A successful brand is not nearly a name associated with a product. In today’s marketplace, a successful brand is a lifestyle, a feeling, a moment, a promise.
Lucas Conley’s funny and often frightening book, OBD: Obessive Branding Disorder: The Illusion of Business and the Business of Illusion, uses several examples to highlight the madness that is today’s advertising and explores the ins and outs of successful (and not-so-successful) marketing campaigns.
With the world becoming more branded than ever, advertisers are coming up with bold new ways to push their messages on a largely resistant public. Companies are desperate for the awareness of capricious and preoccupied customers, which often leads to advertisement saturation. It is said that Americans will see between 3,000 and 5,000 advertisements a day.
Conley’s book takes a look at the obsession with advertising and unearths the deal with the devil that the average consumer seems contented to make in exchange for free stuff or money. There are multiple alleyways and paths to this sordid tale and OBD does its best to outline them all.
If you doubt the legitimacy of “brand obsession,” Conley has plenty to say. Take, for instance, the story of the Connecticut woman who decided to name her child GoldenPalace.com. Or think about the fact that 94% of women in Japan own a Louis Vuitton product.
With the obsession many of us have over brands, advertisers are finding ways to ensure that we have plenty to gorge ourselves on. From branding towns and places to the use of shrewd angles to capture our attention, such as the use of scent and taste to target emotional responses, today’s marketers know how to influence the masses.
This brand fixation and the marketer’s readiness to do anything to sell a product do not simply result in more goods and services being sold. In fact, Conley argues that the brand obsession of our culture winds up conditioning society as a whole in different fashions.
Indeed, the idea of a woman naming her child after a casino or the notion of Japanese women going wild over fancy handbags might not signal the day of reckoning. But the reality is that branding is going much deeper than that.
Take invisible branding, for instance. Word-of-mouth (WOM) is among the most subversive and nauseating forms of advertisement in circulation today. For some, WOM may simply look like an Avon lady or somebody down the hall who really enjoyed the latest action movie. But the reality behind today’s monstrous WOM advertising is much more unpleasant.
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