IT suffers brand identity crisis
As long as the brand is king, no high-profile firm can afford to be truly adventurous
Everywhere in the IT industry, it appears, the power of branding remains undiminished.
But wait. Apple itself is to launch a new operating system, Tiger, in the autumn – yet I’ve only just got used to its Safari web browser. And if Apple’s sub-brands confuse even Mac lovers, big brands outside the world of IT also appear in trouble.
Wal-Mart, the bête noire of Naomi (No Logo) Klein, is under attack in the US courts. And US marketing companies worry about America’s brand abroad. Harvard professor John Quelch thanks Chinese brands, in advance, for providing us with what he calls “an alternative to US brand hegemony”.
Meanwhile, Britain’s high priest of corporate social holiness, Jonathan Porritt, has attacked Marks & Spencer’s putative acquirer, Philip Green, in the letters page of the Financial Times. Green’s crime? Failure to provide evidence that he “really understands that critical nexus between brands, trust and performance” – performance as regards corporate responsibility and sustainable development.
In fact, brandsmiths everywhere now uphold Porritt’s inquisitorial approach. By behaving ethically, it is argued, firms can get corporate brands to win customers’ trust. That way, the brand can help customers avoid suffering the strains of everyday life, and in particular the modern tyranny of branded choice.
At once, then, the brand is at risk, in crisis, and has an immanent tendency to victimhood; but it must at the same time come to the aid of human beings who suffer from viruses, information overload, smacking in childhood, obesity in adulthood and all the rest.
A rebranded Barclaycard will be issued in late 2004 to act as an “enabler” to get consumers through life. This is about as upbeat as branding gets. For the rest, expert opinion has it that brands are needed to edit, signpost, solve problems in or even run parts of people’s lives.
Worse still, we’re told that the best way to improve what other people say about your organisation is to get employees to embody the brand’s values. Thus, in the Harvard Business Review, Dave Ulrich, who combines roles as human resources guru, Michigan professor and president of the Montreal Mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, insists that “Shared Mind-set and Coherent Brand Identity” go together.
Today, HR departments engage in branded schemes of change management. Even more insidiously, HR departments want corporate brand etiquette followed when staff use mobile platforms or go teleworking. This business-to-employee dimension of brands is not just authoritarian. By encouraging groupthink, it discourages innovation.
In the world of IT, every kind of brand promises user empowerment. The logic of branding, however, leads not to more “Think Different”, but to less.
Good luck to the #farmers on their march today!
I probably don't need to tell you to wrap up warm. But please remember that no part of the UK's green agenda is your friend. All of it is intended to deprive you of your livelihood, one way or another. That is its design.
Brilliant piece by @danielbenami. RECOMMENDED
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Innovators I like
Robert Furchgott – discovered that nitric oxide transmits signals within the human body
Barry Marshall – showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid
N Joseph Woodland – co-inventor of the barcode
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – she discovered the first radio pulsars
John Tyndall – the man who worked out why the sky was blue
Rosalind Franklin co-discovered the structure of DNA, with Crick and Watson
Rosalyn Sussman Yallow – development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a method of quantifying minute amounts of biological substances in the body
Jonas Salk – discovery and development of the first successful polio vaccine
John Waterlow – discovered that lack of body potassium causes altitude sickness. First experiment: on himself
Werner Forssmann – the first man to insert a catheter into a human heart: his own
Bruce Bayer – scientist with Kodak whose invention of a colour filter array enabled digital imaging sensors to capture colour
Yuri Gagarin – first man in space. My piece of fandom: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/10421
Sir Godfrey Hounsfield – inventor, with Robert Ledley, of the CAT scanner
Martin Cooper – inventor of the mobile phone
George Devol – 'father of robotics’ who helped to revolutionise carmaking
Thomas Tuohy – Windscale manager who doused the flames of the 1957 fire
Eugene Polley – TV remote controls
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