"OBD: Obsessive branding disorder": Has branding jumped the tracks?

In his book "OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder," Lucas Conley asserts that branding has gotten out of hand. At it's worst it is deceptive, he writes, and it diverts companies away from real product improvement to focus on superficial details. "Branding offers the satisfaction of a sense of change without the hard work," Conley writes.

"OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder" begins on a tear, lambasting branding as "a pesticide working its way up the food chain" and a "cyclone" into which "billions of dollars" are "funneled never to emerge again." Author Lucas Conley asserts that branding has "jumped the tracks, barreling through popular culture unchecked." For Conley, obsessive branding is a large tent which encompasses more than just brands.

Under Conley's big top are brands themselves (the symbols, including names, logos, sounds, etc. that represent a product, company or service), and the advertising and promotions that create brand recognition for a good or service. Conley also adds personal branding and the self-help industry, going so far as to imply that this includes the TV shows What Not to Wear and Nanny 911.

Conley's view elevates branding to gigantic proportions. "OBD" embraces an anti-commercialism argument that people are overexposed to commercial messages and impart too much meaning to the clothes they wear and the cars they drive. Then it takes things a step further.

Branding promotes the sizzle over the steak, Conley argues, and the time and money spent on branding could be spent on other pursuits — notably R&D and innovation. Conley's text raises an interesting question: If branding has indeed jumped the tracks, then what is it supposed to do when it is on-track? But unfortunately, readers are left puzzled until the answer finally appears on page 196, eight pages before the end.

Form over function?

"Branding offers the satisfaction of a sense of change without the hard work," Conley writes. For example, Conley notes that while Ford was operating under the banner of "Driving American Innovation," the company's 2007 fleet got worse gas mileage than its 1908 Model T. He also points to AT&T's "Your World. Delivered." campaign. When the telecom giant launched the campaign in 2006 at a cost of $800 million-$1 billion, it had tried twenty-three other branding campaigns in 25 years.

Shareholders must question the utility of such constant and costly reinvention. Conley believes that this branding obsession elevates form over function. "Companies have become fixated on perfecting the tenor of the voice on their on-hold recordings or engineering the smell permeating the box of their latest MP3 player," he writes.

A sonic branding company worked to orchestrate the sounds of the controller buttons on the Xbox, and worked on fast-food straws so that they would make just the right noise breaking through the plastic lid. In some cases, Conley may be somewhat justified in his outrage and bemusement. Singer Christina Aguilera's efforts to trademark hundreds of products with her name falls into this category.

"The former Mousketeer envisioned customers wearing Aguilera-branded contact lenses, drawing with Aguilera crayons, playing with an Aguilera badminton set, and freshening up with an Aguilera antiperspirant," writes Conley. Is this an example of a branding disorder? Yes, it probably is. But these instances should be framed by the current business environment, to which Conley alludes from time to time.

In this market, waves of new products are launched into a sea of intense global competition, and years of innovation are often reverse-engineered in a matter of days or weeks. A great new product often finds itself quickly paired against a copycat from China or elsewhere. This competitive environment calls for differentiation, allowing a company to delineate its CD player or pharmaceutical drug from a cheaper import that can look nearly identical.

It calls for product names that do not get lost in the swirl of commerce, and it should call for companies to live up to the promises they make to consumers or else perish. Branded eggs and cement — products not previously branded to the scale they are today — are proof that branding has gone too far, Conley argues. But does he mean that we should not brand eggs or cement?

Is that better for the companies that produce such items or for the consumers who buy them? He writes: "Brands offer us mental shortcuts, helping us cut through the clutter of everything we buy and enabling us to communicate certain concepts quickly and easily.

No one wants to sift through tens of thousands of packaged foods on every trip to the supermarket. Instead, we rely on the brands we know. And branding, when it's consistent, provides us with clarity and simplicity in a progressively hectic world." Even in Soviet Russia, Conley says, when the only label most goods received was a factory code, consumers began to look for codes associated with food that actually tasted better or materials that were actually superior.

Lipstick on a pig

What Conley rails against is the organization that strives to fix the message but not the product — potentially hoodwinking consumers — and the plethora of quick-fix branding experts. For example, Conley says that hurricane-ravaged New Orleans tried to sharpen its fun-loving party image with those in and outside of the Big Easy at a time when crime rates had spiked through the roof.

His underlying message is that a catchy tag-line and effective advertising can bring in tourists, but if the reality on the ground is different visitors will feel deceived, will never return, and will rant about it to friends. The book is at its best when it highlights efforts to promote goods and services that are at once creative and underhanded.

In one example, Conley writes about Sony's invention of a fake movie critic who, not surprisingly, gave glowing reviews to the company's Columbia Pictures-produced movies when other (real) critics panned the films. Another example targets Procter & Gamble's efforts to influence consumers through extensive word-of-mouth campaigns. P&G has a network of word-of-mouth agents.

Conley claims that an astonishing one percent of American teens and seven percent of American mothers are shilling for products under the guise of friendship or spontaneity. Does this all make consumers cynical? Yes. Does it call for major change? Perhaps. "The world is cheapened when everyone sees it with a marketer's eye," writes Conley. Is there an antidote to OBD? Conley tells us that we "must acknowledge that there will always be brands" and that we "must look in the mirror and address our disorder head on."

When "we hear the siren call of personal branding, we can rely on authenticity rather than artificiality." Also, we should not be indifferent when our city council "downplays civic blemishes and simplifies [the city's] diverse character under a memorable motto." And we shouldn't volunteer to be one of those word-of-mouth agents appearing to give altruistic, unbiased advice when in fact we aren't.

Branding is so ubiquitous that even Conley's book has the earmarks: its slick translucent cover makes it look like chic perfume or an imported liquor. And the brand-removal advocates apparently use it themselves. The magazine Adbusters, "now sells its own brand of sneakers, calendars [and] flags," Conley notes. It's certainly ironic, but "OBD" readers may wonder if it's truly a disorder.

Bottom Line:

• People gravitate to brands because they offer us mental shortcuts, helping us cut through the clutter of everything we buy.
• Companies may look to change their image when in fact it is their core offering that needs to be overhauled, because a new logo is much more easily rendered than a better product line.
• Billions of dollars are spent in the pursuit of what may be wasteful rebranding. For example, AT&T's 2006 branding campaign was its twenty-third in 25 years.
• Today's marketplace is one where items once seen as commodities are now branded. At the same time, the level of competition and the ease with which products can be copied speaks to the utility of being able to tell similar offerings apart.
• In an effort to sway consumer decisions, companies are pursuing what may be seen as ever more insidious promotional campaigns. Sony invented a fake movie critic to favorably review its films while Procter & Gamble controls a network of thousands of word-of-mouth advocates.