Today I am excited to share another step in our progression to spur the next evolution in marketing: We have an icon to represent our movement. I hope you like it, as it’s going to be appearing in many (perhaps unexpected) places, as we enroll fellow tribe members in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

A few months into writing the book about the Marketing with Meaning concept, I realized that it had potential to be more than just another typical business book. I began to believe that I was writing more of a manifesto for change, and something that people could personally get behind. There are lots of good business books out there that outline a path to change or new approach. Notable examples include Lovemarks, Freakonomics, and The Paradox of Choice. But I thought we had the opportunity to do something more.

The idea of Marketing with Meaning is something that I hope leads people to personally identify with the concept and choose to follow its path as a work-life mission. In other words, I believe some people who read the book (and maybe a few of you who have been reading this blog) will choose to call themselves Meaningful Marketers.

I can’t think of many other books or blogs that aspire to create believers like this, but someone said once that if you want to be big, you have to act big. It didn’t take long for me to start thinking about other movements that inspire and enroll people. One common element I found is the fact that many of them have a symbol to represent their cause. Religions, of course, have united around symbols for millennia; another recent example is this symbol from the Human Rights Campaign.

Symbols work because they allow people to identify themselves with the cause, whether it’s on the label of a suit or the bumper sticker of a car. They allow members to find each other, and they bring an air of mystery.

So I went to one of our star creative directors, Chris Zieverink, and shared my vision to create a symbol of the Marketing with Meaning movement. Logo design is one of his specialties, and over the next few months we carved out time to work on the project together. A few weeks ago Chris came to me with a version of the symbol here and I loved it.

The symbol is simple and iconic, yet unveils more meaning as you spend time with it. You might notice that there is an M (for meaning), W (with), and M (marketing). There is a triangle in the middle, a nod to the Hierarchy of Meaningful Marketing, a key concept that I feature in the book. I also like how some people see this as an alien-like character, which is just cool. Like any true artist, Chris spent a lot of time polishing the design and making sure it worked in different colors and on everything from stickers to iPhone apps. On T-shirts, this looks like some kind of bad-ass superhero logo. (Meaningful marketers ARE bad-ass superheroes, of course.)

We’ll be rolling out our icon in many ways in the weeks to come. It will be featured on the redesign of this blog as we update it for the book launch, and I’ll be sending stickers to people who join the online tribe that we’ll be setting up at the same time. My dream is to be at an airport someday and see someone working on a laptop with this sticker on it. Maybe that could be you?