I think where I agree with @popobawa4u on this is that we aren’t brands. Our names here are identities tied to our real selves, which, I agree with you, indeed are shortcuts. We become known for certain things around here, but we aren’t selling anything in the process (well, maybe later I’ll try to sell you guys a history book, but it’s not the primary focus of my identity here). And how much we let out and how close we are to our IRL selves is dependent and variable.
A brand is the corporate version of that type of identity formation and is inherently tied to commercialization and commodification. So, I take @popobawa4u point on this… we should be wary.
True. I’ve seen “brand” used specifically in the context of criticism of social-media based alternative journalists, in reference to how they’ll react to criticism as an attack on their “brand”.
That is, they’re dependent on cultivating a certain public persona in order to make their living, and questioning some of the details of that persona – particularly, critiquing their implicit or explicit politics – is a material threat, by threatening to drive away part of their audience. The curious thing about “branding” is that the defense is often particularly concerned with defending the integrity of their public persona, as much or more than their particular political position. And this is because it’s that public persona – the brand – that accumulates an audience, on which they depend for income.
Oh I have a million thoughts on branding. I’ve worked for a few companies that are in the “iconic” brand status (BellSouth, Motorola) and had training on branding and its value from BellSouth, when it lost its YellowPages logo worth millions and millions.
They are just fascinating. People are SO attached. Where I’m at now, when the company was bought out yet again and a new CEO announced they were bringing back the old brand many of my colleagues had been involved with creating, they clapped and clapped like he’d just announced their dead grandmother was really not dead and was coming home to live with them forever.
OMG, no no no. When I worked at BellSouth I was told that the Bell Logo, one of the most recognized in the world (next to Coke), was not even quantifiable how valuable it was. It was worth billions and billions. It was amazing to think about how much it meant to them. And as someone who has been involved with many branding operations (not on the front lines, just as a person involved in rolling them out), it’s way harder to create a strong brand than you might think. You have to be so consistent and so clear about who you are and get everyone on your team to see that that is valuable.
Now I’m a wee bit confused. I have two RadioShacks near me; one is closing, the other’s staying open. According to this story, remaining stores will be “co-branded” with Sprint and remain open. How will that work if they’re selling their name? Will they be Sprint stores that sell the stuff RadioShack used to sell?
I was just glancing at my Twitter feed, and noticed one of the sort of tweets I usually ignore, which was advertising a seminar on branding. If anything, I was understating how fully conscious and pervasive this business of cultivating a personal brand is.
It’s a weird magic. Everyone wants a brand. The first thing people do when they start a company is make a logo, even if it’s ridiculous for them to have one. I wonder why they are so attractive to us?
Brands are full of tremendous worth. They are what people interact with every day, for decades of their lives. They encompass nostalgia, perceived quality, and loyalty. A trusted brand name and its logo are instantly identifiable and have deep meaning (positive or negative) for anyone who’s spent a good chunk of their lives seeing them on TV, on billboards, on signs, magazines, packages, etc.
Indeed! I don’t expect others to drop their fascination with personhood to the extent that I do. But whatever personal identities we can be said to have are non-transferrable and (mercifully) die with us.
I blame the mirror neurons! Most people seem to use most of their cognitive ability to process what it perceives to be communication from/with another organism, and have funny ways of doing this. For example, this is why physical gestures, pitch, and cadence are so crucial to oratory arts - because the “listener” might be using 80% of their brain to visually parse what your hands, eyes, and mouth are doing - and maybe 5% (if you’re lucky) thinking about the content of what you actually say. And why the internet is plastered with random pictures of people’s heads, devoid of any explicit context.
The functional plasticity of this mechanism also makes it trivially easy to anthropomorphize anything else! Be it forces of nature, technological artefacts, states of mind, or even rogue financial instruments. This is why I am often amazed by people who casually complain about religion (usually anthropomorphization of nature or states of mind), yet are eager to join a “respectable company” to earn lots of money (anthropomorphization of rogue financial instruments) - when they are functionally the same process. And this process is often exploited by others to knowingly manipulate people - the manipulation itself seems to be the point, the content seems to be, at best, secondary, if it is even relevant at all. Until people can be bothered to fix it, the masses will fall prey to being constantly duped into thinking “Agenda X” is actually their close personal friend.
The daily BB ruminations about hokey politicians? Corporate takeover? Religious fundamentalism? Celebrity worship? Violent herd mentalities? It’s all right here.
The trademark was sold off 90s; by the time I got my camera it was just a during of letters owned by a shell corporation evaluating licensing deals. Much like what we’re expecting to happen to The 'Shack.
Sizzling flesh? It’s a CGI rendering; not strictly accurate I’d expect. No need for a brand to be that thick - waste of metal and an easy heat dissipator. Alternatively, they could beer connected just out of sight.
