Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

In a very entertaining book that came out a couple of years ago,“The Culting of Brands”, Douglas Atkin starts out by calling attention to the monumental waste of time known as the corporate “offsite meeting”. OK, maybe I should amend this: the monumental waste of time that offsite meetings can be. Which they are most of the time, at least in my experience. No time is spent more wastefully in an offsite than when senior officers spend hours and even days trying to differentiate their brand by clumsily crafting their “missions”, their “visions” and (gag) their “values”. How many company “value” statements have you seen framed and hung on the walls of corporate reception areas? Good bet that there’s one where you work! Have you ever been able to distinguish the politically correct drivel printed on any one of these super-size shingles from all the others you’ve seen? To quote Atkin, whose “cult” brand experience includes Mercedes, Fila and jetBlue: “Most brand doctrines (the language forged at corporate retreats) generate as much excitement as wilted cabbage…For virtually every example I’ve seen, the outcome of these retreats has been exactly the same: what was intended to be a bang ended up as a whimper. In the attempt to please everyone, and offend no one, most of the ideas were compromised, their destiny to be relegated to laminated sheets on cubicle walls and the odd coffee mug in the company kitchen”. There is a connection between religion and consumerism. It’s rooted deeply in the paradoxical human craving for belonging and at the same time yearning for individualism. The kind of brand loyalty sought by almost every marketer bears a stunning resemblance to the passion and devotion typical of cultists. Their very identity is wrapped up in the product and the brand: Apple, Harley-Davidson, Mary Kay come to mind. You don’t gin up this kind of attachment at offsites. Smart brand managers understand that most people want to commit to something, but the weaker the belief system – think the hollow “values” that most companies ascribe to – the less committed the buy-in will be. One of the biggest mistakes is succumbing to the temptation to be everybody’s everything. A cult brand is, by definition, politically incorrect. The fact that they’re not for everybody means that, for somebody, they are everything.. Now that’s a brand.