Christmas 2.0: Santa Brand

Writer and radio host Kurt Andersen asked designer Michael Bierut (Pentagram) and six other Pentagram partners to rebrand an overly commercialized, cliché-ladden brand: Christmas. This was of course a welcome challenge for the creative team: “It’s a big brand: 2,000-plus years of what marketers call brand equity in the making,” explained Mr. Beirut on Kurt Andersen’s radio show, Studio 360.

The “Christmas Study group” came up with a new “x.mas” domain as a “21st-century spin on the stingy old Xmas abbreviation.” The x-mas label would offer corporations that are willing to spend big money to be the official sponsors to co-brand x.mas via web sites such as Apple.mas, Target.mas, Nike.mas. The money would then be used for philanthropic activities, making Santa Claus, as Mr. Bierut said, “bigger than Gates, bigger than Buffett, bigger than anything.” The International X.mas Organizing Committee, he predicted, could even end up supplanting the United Nations, spreading x.mas cheer and sound diplomacy worldwide.