Do we need more good brands?
The word “brand” comes with a taste, as you would say in Swabian. Many people associate the term brand with unpleasant things, such as:
- Heartless commerce
- Equalization
- Untrue product promises
- Contentless mass-produced products
- Overpriced products
In cynical terms, you could define many brands as follows:
Scrape out the authentic, bold and original from a good idea, and then throw what's left over onto the market as a standardized series product.
Unfortunately, this description sounds like the opposite of art. That is why we would like to raise the question of whether we need more good brands.There are really a lot of bad brands on the marketThe writer Nassim Nicolas Taleb has in his bestseller Antifragile listed some heuristics or wisdom. One of them is
Never buy products that are advertised on television
As an explanation for this rule, he stated that the advertised products must usually be overpriced and of inferior quality, as the costs of advertising are extremely high and must be included in the calculation. Do this test during a few TV breaks. They'll probably agree with Taleb 90% of the time. Cheaply produced snacks + fast food, cosmetics and consumer goods dominate the advertising landscape. It is therefore all the more understandable that the brand concept is suffering. The idea of living in a world that is free of brands is becoming increasingly tempting.
But the idea behind brands is pretty significant in itself.
Essentially, a brand is the interplay of certain characteristics, a type of personality in the material world. A brand stands for a future vision of life in its condensed form and expresses it through services and physical products. What is the characteristic of products that combines them with each other on the one hand and distinguishes them from others on the other? What is on sale on a wristwatch or a T-shirt is not the product itself. What we want to buy is not so easy to grasp, but it is all the more important to us. We want to buy a sense of belonging, share a specific vision, acquire the character or spirit behind a product. Brands can stand for big things
A brand can provide the template and set rules. You don't have to be a genius yourself to get a bit of genius from the genius cake. That is good news! Because there aren't that many geniuses out there and we simply don't want the good things to depend on rare phenomena.
The big goal should be to raise the meaning of the brand term to a higher level
We need and benefit from the good things that have established themselves as brands. Unfortunately, it has become common practice in business and business life that a good brand is a strong and well-known brand. The raw capitalist is only impressed by a brand if as many people as possible buy it. Shouldn't we start asking other questions much earlier?
- What makes a brand admirable in terms of humanity?
- What makes them good in terms of their influence on human development?
- How can a brand help us live the best life we can?
Brands invite us to understand that great things never, or hardly ever, are created by individual individuals in an act of heroic isolation. Every good idea, every important insight should go through the process that a good brand must go through on its way there. Because that really just means that the idea, the insight, should increase its influence in this world. And that people can follow her from now on.The world urgently needs good brands!
