Interesting article on Wired about the demise of brands.
The world seems to be disappearing beneath a deluge of logos, corporations are branding like there’s no tomorrow and the brand value of companies like Coca-Cola and IBM are routinely calculated at tens of billions of dollars.
Brand were originally created to protect the consumer. So that when you bought a bottle of Coca Cola you were getting exactly what you purchased rather than a knock-off. Laws were based around a company fighting to protect the consumer from being hurt or misled by products falsely claiming to the real thing.
That changed when companies started attacking the consumer. Disney’s one of the worst, of course, going after day cares that paint Mickey on the walls — even though there’s not an instant’s danger that anyone will mistake a nonprofit daycare center for a Disney operation and be misled into patronising it.
This practice has backfired on corporations with consumers no longer having brand loyalty and actively avoiding some companies due to their aggressive behaviour.
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