Most Idiotic Recent Terminology: "Brand"/"Branding"

Look, Barack Obama is not a @#$*%@ brand. Neither is 'Barack Obama', America (or 'America'), nor John McCain (nor 'John McCain'), etc. In a world filled with moronic terminology, witless and artless neologisms and linguistic abominations of every sort, this has got to be the worst to come along in quite some time.

Needless to say, the terms 'brand' and 'branding' aren't new. But now the terms are being used loosely or semi-metaphorically in particularly irritating and objectionable ways. So now we're subjected to yammering about, e.g., Obama "risking his brand" by moving to the center. This stuff is like fingernails on a blackboard to me. Seriously--every time I hear this kind of thing I get one of those little squiggly black clouds over my head and want to throw something at the t.v..

Look: people are not brands, and they do not have brands (unless they manufacture something and, you know, have a brand). But this way of speaking is not merely imprecise and aesthetically bad. It is associated with an actual, substantive cultural problem. Specifically: business is such a dominant part of current American culture that many have, apparently, begun speaking and thinking of all institutions as if they were businesses. Terms and concepts that are appropriate only to business have creeped into, for example, government and academia--to their detriment. One of the most nauseating and harmful examples of this from academia is the current fad of thinking of and referring to college students as "customers." They are, of course, not customers, they are students. My students are no more my customers than a doctor's patients are his customers. Now, obviously, there are certain respects in which students and patients are like customers. They pay, for example. But to see them only in those ways (which is what we are invited to do when they are so referred to)--is to ignore what is most important about them.

These uses of the loathsome "brand"/"branding" terminology are not only annoying and inaccurate, but they promote a false and pernicious view about the primacy of business and, in particular, advertising and marketing. Obama, to return to our original example, does not have a brand, and, so, a fortiori, he is not risking his brand when he makes a controversial decision. If he is risking anything, he's risking his good name and his reputation--things which are, of course, more important than any mere brand.