I particulary enjoyed this chunk of James Surowiecki's Wired article on the decline of brands.

… [B]ecause consumers are more promiscuous and fickle than ever, established brands are vulnerable, and new ones have a real chance of succeeding - for at least a little while. The obsession with brands, paradoxically, demonstrates their weakness.

… Marketing types either don’t see this trend or choose not to talk about it. In the words of advertising legend Jim Mullen, “Of all the things that your company owns, brands are far and away the most important and the toughest. Founders die. Factories burn down. Machinery wears out. Inventories get depleted. Technology becomes obsolete. Brand loyalty is the only sound foundation on which business leaders can build enduring, profitable growth.” Similarly, in the new book Brands and Branding, Rita Clifton, chair of Interbrand UK, puts it this way: “Well-managed brands have extraordinary economic value and are the most effective and efficient creators of sustainable wealth.” These assertions claim that while factories, source code, and patents are ephemeral, brands are real.

I don't much warm to Interbrand as an organisation. They make a lot of money by claiming to put a reliable value on brands, using some complicated and not-open-source model. At the same time, they come out with statements that mean I wouldn't rely on them to estimate the value of a dollar bill. I've quoted this before I know, but it still amazes me: in an Interbrand book, (I can't cite which book as it's at home 12000 miles away) edited by Rita Clifton herself, we find the following stated as fact

Today, Kellogg's is synonymous with health and vitality.

I don't know about you, but I've never been told by anyone that they're feeling really Kellogg's today; no doctor has ever reassured a hypochondriac "Don't worry, Mr Jones, you're totally Kellogg's"

I'm no expert on food and nutrition, but it strikes me that a lot of Kellogg's products contain quite a bit of sugar and other stuff which don't exactly qualify them as in perfect alignment with a healthy lifestyle.

In short, the statement is a load of old tosh. And it represents exactly the kind of fawning, lickspittle client-worship that makes me so suspicious of branding experts.

And I distrust the sleight-of-hand by which the successes of real companies and products are hypothesised as branding - exactly the process Surowiecki spotlights in his article. Most branding experts started life in advertising or packaging. They may occasionally sing songs about the customer as king but what they really love to do is to add a dash of icing and then claim the whole cake as their own.

Douglas Adams wrote a marvellous scene in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in which our heroes stumble on a spacecraft manned by what seems a rather incompetent crew. It transpires that a planet has rounded up a collection of its least productive and useful citizens and tricked them into leaving on a spaceship to escape the pretended imminent destruction of the home planet. The rest of us will follow behind, the travellers are assured. Of course, the rest of them have no such plan. Adams populated this craft with (as I recall) the likes of telephone sanitisers and PR execs. I'm sure if he were writing today, he'd find a few spare seats for Brand Consultants.