People Are Not "Brands"
Jebus, when will people just cut it the hell out with this nauseating "brand"speak? People are not brands. Normal people do not have brands. Unless you're e.g. Micheal Jordan and have your own line of shoes, you've got no brand. Obama is not a brand, and there is not "brand Obama."
I'm flummoxed as to why it seems so difficult for some people to see how obviously nauseating this locution is. The clear implication is that something is being sold, and the clear implication of that is that it's all about illusions and persuasion rather than substance.
Now, that's clearly not what Obama's all about; in fact, it seems antithetical to his basic theory of what he's up to.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to get too bent out of shape about mere terminology. But this "brand"/"branding" crap makes me want to barf. It's not particularly useful or illuminating, and it carries with it implications that patently loathsome.
So drop it already.
Jebus, when will people just cut it the hell out with this nauseating "brand"speak? People are not brands. Normal people do not have brands. Unless you're e.g. Micheal Jordan and have your own line of shoes, you've got no brand. Obama is not a brand, and there is not "brand Obama."
I'm flummoxed as to why it seems so difficult for some people to see how obviously nauseating this locution is. The clear implication is that something is being sold, and the clear implication of that is that it's all about illusions and persuasion rather than substance.
Now, that's clearly not what Obama's all about; in fact, it seems antithetical to his basic theory of what he's up to.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to get too bent out of shape about mere terminology. But this "brand"/"branding" crap makes me want to barf. It's not particularly useful or illuminating, and it carries with it implications that patently loathsome.
So drop it already.
posted by Winston Smith at
9:04 AM
6 Comments:
I just saw on TV this morning an entire episode of the Today Show or some other such garbagey "news" program that was devoting an entire episode to "creating your brand" in order to "get your dream job".
I don't know why you're so surprised that this locution has caught on. We live in an age in which we're taught to think of ourselves as products to be sold to employers.
If you don't like it, clearly you're some sort of gay communist.
I would argue that Obama was selling a brand - one of hopeTM and changeTM all during 2007 and 2008. Hell, he even had a brand slogan - "change we can believe in" - and a nice friendly hope-y looking logo for his campaign. This doesn't lessen what he was trying to say, it just is what it is.
Nope. It's not what it is at all. Having a slogan doesn't make you a product, nor a "brand," nor any such thing. People have to quit mistaking vague analogies for something more than that. We seem to periodically go through these fads during which people think that business is the only type of institution and selling is the only type of activity--and all other institutions and activities can only be understood by analogy. to them.
It's not true, and it isn't even close to being true.
I think the logo argument has weight. I thought that meself. And "hope" and "change" were repeated so often that it became fodder for the comedians.
Hey, the GOP is huddling together to rebrand itself as well.Bill Clinton and DLC centrism was a rebranding. And the most successful of all was Tony Blair's rebranded "New Labour," which took Labour from being a bunch of clueless Fabians to capturing the UK's centre. So much so, that if and when David Cameron's Conservative Party turns them out, they've moved so far from Thatcherism that they might as well call them the "New Tories."
No, again: "brand" here is an analogy or a metaphor. These are not literally brands, and, presumably (with the possible exception of the GOP) nobody's trying to *sell* anything. There is no product.
Of course people or groups sometimes have slogans or even symbols--but to try to say that these are "brands" is, in effect, to argue that business and selling are somehow the central activities in terms of which the other activities should be understood.
Which is false.
A logo is one kind of symbol; to see all similar symbols as logos is, again, to treat the case of business and selling as somehow more fundamental, the exemplary case, or the type of case in terms of which all similar cases ought to be understood.
And that is an error.
This will, of course, pass. But it's stupid and irritating while it's here.
If one where to judge the electoral defeats suffered by the Republican party recently by past business marketing flops to date, one would have to agree that the diagnosis John Brooks made in his essay, "Fate of the Edsel", with a few changes:
"Instead of spending millions on listening and learning about the market," Brooks wrote of Ford's executives, "it spent millions on a campaign to launch the product it had developed in isolation. In this sense, the Edsel story is a classic of what so often goes wrong in a silo-based enterprise: Organization and ego got in the way of sound decision making."[18]As for what you wrote about Obama, I agree. I think part of the problem is in the excitement he generated as he became a national candidate, an unanticipated sizzle that came with the steak of substantially changing the direction the country was in for 8 years.(I'm alluding to the old sales slogan, "Sell the sizzle, not the steak".)
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