I’m interrupting my blogging holiday to bring you this unfinished thought: Branding isn’t.
It’s genuinely an unfinished idea. I’m saying it partly to challenge the frequency with which people are busily defining brands. (Evelyn gets on the back of the “brand is a promise” crew here) A brand is this a brand is that people say, like they own the word and it’s theirs to define. It’s fine to speak this way (I’m sure I do myself) but it does seem to lead to a lot of abstraction wars.
And there’s a nice irony there, as I think that a lot of talk about brands carries an assumption that stating an opinion as if it is some kind of fact constitutes the act of branding. Take any brand slogan and you’re likely to find exceptions and mismatches if not downright massive contradictions in reality. Indeed those exceptions, paradoxes and contradictions are part of what makes the brand what it is… something we can approximate but not define.
I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this idea. I just know I feel like saying Branding Isn’t and seeing what happens.
And now back to my blogging holiday. You may feel that I need it…
