True Brand Revolution by J. Callon Moss
The branding industry that was intended to tell compelling corporate stories is actually a Trojan horse, smuggling inside it our own ability as consumers to shape the brands we use. This book shows you how.
HOW BRANDS ARE NO LONGER UNDER CORPORATE CONTROL
Branding has enjoyed a dizzying climb. It took the industry less than fifty years to advance from policing assets such as names and logos to installing in the boardroom CBOs whose job is to understand and respond to the tumultuous voices of consumers. Today brand rules cover every part of the corporate mission and shape its values. But this is only the start, and the coming brand revolution will effect just as profound a change and happen just as fast.
As this book details, we’re in the opening skirmishes of a brand-driven war for the hearts of consumers between those that want to continue to dissemble and falsify and those that open themselves to our oversight. Branding has torn down the barriers that are supposed to shield corporate machinations from our view. Brand stories are exposed to scrutiny like never before, and disconnects with reality will be ruinous.
For consumers, branding has gifted us presence inside the upper echelons of the organization, hauled there like a Trojan Horse in the form of those self-same CBOs and their departments. Brands, we’re told, are now built around us. That means we hold the reins of power, not CEOs and shareholders.
Guided by this book, we can use our brand-mandated authority to demand more accountability to employees, society, and the environment, and to ensure the business follows ethical principles dictated by us. In the coming war, we will decide the victors, and they will be the ones whose brands are built solely on truth.
96,000 words : 368 pages
eBook
Amazon search code: B0D2KQL5X5
Buy at Amazon US : $9.99
Buy at Amazon UK : £7.99
Paperback
Amazon search code: B0D2L9GLCD
Buy at Amazon US : $15.99
Buy at Amazon UK : £13.99
EXCERPT
There are good companies in the world. There are wicked companies. From the traditional brand perspective, it’s impossible to tell one from the other.
Asset branding, done well, gives every brand a sheen of professionalism, competence, and goodness which means that the very same branding that is supposed to highlight differen-tiation actually renders all companies into an indistinguishable homogenous mass. There are even corporations I’ve worked for who asked for a slogan along the lines of “we are a good company.” Their point is not to boast but to screen.
Brands humanize corporations, but the corporate person they create is an invented persona. It is the very essence of branding to manufacture this false, good identity, to give it a character, a way of speaking and behaving, to clothe it and doll it up and, most of all, to give it a fake biography, in other words a brand story, so you don’t think of who’s actually running the show.
If you met them in the street, what kind of person would Chiquita be? Branding answers that with a lovable puppet. You can feel their story, relate to them, but they’re just a sock with googly eyes on the end. The actual corporation is nothing like you think it is, and you can be absolutely sure it’s far worse. (Companies hide badness. They don’t hide goodness.) If brands were people they’d be monsters you’d run to avoid.
Every human quality that brands appear to possess is a charade meant to con you into being friends with them and even trusting them. The whole basis of their relationship with you is a googly-eyed lie.
Many corporations are not purposefully bad. They are simply devices for the accumulation of money to be passed to shareholders. The badness comes with the exploitation they’re willing to endure to keep that money rolling in. The worst will continue to do harm as long as they can and never admit that they did it. They will toady to the worst dictatorships in the world, for example agreeing to open their records to government surveillance in order to enter their market. The same brand that tells you it loves you lobbies against the minimum wage and threatens to take its business overseas to cheaper workers it can exploit there.
They do all this to you, and they do all this to each other, because corporations are worse than politicians in the way they claw at their rivals. As I said before, the best company does not necessarily win. Best for you, best for humanity, best for the planet. The most ruthless company is likely to win.
Wars are good for business. They’re a permission for price hikes that will never be reversed. So are disasters and epi-demics. The stock market rockets when people die.
Today brands are praised precisely for their ability to ‘empathize’ with consumers, a reward for pretending with sincerity. The reward is for the company that managed to present the most convincing public face — not for what they actually do for people and the environment but for the pretty words they use to convince you that they’re doing these things.
Brands will talk about connection, but this is a special usage of the term. It’s a connection between the person and the company (the bogus person), not between the person and other people.
Brands sell human freedom, but it’s actually a form of oppression. That they create good living. That you gain your own value from the brands you support. The story is essentially that these are people just like you, whereas of course they’re not.
Brands expect you to have short memories, or to not care at all about their past, so that when they’re found out as nefarious you’ll forgive and forget quickly. There’s always asset rebranding like Chiquita’s for the recalcitrant, the corporation-as-people equivalent of the witness protection program. New sock, you’re a different person. From chemical spill polluter to champion of the natural environment in one fell swoop.
With social media, brands found a whole new way to pretend to be your friend.
Equally, branding has equipped corporations with a rule-book of new strategies to deal with negative press, from claims of discrimination and sexual harassment, real or rumored product contamination, layoffs and lawsuits, all kinds of data breaches, to the embezzlements and tax evasion of those self-same C-suite members who sit at the top of the pile directing all this.
It’s actually enshrined there in the brand book, for those in the boardroom who bother to read it: “If there’s a problem, be empathetic to the victims, express sympathy, deny brand responsibility if it’s at all credible to do so, and stress that the company is taking steps to resolve the issue, since stating you’re doing so is equal in the public mind to actually doing so. Finally, reiterate that we’re a corporation dedicated to people and which always puts the planet first.”
This was not all created by branding, but it is branding’s gift to the world in the 21st Century: unscrupulous robot corporations chewing up everything with a human smile on their face.
96,000 words : 368 pages
eBook
Amazon search code: B0D2KQL5X5
Buy at Amazon US : $9.99
Buy at Amazon UK : £7.99
Paperback
Amazon search code: B0D2L9GLCD
Buy at Amazon US : $15.99
Buy at Amazon UK : £13.99
Cover apple courtesy of Summit supermarket. Cut, photographed, and eaten by the author.
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