No, brands are not dead yet. The really thick consumers who don’t get out much may still be swayed by a brand name in their buying decisions.

There is, however, massive brand slaughter going on by the same people who want to levarage brands to make a sale, e.g. in the car industry. Once a consumer has to consider and research who is actually building his car and what quality it is, without being able to trust the brand name, the brand is dead.

A Subaru with a Saab badge, front-wheel drive, overweight, Fiat-based diesel cars being called Alfa Romeos, Daewoos suddenly called Chevrolets, pimped Ford Mondeos called Jaguar… Many new cars seem to be an amalgamate of random components with a “brand” slapped on in a feeble attempt to suggest the emotion, continuity, and quality the brand once stood for.

Some people know these things, and knowledge spreads. You can’t fool everybody forever. Putting forward a brand as a magical extra slapped on run-off-the-mill stuff is a sure way of killing a brand for good. In the automobile industry, brands aren’t dead yet, but everything is being done to kill them.

Jonathan, I know you are promoting a singular point of view, and I do applaud the positioning you’ve applied to this endeavor. I might even agree that the discipline of ‘branding’ is dead (if it was ever alive)…but brands? Good god, man.

Your arguments appear to stem from a need to measure results. Fair enough. The problem comes when you try to measure that which cannot (or perhaps, should not) be measured. Yes, should not. (As in, “Honey, I love you .04% less than I did a week ago.”)

Here’s the issue: during the past 15 years or so, as the economy grew and as companies attempted to push brands beyond their natural core, many a negative thing happened. Positioning (the act of articulating a brand’s natural essence in a competitive framework), was replaced with branding. Branding? You can’t ‘ing’ a brand. It’s like painting a house with a crumbling foundation.

And so, branding became the superficial: logos and taglines. And brands were pushed further into ill-advised places by those who never understood their strengths and weaknesses in the first place.

You now fight for commodity, when business needs a bit of magic. A bit of showmanship. Logic is easy to sell. Emotion, true connection, at an intangible level, is hard. Always has been. That’s why you can charge so much more for it.

Brands are dead? Hardly. But your argument is. You see, Mr. Baskin, your name reminds that I’ve not had an ice cream cone in quite some time.

So to argue that there’s not something fundamentally wrong with how companies approach branding is beyond me. Branding RARELY works, and it NEVER accomplishes the goals of attaching immutable, motivational associations to products and services. And it’s all too-likely that companies all over the world would “spend trillions of dollars in developing these brand experiences” considering the enormous edifice of habit, routine, and agencies/consultancies/hopeful believers who work tirelessly to try and make true something that is little better than an outdated wish.

Imagine if they (and you) stopping trying to make the case for why brands matter, and working tirelessly to find proof of your beliefs, and instead started from the point that any credible research scientist would embrace: brands DON’T matter, and then go about trying to identify what DOES influence and prompt customer behavior.

We could call whatever we come up with ‘brands’ or ‘behavior’ or ‘Fred,’ for that matter.

Anyway, thanks for the conversation.

To think of branding as a creative indulgence of logos, advertising and cluttered fodder in our lives is ignoring the overarching effect that brands have (and the companies who execute them).

Yes, brands can take on a life of their own beyond what a company injects into them. And surely it is the definition of the brand experience that is owned by the consumer. It is fool hardy, however, to think that brands are an uncontrollable force beyond which a company can have any control.

The values and intrinsic characteristics which a brand delivers to its customers are a result of the pre-contrived strategies of the companies executing them. A company can control how it’s messages are delivered. A company can control it’s values surrounding how the product experience is created. And a company can have a critical role in creating a specific brand connection with it’s customers.

And forgive me for believing that it is unlikely for companies the world over to spend trillions of dollars in developing these brand experiences if they did not instigate a specific, valued response from customers.

Human beings attach meaning to the things they do. We assign attributes real or imagined to what we buy and use.

But to argue so angrily that we have ‘relationships with brands’ has no substance; we relate to what we do, and in doing so we define brands. Marketers who spend lots of money to assign those values for us do so with little effect. They might prompt an inquiry or even a purchase, but they cannot and do not attach lasting values — brands — to the products and services we use.

We do. ‘Brands’ arise when we experience different products, or experience different levels of service. There are no ‘brands’ outside of our experience and moment-to-moment affirmation. They aren’t “them” or “it.” Sorry.

fMRI and other neurological studies prove absolutely nothing about the relevance or utility of brands, other than that things prompts neurons to fire. We recognize certain things, and ignore others. So what? Marketers can’t manipulate these reactions, and they certainly can’t causally link them to subsequent purchase behavior.

So, it’s funny: I’m not the contrarian. Believing in the magic of branding is the belief that flies in the face of reality.

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“Nobody has a relationship with a brand.” Seriously? You can’t really be saying that the products we buy, the sports teams we root for, nor the commercial experiences we have in life don’t carry an emotional connection (good or bad)? I love my sports team, to which I have cried like a baby after a championship loss; I hate my phone carrier, to the point that I get puke burps anytime I even think I may need to call customer service; I anxiously await my daily trek to my facebook page… How then could I not have a relationship and/or emotional connection with these brand experiences?

“But brands are simply irrelevant in a world wherein people know that one airplane seat looks like another, different clothes and PCs are made in the same factories overseas…” Yes, but one airlines service may be drastically different than another’s; one clothing brand might make one feel drastically more attractive than other; and sporting a Mac at the local Starbuck’s might be one’s pinnacle on the road to a carefully executed hipster persona.

“…human beings make purchase decisions based on their own experiences of real life…” Yes, but they also make purchase decisions which amplifying the definition and/or aspirations they have of themselves. If only the world of commerce were as easy as creating utilitarian, lowest-cost products. Of course, this isn’t – and will never be – the case in a society that strives to fulfill more than merely basic needs.

And if you need proof of this try looking at the fMRI neurological studies, which show that strong brand attachments spark distinct emotional activity at the neurological level of the brain. Or why not look at some competitor vs. competitor profitability data and see the impact of different branding approaches on revenues, profitability, and consumer engagement. Or even more simply, ask anyone you know what strong feelings they have towards the companies, products or service they love or hate. Do any of these things and you will realize that at a psychological, physiological and emotional level – we have a connection the material world around us (and, yes, relationships with brands).

I savor intelligent contrarianism as much as anybody, but these ideas are on the brink of absurdity. Attack marketing, talk about how we as businesses and consumers can view it differently, but don’t launch an unsupported doctrine of change without understanding the basic facts of reality.

Your attack on the modern fabric of commerce is equivalent to a physicist constructing a theory which argues the non-existence of gravity: wrong and naive.