El oh l.

I just received this email from what I’m sure is an otherwise successful and hardworking PR rep offering up… yet another PR rep(?) to discuss the creation of a slogan that is, at best, a footnote in the Sixers’ tanking process:

[Redacted] from Slice Communications, reaching out about Wednesday’s buzzer-beating Sixers win! With the team picking up steam and fans starting to see returns of risky long-term investments, I’d love to connect you with Finch Brands, the creative agency who rallied fans around “Together We Build.”

In 2013, how could you market a team trading losses today for wins tomorrow? Transparency – no one sees through hype like Philly fans. The hashtag #TogetherWeBuild caught on, but so did the movement, and soon “Trust the Process” was born.

With fans finally feeling like that trust is paying off, I’d love to connect you with Finch’s President Bill Gullan to chat about the movement he helped brand. Hope to hear from you!

Ah, no, I’m good. Thanks though! Bill, in fact, didn’t help brand the movement because the movement is now widely referred to as Trust The Process, a phrase that grew organically almost in spite of the Sixers’ efforts to brand their own misery. Together building has about as much to do with process trusting as peach rings have to do with a farmer’s market. One of the things that is so special about the Process is that it has little do with anything the Sixers themselves have done and was born in the depths of Twitter fandom and Sixers podcasts. For a time, it was a tongue-in-cheek rallying cry in support of Sam Hinkie that the team actively distanced itself from. It’s only now since Joel Embiid has taken to calling himself The Process that the team has somewhat embraced the phrasing.

There was nothing wrong with the slogan Together We Build, even if the press release announcing it was one of the most absurd, out-of-touch things ever written. We used it as a punchline when things were really bad, but it was certainly better than Show Ya Love and the cringeworthy Passionate. Intense. Proud., which I can only assume was whispered to Adam Aron by a small goblin after a hallucinatory reaction to the fumes of his own cheesiness. Is that brie I smell? But they were all essentially hijacked by Sixers fans embracing something the team itself was hesitant to acknowledge. For anyone to take credit for their current momentum, let alone the guy who came up with a marketing slogan no one cared about, is about as lame as it gets.