Although there was a certain sportiness to the one-word limit, it does demand an exclusion of potentially very entertaining alternate personality traits.

So, feel free to expand the one word anti-equity to three.