Reader Al Geduldig asks below what I meant in an earlier post when I referred to "the Democrats' fatal attraction to branding." I probably should have been clearer at the time -- what I meant was, "the Democrats' fatal attraction to branding as a substitute for actually doing hard, hands-on policy work." The Democratic Party -- in flirting with George Lakoff and other framing and branding gurus -- seems to have decided, along with a fair number of businesspeople who ought to know better -- that branding is a sort of magic fix that, once you apply it, takes care of all your communications problems. "What we really need is a brand!" What's generally meant by that is, "What we really need is a campaign or a commercial or a logo that makes people understand who we are and what we mean, and makes them like us, without our having to address any of the fundamentals of what we do."
I once had a client -- he was the head of marketing for a consumer Internet startup that meant to compete with Amazon -- who came to my office and said, "I need to be Coca-Cola. What does it take to be Coca-Cola?" I was a bit tired that day, and not feeling very diplomatic, so I looked at him across the table and said, "Two world wars." It's a tribute, I guess, to him and maybe also to me, that he didn't jump across the table after me. His business is gone, but we're still good friends.
What I was really trying to tell him was this -- Coca-Cola wasn't built overnight, and it wasn't built on a wish. It was built over decades, through a whole series of business decisions and actions that added up to the Coca-Cola brand. Yes, there were some decisions along the way about what Coca-Cola ought to represent -- but they were consistent with the business strategy, and they were arrived at over time.
A brand isn't a goal. It's a result. It isn't a magic substitute for strategy. It's the expression of strategy. It isn't easy. It's hard.
I'm not confident that the Democrats who talk about the need for branding understand that. If they articulated the desire, it might come out this way -- "if only we had a brand, we wouldn't have to worry about the fact that we're aligned with old vested interests, and we're fixated on solutions for an industrial economy, and we don't have a coherent way of talking about values, and we don't have anything resembling a national security strategy." A brand would be easier than that -- wouldn't it?
No.
I'd be happy to see a Democratic brand emerge. But I'd like that Democratic brand to be the expression of what the Democrats actually are. And right now, I'm not at all sure what that is.
Policy now. Branding later.
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