April 17, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Intercept"-
United’s
stock
plunges
after video emerges of a passenger being
violently dragged off an oversold
flight. Pepsi
yanks
an ad that portrays police and Black
Lives Matter-ish protestors making peace
over a can of soda. Fox News faces an
advertiser
exodus
after new revelations of massive payouts
to settle sexual harassment and verbal
abuse allegations against host Bill
O’Reilly.
If
there is one lesson that emerges from
all these controversies it is this:
Institutions organized around a powerful
brand image – often understood as “a
promise” from a corporation to its
customers – are in big trouble when that
image gets battered and the promise
appears to have been broken. These facts
make corporate brands intensely
vulnerable to public pressure,
particularly when that pressure is loud
and organized.
All of this
has long been understood by brand
managers and consumer activists, but it
now has implications that reach far
beyond the fate of PepsiCo’s share price
or United’s crisis management team.
That’s because, for the first time in
history, the president of the United
States is a fully commercialized
Superbrand, with family members who are
best understood
as spin-off brands.
From an ethics perspective, this is as
swampy as it gets, since the Trump
dynasty is already profiting
significantly from the presidency,
whether from the free publicity it is
getting for properties that have been
transformed into White House satellites,
or simply because the Trump brand name
is repeated in the global press about a
zillion times a day. More worrying are
the many opportunities for backdoor
lobbying and influence peddling — what
better way to curry favour with the
First Family than by selecting one of
its properties for a lavish event, or by
paying an inflated price to lease the
Trump name for a new development?
No
Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is
Independent Media
Journalists have pointed out these
conflicts many times, and Trump and his
spawn have responded with a defiant
shrug. This is happening for very simple
reason: Trump isn’t playing by the
normal rules of politics, in which
elected representatives are accountable
to voters and to an agreed upon set of
standards. He’s playing by the rules of
branding, in which companies are only
accountable to their brand image.
Here’s the good news: as the recent
travails of Pepsi, United, and Fox News
tell us, brands have their own special
vulnerabilities. And that can be useful,
as long as you understand precisely what
promise a brand has made to its
customers.
It’s a phenomenon I’ve been studying for
a long time, ever since I started
writing about brand-based pressure
campaigns and boycotts in the mid-1990s,
research that turned into my first book,
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand
Bullies. What I learned is that any
brand – no matter how seemingly amoral –
can be significantly weakened with the
right tactics.
So, with that in mind, here’s a
quick-and-easy guide for doing battle
with the president in the only language
he understands – his own brand.
Naomi Klein’s new book, No Is Not
Enough: How to Resist Trump’s Shock
Politics And Win the World We Need will
be published in June.
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