Johnnie Moore

More on the death of branding

Johnnie Moore

Johnnie Moore

I’m Johnnie Moore, and I help people work better together

Hugh at gapingvoid is on top provocative form returning to his theme that branding is dead with a few good reasons. I have to admit that this afternoon I especially like number 5 for its insight and number 6 for its directness:

5. “Branding” is all about articulating top-down hierarchal control of the conversation. “This is what it means.” It’s EGOlogy not ECOlogy.

6. I generally find people who like using the word “Brand” a lot are assholes.

Yes it’s rude but I think it has a certain emotional truth.

Yeah, like Jennifer Rice I’d make a modest effort to hold on to the word brand for conversational convenience. But basically I’m with Hugh in his impatience with the twaddle that is so often spoken on either side of the word in sentences.

Share Post

More Posts

Waterfalls and chaos

I linked to this paper on wicked problems the other day and Chris Corrigan commented “there’s a lot in that paper eh?”. Which is true.

Passion branding

Passion brands bring people together based on common interests and excitements. I’m particularly interested in ones created from the bottom up, as opposed to driven by producers concerned mainly with profit.

Medinge Moments

Just back from another extraordinary gathering at Medinge where the community that has produced Beyond Branding meets each summer. I was planning to keep this

The volatile chemistry of trust

Interesting research from Stanford suggests that exciting brands get more trusted after making mistakes and putting them right whilst more “sincere” brands start with more trust but lose it more easily. Perhaps the sensible interpretation is that second-guessing customers can be a waste of time!

What brand are you?

Thanks to Matt Tucker at Smith Associates for telling me about What Brand Are You. It strikes me that lots of companies waste money on

Just Undo It?

The AntiBrand: blackSpot sneakers, a project by Adbusters attacks Nike directly. In doing so they take on what has become one of the great icons

Putting humanity into branding

We live in a world of too much marketing and too much branding. People’s faith in advertising has fallen to new lows as we simply

New Abbey

So the Abbey National is rebranding itself this morning. As I write this entry, they are revealing their new look, their shortened name (just “Abbey”)

More Updates

Emotional debt

Releasing the hidden costs of pent up frustrations

Aliveness

Finding the aliveness below the surface of stuck

Johnnie Moore

Certainty

Thanks to JP for pointing to this: In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence what is not surrounded

Johnnie Moore

Hopes and fears for the net

In preparation for a visit by Tim Berners-Lee, the folks at NESTA asked people via twitter to send in short statements of their best hopes and worst fears for the

Johnnie Moore

Presence and leadership

I’m continuing to work through Presence. The chapter on presence as a form of leadership is one of the strongest for me. It articulates a non-heroic idea of leadership that

Johnnie Moore

Hutton and faith in authority

I’ve just had a conversation with my colleague Chris Pearse about the Hutton report. (Just published, Lord Hutton’s report into a scandal surrounding a government weapons expert Dr David Kelly,