Despite his reservations about modern day branding, Conley recognises that it is somehow hard-coded into human behaviour. As an example of how branding persists even when it is officially proscribed, he takes us to communist Russia where, despite the lack of advertising and logos, people created substitute brands. Most goods in the USSR had a description and a factory code stamped on them. Some factories produced better quality goods than others and soon the factory code became shorthand for the quality of the product. In other words, the code became the brand.
Brands are necessary and useful, or at least they should be. And that is Conley’s main argument against our current obsession with branding: brands no longer symbolise anything useful. They’re not information, they’re just noise. Noise of the most irksome type. Instead of creating better products and services, companies are using all their innovation potential to grab our increasingly fragmented attention. And they stop at nothing to figure out how to get some of that attention, even if it means scanning our brains to find that elusive ‘buy button’. But Conley needn’t lose any sleep. Much of the marketing mojo is as effective as homeopathy.
Clint Witchalls is a former business analyst and now works as a freelance journalist for the Economist, the Guardian, the Observer and the Times
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