Brand malpractice: how ''Brand'' became a dirty word

So, how did we get here? For starters, brand has been misused and overused so often, by so many people, that it has ceased to have any real meaning. A quick search of Amazon.com reveals 74 763 books with the word "brand" in the title. By comparison, a search using "Abraham Lincoln" produced just 21 049 titles. Enough said.

Brand deserves a better fate than slinking off to the scrapheap of the business lexicon. Brand is noble word that communicates a simple but powerful connection that a company, product or service makes with its customer. Sure, there are layers and complexities to a brand and how it exists, grows and communicates, but at its core the compelling promise of
quality and trust that every great brand represents is a concept that most people once understood. Not anymore.

The cacophony of brand blather in recent years has confused and annoyed so many people that companies seeking to implement major branding initiatives are encountering strong resistance, suspicion and outright hostility.

Using specific examples from our client list (Stryker, www.stryker.com; Medtronic, www.medtronic.com), and other companies (Air Products, www.airproducts.com), we can examine this anti-brand trend; the tactics and strategies that companies with urgent brand-related challenges are using to
gain the employee and customer participation necessary for success; and how this culture-shift is forcing companies to reengineer traditional brand management to focus on the holistic "customer experience."