The posts that have started appearing on Marketing Watchdog tell an ongoing story about marketing’s cultural impact (Marketer’s Burden), how marketing gets intertwined with religion (Marketing Gods) and how marketing is shaping the future (BrandLand). As posts accrue, the library, blogroll and other features will take shape more slowly. Marketing Watchdog speaks to anyone who has been targeted by marketing campaign. Which is to everyone. Related posts & pages: Nothing … [more]
Jul 152011
![Mitch McConnell, brand manager [video]](http://marketingwatchdog.com/wp-content/uploads/thumb-cache/mcconnell-with-hand-4086a2b03f29e833f25f5ee7ee642acf-150x150-75-nocrop.jpg)
A recent comment by senate minority leader Mitch McConnell triggered the predictable cognitive dissonance. How you saw that comment—in this case, whether or not McConnell revealed a cynicism that puts politics ahead of country—depended on if you were looking at it from the right or the left. But, the most significant thing about what McConnell said? No one seems to have seen that at all. In the following clip from … [more]
Jul 182011
[From the Marketing Watchdog vantage] A pre-packaged story that consumers use to tell their own story, often in an effort to make themselves part of the brand’s story. It can be hard to get a handle on the term “brand.” See Wide use spawns diffuse definitions. Note how the following offers accurate definitions of brand and its characteristics, but suggest little about what makes brands significance. From Dictionary.com: Brand … [more]
Jul 182011
[From the Marketing Watchdog vantage] Contamination of a product (usually with a logo) that, in turn, contaminates the consumer of the product. The following definitions, while accurate, show how hard it is to get a handle on the term “branding.” (See Wide use spawns diffuse definitions.) Not how these definitions miss the significance of branding by focusing on the mechanics. From the Dictionary.com 21st Century Lexicon: Branding is 1.) “The … [more]
Jul 182011
[From the Marketing Watchdog vantage] The process where an object’s contact with the sacred can “contaminate” it so that it, too, is sacred. Applying this concept to branding, a “sacred” logo contaminates an otherwise generic product with properties that, in turn, can contaminates the product’s user. Attributed to Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, the contcept of “contamination” also can begin to explain the value that consumers’ place on brands. Call it the … [more]
“Brand” and “branding” are two words words that, by seeping so completely into everyday use, have lost their potency. Wide use works to dilute the terms, making them vague and cipher-like. Another problem is that the existing definitions for brand and branding have tended to focus on their tangible, surface characteristics. What most current definitions don’t capture is the fundamental significance of these terms. That’s why Marketing Watchdog is coming … [more]
