Nishad( a friend of mine) directed me to a thought-provoking article on branding by Russell Davis. There are some fundamental shifts happening out there. Marketeers and agency folks need to take cognizance of these changes and must get ready to reinvent themselves and change the way they approach and practice marketing:
Branding is no longer the future of business.
There was a point in the 80s when branding was the future of business. Businesses realised you could stick brand value on their balance sheets, so they did. Consultants realised they could charge a lot of money for advice about brands so they did. And the money people looked to the branding people (often conflated with the marketing people) for all the money making ideas. So you got line extensions, big ads, expensive logos, brand onions. You got branding.
...the brand model is broken and it's stopping us thinking. A lot of communications thinking at the moment seems to be about taking all the old assumptions and just applying them to different channels and different technologies.
....This was brought home most forcefully to me by working with Honda, who had an inherent distrust of the word brand and refused to let us use it. This may well be a broader Japanese instinct. They thought of branding as a trick to disguise a weak product.
Branding is being replaced by design/technology as the future of business.
...The value that the Balls ad injects into a Sony TV is real and is probably cheaper and more effective than putting actual technological innovation in the product. It's just you can't survive on that alone anymore (if you ever could.)...
...The way forward
I think it's the hubris we have to get rid of. Launching logos is not the way forward. A logo should be repository of meaning, not a substitute for it. And you have to build that meaning, not borrow it. We should be announcing smart and interesting things and then saying; by the way, this is the logo for it.