West Coast shows the world how to work:
Laid-back culture uses an alternative way to build success

It's 11 a.m. on a sunny morning at Kits beach. Matthew has just finished a 40-minute run, and now he's stopped for his morning coffee. But it's a workday, so my fictional character is checking his handheld computer for any to-do items -- after all, he only has a few hours to work before his volleyball game that afternoon. Matthew is a typical West Coaster: fit, outdoorsy, and mellow enough to plan his workday from the beach.

He's also a typical global consumer: his coffee is from Starbucks, his computer is powered by Microsoft, his running shoes are Nikes and his sweats are from the Gap.

These brands are as West Coast as Matthew himself. That's right: the most powerful brands to emerge in the past four decades are all products of our own West Coast culture.

The 1960s brought us the Gap, from San Francisco.

The 1970s brought us Nike, from Portland, Ore., and Microsoft, from Seattle.

And the 1980s brought us Starbucks, also from Seattle.

By the 1990s, all four had become symbols of brand-ness, their products featured prominently in virtually any shopping mall or retail district.

So how did the laid-back ethos of the West Coast spawn the biggest brands of the millennium?

The answer is that each of the West Coast juggernauts is a company that originally built its brand around an independent, anti-brand attitude -- an attitude that is distinctly West Coast.

The Gap offered clothes for people who refused to be slaves to fashion or to corporations. It sold simple, natural fibre clothing for the suit-free West Coast lifestyle. As business suits disappeared from even the most formal workplaces, Gap clothes became the uniform for the casual worker. The rest of the world started to dress like West Coasters.

Nike took another West Coast preoccupation -- fitness -- and turned it into a brand instead of an activity. "I don't need to brag about squeezing in a gym visit between bond trades," the Nike swoosh says. "I just do it." The rest of the world started to work out like West Coasters -- or at least to dress as if they did.

Microsoft's founder, Bill Gates, is the father of geek chic. Sure, Microsoft is now the epitome of the corporate bully. But in its early days it was the little guy, taking on the IBM juggernaut with an operating system that was better and faster. The rest of the world learned to geek out like West Coasters.

Starbucks challenged the idea of coffee as fuel for spending another two hours at your desk, and turned coffee into a social activity -- the post-tobacco equivalent of a cigarette break. The rest of the world learned to chill out like West Coasters.

The ubiquity of the Gap, Nike, Microsoft, and Starbucks is a tribute to the business value of the West Coast attitude. Far from treating West Coast mellow as a danger to corporate efficiency, these companies figured out how to package and sell it.

So the next time you catch a colleague sunbathing on the beach in the middle of a workday, don't think of it as goofing off. Think of it as building the brand.