Perhaps I am a little touchy about this, since I recently experienced a shallow, trivializing "branding" excercise at the non-profit where I have worked for 20 years. That experience pointed out to me how easy it is for people at the top - who are not really doing the work of the business, regardless of it's function - to rely to heavily on the importance of branding.
Of late, I keep reading about "branding" from Republicans:
"George Bush has destroyed the Republican brand"
"The Republican brand is destroyed, but we can fix the Conservative brand"
"McCain has his own brand" (That Maverick!! - haha)
"We need to retool our brand"
The concept of branding exposes some of the deepest flaws in the thinking of the Republicans. It also explains why such a large percentage of the electorate thinks we are on the wrong track.
I am by no means a branding expert - but I have experienced a branding exercise. It involves catchy slogans, defining your mission, an elevator speech, and magic words to describe and define yourself. There is sort of this theory that if you say these things enough, they will become true, or at the very least people will believe them to be.
Well, people see through that. The Republicans branded themselves as the party of family values - and then they demonstrated so very clearly that their leaders don't have any. They branded themselves as small government, and have built up a much larger federal sector through the use of greedy contractors. The branded themselves the party of fiscal conservatism, and they've driven the federal deficit up faster than any Democratic-led government. They claim that the free market solves all problems, when it's become pretty obvious that unregulated free markets lead to greed, excess, and collapse.
Branding is not the problem of the Republicans. They were wrong about several things. Their underlying ideas are flawed. No amount of dressing this up with branding will save them.
In the meantime, Democrats have worked hard to find more and better Democrats. We're finding good, honest, smart people to run for office. Who gives a crap about branding when you can elect citizens with strong inner compases, energy, and common sense. Republicans are in the opposite situation and have been for several years. They've chased away many good people who are Republicans and have an every shrinking pool of scoundrels and fools.
I laugh whenever I see the Republicans talk about branding. Let them pay millions of dollars to branding consultants. It's a waste of their time. You can't dress up a pig and sell it as a racehorse.
Democrats are in the process of going back to the drawing board and rethinking how to solve the problems that face us. We are open to ideas. We are in the real world. We want to hear the honest truth from experts and reporters. We are willing to make sacrifices to make things right. We are getting some excellent people to run - so many excellent candidates I can't name them all.