According to his bio on BNET, Geoffrey James “has sold and written hundreds of features, articles and columns for national publications including Wired, Men’s Health, Business 2.0, and… and… and…”

… And according to me he’s just penned his last. Because it is codswallop. Which is the sort of grand pronouncement Geoff seems to favour.

BNET is owned by CBS so I assume it has a substantial readership and a modicum of credibility within the business community. Which is the only reason I bother to call out clods like Geoff who make baseless, facile and sensational pronouncements concerning marketing and advertising. Like Mrs. Patrick Campbell, I don’t mind what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses, or in this case my clients.

His article is entitled Branding is Dead: Apple, Toyota, Leno & Obama Prove It. Geoff’s journalistic speciality appears to be the startling non sequitur. Viz. (all italics mine)

Apple, of course, is a highly visible corporate brand and has established numerous successful product brands. However, all the discussions after the announcement of the iPad were about the product, not about the brand.

Toyota has a highly-recognizable brand name that for decades has been associated with high quality products. However, the brouhaha over the recall shows that consumers are more than willing to change their perception of a brand for the negative, if the product no longer justifies that high opinion.

Both Leno and O’Brien are “brands” in and of themselves, but the reason that there was an argument in the first place was that, no matter how recognizable their brands might be, their products weren’t any good

The final event of note was Barack Obama’s state of the union address. Obama is more than a President; he’s a brand in and of himself… His speech was masterful — like all of his speeches — but in the large scheme of things, that speech is irrelevant because Barack Obama will be judged, not on his brand, but on the performance of the product.

You are so confused on this subject Geoff that I’ll let your random thought collisions speak for themselves. Most of my readers understand the difference between a product and a brand.

Think of it like the physical states of matter: a product is a solid, tangible thing, a brand is a gaseous ephemeral thing while your article is a liquid babbling thing.