Book Review: OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder by Lucas Conley
Monday, January 5, 2009 at 05:22PM OBD is a book about branding by a non-brander. In fact, Lucas Conley is a business writer who controls his resentment of the excesses of branding he describes. Conley investigates and explains in detail the extent to which branding has seeped into modern culture, and how far companies will go to promote their products.
Forms of invasive branding
Those in the marketing and graphic design fields that have worked on brands won’t be surprised – branded golf holes, branded urinals, fake bloggers and even branded beach sand are uncovered as examples of branding going too far. Conley doesn’t say that we don’t need branding – he’s not one of those who think everything should be “no logo, no brand” – but in Conley’s view branding has become more of a Band-Aid or a solution to inferior products instead of companies actually fixing the broken product. He criticizes executives for becoming “so focused on the strength of the all-encompassing idea — the brand — that they ignore the physical properties that compose it.”
Conley gives numerous examples of forms of invasive branding that threaten people’s understanding of life and culture. He asks “What does it mean when our ‘sense of meaning’ and our ‘sense of identity’ are shaped by someone trying to sell us something?”
After talking with a branding fundamentalist, Conley notes “The more he describes branding, the more it appears to consist entirely of vague idealism and seemingly vain efforts to create something meaningful and permanent of what is often superfluous and transient. The simpler the product, the more Byzantine the branding seems.”
Watch out for Cincinnati
Conley doesn’t see the ad agencies as being the people behind all of this. In fact, he writes that branding has “superseded the advertising industry, either claiming advertising outright or dictating the message that advertisers are allowed to deliver. Increasingly, marketing has also become a division of branding.” He also has no qualms pointing fingers: apparently, Cincinnati, Ohio is a hotbed of professional invasive branders.
Watch out graphic designers!
Conley ties branding into graphic design pretty plainly for designers: people don’t understand design – they don’t “get” it. But clients “get” branding. They get the idea that a brand can make their product better, more appealing to consumers. So, to many companies, graphic design is to follow branding; that is – graphic designers should design for the brand, instead of the other way around.
The branding problem
Conley says the problem with branding is that “...branding, when it’s consistent, provides us with clarity and simplicity in a progressively hectic world. But branding has become unhinged from its initial principles, and its aims have become increasingly exaggerated and warped.”
I’d like to think that there are still some companies left that grow their brands organically – that is, without lies, exaggerations and such. Some companies do it the old-fashioned way – their brand builds with real word-of-mouth (not the 7% of mothers that are compensated for WOM marketing, as Conley states) and real customer service. Oh yeah, and a quality product.
But, unfortunately I see Conley’s take as being all too real for more and more companies. As Publisher’s Weekly states: “Conley's perspective on branding's encroachment into social areas is as alarming as it is stimulating.”
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