In turbulent times there’s a tendency for people to put their brains into sleep mode. Fear dampens the spirit of inquiry and heightens the appeal of easy answers. No more middle ground: you’re either with us or against us.

Tom Asacker thinks that branding is an industrial age concept that’s long past its sell by date. He suggests that, “GM, Hertz and Sprint are close to collapse due to the psychological weight of branding.” He draws this conclusion because brands grew out of mass production, either to create distinction where there was none, or to con people into buying up excess inventory through deception.

His argument is syllogistic: branding has been used in the past to create false value, consumers now demand real value, therefore brands are an outmoded concept. Much as I hate to borrow from the NRA, brands don’t deceive people, brand managers do. As Luke Sullivan so concisely put it, a brand is an adjective. And just because adjectives can be used to exaggerate or mislead, it doesn’t follow that adjectives are obsolete.

Mr. A. further suggests that brands are “holding back marketing thought and organizational action”. He chooses not to share with us exactly what it is they are being restrained from doing. Hiring chief cultural officers perhaps which is all the rage right now (at least for those too young to remember when marketing people saw being in touch with the zeitgeist as part of their job).

The fundamental problem is that industry gradually lost touch with the idea that commerce is a transaction of money in return for the equivalent value in goods or services. Instead they came to think of it as a byzantine shell game, the sole goal of which is the pursuit of “shareholder value”. So marketing and strategy went out of fashion, manufacturing, sales and service got shipped off to the orient when possible and whatever else could be done to slash costs and boost sales in time for the quarterly analysts’ call became the endgame.

The fact is, the deception of customers, not to mention self-delusion as to the whole point of the enterprise under this scenario, is infinitely deeper than when companies simply made stuff, packaged it up into an attractive brand and made ads to convince people their shit was better shit than the competitor’s shit.

Now that the fundamental incompetence of former powerhouses like General Motors has been exposed and the shell game is seen for the fraud it actually is, customers are using their new found power to voice their discontent. This is not so much profound change as it is (as they say in the financial industry) a market correction.

And so the fear sets in and everyone starts looking for some easy (or at least new and impressive) answers. But the problem isn’t so much that the old way of doing things is fundamentally wrong, it’s more that no one remembers how to do it.

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