Branding Is Dead …
Long live “equality marketing”
06.25.08
by: Nathan James


“Branding” long ago became a misused cliché … but that’s not why it’s dead.

The mass media that gave rise to branding are losing audience share … but that’s not the biggest reason branding is dead.

Branding is dead because it is a metaphor for a communication dynamic that has become socially intolerable.

Branding means: I will sear my product or service into the minds of my customers and prospects. I will use mass media, so there is no way people can escape my brand.

In other words: I will dominate your thoughts by brute force. You are a cow, dear public. Your mental flesh is mine to mark.

Seth Godin and others wrote convincingly a decade ago about permission marketing. They were right that mass media was losing its advantage. But they took the power shift a bit too far, suggesting that marketers should now roll over and pee on themselves, or sniff at consumers’ back doors, whining to be let in. (Pardon the dog language … it’s puppy day at the office.)

All those communication power dynamics have been swept away by the awesome leveling power of the Internet.

Goodbye branding … we really won’t miss ye. Hello equality, come right in.

Trust in making buying decisions has shifted to peer-to-peer referrals – good ol’ word of mouth. Thanks to the Internet and especially blogs and social networking, we don’t even have to open our mouths.

The trust placed in peers has replaced trust formerly given to news media and advertising.

I have mixed feelings about this. I was raised as a TV kid, and trained as a mass media communicator. I have an ingrained bias towards authority that I still struggle to overcome. Yet I never have liked the unfair advantage that mass media gives to the already rich and powerful – or for that matter, the attention it pays to the vulgar and outrageous.

Now we can all talk to each other constantly, intimately and anonymously. And apparently, we prefer that over the well-financed inanity available via mass media.

Two new blogs are posted to the Internet every second. One-hundred thousand new videos are posted every day.

On the Internet, there is no power imbalance between writer and reader. All are equal, all are judged by quality of content.

So if you employ a “branding firm,” you and they are dangerously behind the times. Your concern now is reputation, not brand.

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