branding

August 1, 2019 branding

branding

(1980’s | businese | “marketing (strategy),” “image”)

You are wondering about the connection between branding oneself or one’s organization and branding cattle, so I will tell you. They are both ways of marking salable property. Your brand is the quality, whatever it may be, that sets you apart from the competition, just as branding a calf designates it exclusive property. A possible intermediary would be “brand” used as a verb meaning “accuse someone of being,” as in “he branded his opponent a liar.” (The occurrence of “as” in between the object and the article was already possible in 1980, though perhaps less common then.) “Branding” in this sense is the act of pinning a disagreeable attribute on someone, but “brand” does not refer to the scarlet A that dogs the victim (à la Hawthorne). Nowadays, individuals and organizations improve their brands — which would have sounded very strange back on the range — in order to increase their appeal, rather than repulse customers. It is the flavor or feature or je ne sais quoi that renders them more worthy of the sacred ritual of opening the wallet. It must be tenderly nurtured and aggressively developed, with much overtime and expensive consultation.

Not just for-profit businesses; universities, foundations, hospitals, even nations are expected to burnish their brands in order to attract more people and make themselves more relevant — that is, closer to the money spigot. Just as IT departments became necessary a generation ago, branding consultants (or in-house staff) are now de rigueur for any business serious about staying in business. Anything an organization does to increase its status or revenue might qualify as a branding venture. For now, at least, it remains grounded in consumer behavior; the true measure of branding success is consumer appeal. Thus such projects tend to take on an anxious or abject tone; consumers are capricious gods whose whims must be catered to in order to part them from their money. Americans have seen a steady erosion of their political power for a century or more. To some extent it has been replaced by consumer power, but consumers don’t get to hire and fire corporate executives.

“Brand” and “branding” broke new ground in the eighties; it was rare before then to see either term as we use it now. By 1990 they both showed up regularly in the business press, though not perhaps in everyday vocabulary. One team of researchers defined “brand” as consisting of three components: “physical make-up, functional characteristics, and characterization — i.e., personality.” “Branding” goes with words like “messaging” (conveying a selling point) and “positioning” (proving yourself superior to the competition). “Brand” meaning simply “name of manufacturer” or “name of particular product” has been superseded, though it has not disappeared. It’s not enough to be Heinz or Kleenex any more. Heinz and Kleenex have to get out there every day and prove they’re better, or at least more compelling. You can’t just maintain a good reputation and rest your name on it. You have to build, respond, and work, work, work to make sure you remain irresistible.

There seems to be a strong tendency in corporate America to find or create new methods and theories of improving sales or employee retention or customer loyalty (cf. the recent entry on “emotional intelligence“). They don’t all involve branding directly, but they do involve purchasing books, hiring consultants, and supporting researchers who seem more and more like a parasitic class, feeding off their high-powered hosts and justifying it by dispensing advice that doesn’t — and can’t — work most of the time, because in most fields winners must always be in the minority. Even if you follow your consultant’s report to the letter, it probably won’t improve your market share much. But another consultant will come along next year, and you’ll have to shell out for that one, too. It’s just another way to make the money trickle down, I suppose, but one can’t help but wish that all these corporate geniuses might put a bit more effort into innovation and investment than convincing us by more or less fraudulent and manipulative means that we should buy their product. Maybe it will turn out that the best long-term branding strategy is finding a gizmo nearly everyone uses and making it better than anyone else can. But it’s a lot easier to talk about what the logo should look like and where it should go than to re-envision the entire chain of people and duties required to improve the merchandise. The point is not the product, it’s your ability to convince the gullible to pony up. I’m beginning to think we should put P.T. Barnum on our money, not George Washington or Harriet Tubman.

This is the five hundredth expression I have written about, assuming I’ve counted correctly. I encourage everyone to head over to the alphabetical entry list and look around to see if I’ve covered a favorite expression, or a pet peeve. If so, comment! If not, send it in (usagemaven at verizon dot net).

Tags: advertising, American history, branding, business, consumerism, corporations, design, English, language, marketing, Nathaniel Hawthorne, P.T. Barnum, politics, The Scarlet Letter, words

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