Brand building and bullshitting

Here’s Radio KK back again, hopefully tuned to your frequency.

The ‘Radio’ of course refers to my earlier blog on brand building and the oral culture of India;-) BTW, John Hegarty, the one living person I look up to in the world of advertising, did mention to me when he was in India at the invitation of India’s fledgling Creative Directors’ Club in 1997 that the Irish people also delayed the adoption of writing in order to maintain the richness of oral story-telling!

Those of you who have read Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, will probably agree that groups of people who belong to one sect, caste or society often grow blind to the practices that are clearly self-destructive. Jared refers to Easter Island and Mayan societies as examples that prove this theory.

Are there such practices amongst us, we who claim to be brand creators, brand builders, brand definers, brand sustainers, brand nurturers, brand guides, brand expression specialists…?

One practice that springs to mind is the usage of jargon to bullshit our clients. In my two and a half decades in marketing communication and branding, I realized that clients as a species often worship ‘creative people’ as a species. Creative people are considered owners of arcane and mystical knowledge. Do we exploit this faith?

Here are some examples I picked at random:

1. A branding expert regularly tells his clients that he “assimilates market viability through brand planning…” I am a published writer of fiction and attempt to keep up with the world of words and grammar; and despite revisiting the dictionary I could make no meaning of this glorious objective of brand planning. To me it sounds suspiciously close to the language of art criticism, which uses words like the ‘precession of the simulacra’. If any of our brothers and sisters in branding can unravel the meaning, do write in.

2. Here’s another branding expert explaining a logo for a bank: “it signifies four new things about the brand: value for money, variety of channels, different timeline for every product that it offers and transparency in every service/product that it offers.” Four new things in one logo??!! That is real value for money! I was under the mistaken notion that a logo is a visual telegram (after all, the word logo itself is a short form of logogram) that communicates one message strongly!

3. Hardly had I recovered from this muscular, multi-tasking logo’s onslaught than my colleagues pointed out another one for a software company, which, they maintained, made the bank logo look like a starving featherweight. The brand expert maintains that this logo (which, btw, uses seven colours, so I don’t know what happens to it in B&W) communicates 16 rational and 12 emotional attributes! But don’t hyperventilate yet, brothers and sisters in branding. The brand line communicates a further 18 rational and 10 emotional attributes!! And they even communicate contradictory attributes like solid and flexible!!! And all this is proudly rounded off with the claim, “We focus on one singular positioning statement…!”

Because poor unsuspecting clients are dazzled by ‘creativity’ just as millionaires are by ‘art’, does not mean we as brand evangelists exploit their credulity…unless of course, like the societies outlined by Jared Diamond, we want to press the self-destruct button. Amen.