The Hottest Brand Going - Branding an Empty Shell

"Hottest Brand Going"

It was just a moniker on a toy car at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, but it struck me as so facile that I realized it was the gateway to a wider understanding of branding. There's so much talk about brands and how important they are - that there's an implicit understanding that each successful brand has cache because it has substance.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

So many brands are just the sum of the marketing that expresses them. There really is no there there. I live in LA so I know all about the absence of 'there'. It's no surprise that LA has spawned so many non-brands, from fashion to celebrities and movie franchises, that are essentially worthless, in every respect but one. For some inexplicable reason they attract the fashion victims, who slavishly adhere to whatever junk is being offered by this or that brand.

It can only be a desperate need for validation and belonging that drives this kind of almost religious magnetism to the empty brands. Which suggests that for all the talk of brand value, sometimes, indeed often, a brand thrives, on that rarified air of just being perceived, usually by the unwashed, as cool.