Branding under fire

The word branding is dangerously overused. Many people use branding as a cure for all kinds of problems in all kinds of businesses. To lay claim to a deeper understanding of this elementary word, branding agencies all over the world have developed some cute variations of it, from emotional branding to primal, sensory, musical, internal, external, holistic, vertical, abstract, nervous and all the way to invisible branding.

Haphazard Branding
There are hundreds of such branding terms pointing to the same thing. Let's analyze and see how this historical process of branding ownership marks on animals got transformed into a word circus, bending the state of mind among corporations, institutions and many governments.

Most of the time, branding is designed to create a safe and secure feeling for the corporation while waiting for the thunder from the charge of anxious customers.
For some reason, if the highly anticipated traffic doesn't show up, then the term is changed immediately to the likes of primal branding. The same single promotional process is re-named repeatedly.

The idea is that when share prices fall, call the branding team and let it apply its fiscal branding to mail fancy brochures to shareholders. When products fail, let the visual branding make logos makeover.

Just Promotional Tools
At times corporations do need solid and real branding. However, it most often fails, frequently due to lack of substance, quality, intelligence and experience. What is now being offered in the name of branding includes perfumed stationery at the banks, sensory tickles, jingles and chimes for the funeral parlor - just raw promotional tricks.

These approaches fail because they are just basic promotional tools and skills and because they are trendy quick fixes.

Solid Training, Thorough Skills
Let's face it, branding rules are very hard to learn and very difficult to apply because they require solid training and thorough skills. Simple, raw promotional skills backed by big budget fireworks are only accidental branding at play, where everyone becomes happy as long as there is some noise.

US businesses are still overdosed with branding. Massive turnover in the advertising and branding industry, compounded by the Internet , e-commerce and outsourcing has created a large glut of branding consultants with too many faceless, nameless consulting services and Web sites.

The market is simply glutted. Western branding agencies are losing their grip by not producing world-class standards and are becoming a laughing stock by adopting, in a panic, monkey-see-monkey-do campaigns.

In reality, you definitely need proper branding. However, first you must have something very good to offer. You also need highly specific and proven branding with highly tactical positioning skills, under proper corporate and brand name identity and image laws, rather than raw graphic and promotional tools.

Useless Branding?
Empty concepts and poorly designed and beaten up products and services can't be resurrected with some abstract branding terms along with some flashy campaigns. Big money spending will not buy big image anymore.

As e-commerce matures by the minute, the masses of customers have successfully ignored the expensive blitzes and pretended to have some type of an early Alzheimer's condition to justify their memory loss. Nothing sticks in mind any longer.

The blasted, useless messages are instantly forgotten. The 15-minute fame suggested by Andy Warhol is now only a 15-second blip on the global e-commerce landscape. What was previously shoved on 24-7 ad campaigns and lasted at least a year is now completely forgotten the very next day.

Should we now re-define branding all over again? Should this word be re-invented? How about "useless branding?" No, not yet.