Brand Babble Meets Digital Drivel

A few weeks ago, in a piece called The Age Of The Complicator, Part 4  I said, "we have to remove the word branding from our vocabulary. It has lost its meaning... "

If you need further evidence, I urge you to read Time To Rewrite The Brand Playbook For Digital in Ad Age this week.

It's been a long time since I've enjoyed a piece of highfalutin' baloney as much as I enjoyed this thing.

The author (of course, a "digital strategist") managed to use the word "brand" or some derivative of it 54 times in a 58 sentence article. That's a brand babble quotient of .93 which is a new world's record. Kudos all around!

She has also been able to do a lovely job of integrating brand babble with digital gibberish to come up with a true tour de force of contemporary marketing double talk. A few excerpts...

• "Instead of simply wondering whether we should spend more time and effort on developing strategy or focusing on implementation, our challenge is to address branding online simultaneously as behavior and technology." 

Yup. I'll get right on that.

• "There's always an opportunity to choose anew how a brand is going to behave online." 

And if it doesn't behave online, no dessert. I mean it.

• "The branding industry of the past worked by coming up with an idea that they handed off. In the branding industry of the present, it is not easy to hand things off."

And in the branding industry of the future, there will be no hand-offs. It'll be all passing. Everyone go long.

• "...people's behavior in digital is shaped by a simple trade-off between expected gains and expected costs of interacting with a brand."

Really? I thought people's behavior in digital was shaped by watching too many dirty videos.

• "Traditional branding deals with extending the brand promise to the digital space and integrating go-to-market tactics with digital tactics to support the brand promise."

How many times have we all said that!

• "Of course, brands realized that they needed to appropriate their message to the new media, according to McLuhan's "medium is the message" idea, and now everyone is talking about brand experiences online."

Yeah, whatever.