Branding, Schmanding.

It's funny to me how, and this is completely Orwellian, how so many people and corporate entities use a passel of words over and over again and those words are essentially devoid of meaning.

This morning (it's Sunday as I write this) I saw someone advertising on LinkedIn that they can build your personal brand. That's what set this off.

No one can build your personal brand. Period.

Someone else can promote it, but only you can build it. 

The same with corporate brands.

A brand is not a logo, a tone of voice, a palette of colors, or a store or an office building. A brand is way more essential than that.

It's who you are, how you behave, and what you do.

A brand is not supposed to be a Potemkin village. But most are.

If you can sum up who you are in the artifacts I mentioned above, fine. But if you start with blue, and a bunch of designy-squiggles, that's just bull-shit. If it doesn't define and capture the essence of your actions, it's not a brand, it's a decorative representation of a brand.

TBH, I'm more than a little bit tired of this confusion and people who say they're in "branding" when what they really are is in coloring-in.

In fact, in all of the world, I can think of thousands of companies, and people and politicians (who fall under a category separate from people) who are branded. And very few that are actually brands.

Apple is a brand. (Except for the slave labor in Asia thing, and the not paying taxes thing.)

Nike is a brand. (Except for the slave labor in Asia thing, and the monetization and destruction of what used to be amateur sports thing.)

But Verizon isn't a brand. They say they're reliable. But they're not. And all they really advertise is cheap and free phones, which are never free. And that reliable network? Just try to get help.

trump is a brand. But a mean, lying brand, sell-aggrandizing, thieving brand. In fact, everything trump does is on brand. Moreso than almost any other brand in existence.

Drug companies that spend billions promoting the splendors of their drugs are not brands. With the possible exception of Moderna, saying a drug is from Pfizer, or Lilly, or Merck or anything else means nothing to me. I could say the same about car companies. The name on the back of an indistinguishable too-large SUV identifies its manufacturer but not its values or etiology. 

The same to my mind holds true with ad agencies and the cabal of colluding holding companies that own them. An Ammirati ad used to mean something, a BBDO ad, a Chiat ad, or an Ogilvy ad used to mean something. I was proud to be an Ogilvy writer in the Ogilvy-tradition. Today the same algorithm, essentially, makes and places all ads and they are as alike as ball-bearings made in an old German factory.

There are a host of other linguistic markers that are similarly devoid of meaning.

I was always stunned by the cruelty of the nomenclatura of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Diversity was always exclusionary (old and Jewish didn't count as diverse, so diversity itself was selectvely-selective.) Equity is a mockable idea in a corporation where a CEO makes 300-times the wage of a median worker and that median worker has no real share in the company, no voice and no security--where's the equity? And Inclusion is a charade in organizations where management is segregated from those they manage--usually behind closed doors and on a separate floor. 

Similarly robust in describing infrastructure with no back ups for an outage. Or agile in an organization that takes seventeen days to produce a tweet. Or nimble in a business that has more project managers than project creators.

Maybe growing up as I did during the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and the era of Vietnam, I got used to looking beyond mere words into their meaning--to what was behind the words.

Soon, as I've said many times (too often) before, everyone on Linked In, every agency, every holding company will be trumpeting their Cannes-n-ization. While their work sucks, they lose 44-percent of their employees every year to attrition and expulsion and year-over-year they shrink in revenue, margin and headcount. Yet, they'll be agency of the year, or network or the year, or most awarded, or 40 under 40.

Like "freedom," "liberty," "justice," and "rule of law," you have to look at the discord between what's being said and what's being done.

Or, not