A Fresh Look at Brands

A brand begins in the mind of a consumer much before the marketer conceives of it.
This beginning is rooted in desire.
While desire is at the core of all life, the complexity of desire defines the human condition.
Human civilization is a result of the complex nature of human desire.
Every epoch of human progress is a result of a new culture of human desire.
Not straying too far from today, the post-industrial culture of desire was shaped by the emerging surfeit of material goods and comforts.
With this culture of desire was born the culture of "products". For example as basic an act as bathing got crystallized around a set of material products. And the discipline of modern marketing was born with the trade-marking of soaps.
It was marketing that drove the spread of modern media.
And it was media that was the harbinger of the Information Age.
We get a fresh take on the computer when we conceptualize and consider it as media, which was what the brilliant guys at Palo Alto did with the invention of the GUI.
The concept of brand as we understand it today came into marketing at a much later stage of its evolution.
In fact it is my contention that the concept of brand is the end of marketing as we know it .
Because a brand is an entity of the imagination while marketing as we know it is rooted in material products and services.
Marketing today has become effete because its practitioners are in essence living a lie.
To jump metaphors, they are all falling between two stools.
Brands are the essence of a new culture of desire (the New Culture of Desire is a phrase and concept I first came across in the book "The New Culture of Desire" by Melinda Davis, the CEO and founder of The Next Group).
Brands have very little to do with material products and services.
The fact that much of marketing today revolves around the concept of the brand is like trying to get an Intel microprocessor to work for an old-fashioned abacus.
When I use the term brand, I of course mean it in as the idea that signifies an emotional state that crosses a threshold of intensity.
Marketing today has got the concept of the brand firmly in its grasp.
However the desire to link it to the consumption of a particular product and/or service is entirely misplaced (and at the core of the increasing failure of modern marketing to deliver).
It is essential to realize that in the new culture of desire an emotional state that crosses a threshold of intensity is the central object of desire.
It is what Melinda Davis terms as " The State of O".
The concept of brand is sue generic and nothing at all to do with the marketing of products and services.
In fact the central "industry" of the next few decades will be creation, "manufacture" and propagation of brands.
That is why the next few decades are going to be characterized as the Emotion Age because the buying and selling of emotions is going to be primary form of commercial activity just as the buying and selling of information was for the fast receding Information Age and the buying and selling of manufactured product was for the bygone Industrial Age.
Marketers understand brands and once they delink this understanding from the selling of material products and services, they will emerge as the prime movers of the Emotion Age along with artists, entertainers and communicators of all hues.
This of course will happen to those marketers who answer in the affirmative to the question: Does Marketing Need Reinventing?
Either because they recognize brands not just as entities independent of the marketing of products and services but as in themselves the key "products" of the Emotion Age.
Or because they recognize that trademarks are convenient pegs to hang the identity of products/services and beyond that the deeper concept of "brand" has very little to do with the buying and selling of material products and services.