Brandscendence: Three Essential Elements of Enduring Brands

This confused primer from IBM ""brand steward"" Clark insists that virtually everything, not just the commercial name of a product, is a brand. The Catholic Church is a brand. The generic category ""ski resort"" is a brand. Einstein, Gandhi and Mother Teresa are brands. Switzerland and the Middle East are brands, while New York City is ""a web of brand holons."" Clark's ideas about brands are no more focused than his definition. He relates Brandscendence (a trademarked word meaning a ""brand ... that goes beyond ordinary limits"") to the ""elements"" of Relevance, Context and Mutual benefit with the equation B = (R + C) X Mb. But rest assured that ""this is not a mathematical formula or a numerical expression,"" just a lazy association of nebulous pseudo-concepts that Clark conflates with all manner of junk science. Brands, he theorizes, partake of wave-particle duality, tap into the Jungian collective unconscious, swirl in a ""spiral dynamic"" of memes and ""wave-like meta-memes"" and sometimes constitute a ""McLuhan tetradic reversal."" And if people are brands, brands are people, too; a brand goes through the stages of Piagetian child development, can suffer from depression and paranoia and may cease to ""care about itself or others."" Intellectual pretensions aside, Clark has little in the way of useful business lessons to impart beyond a few truisms (""creating meaningful and memorable names is one of the most important jobs ... in branding""), some disorganized anecdotes about favorite brands, and the ridiculous suggestion that the Red Cross ""brand"" ought to think of itself as ""the ultimate humanitarian experience."" Clark's premise that reality is essentially identical to its shallowest marketing representations yields few insights into either reality or marketing.