Let’s lose the word ‘brand’ from marketing
Brand strategy head at Loud, Waqas Tahir, writes that the only way to gain meaning from the B-word is to strike it completely.
The word ‘brand’ is our biggest impediment to effective marketing and the problem lies with the vagueness of the term.
When we talk about a brand campaign, we don’t quite know exactly what we’re talking about as we would – for example – with a retail campaign. Based on how the industry talks about a brand campaign we can derive a set of negative definitions, i.e., we can say that a brand campaign is; non-product, non-promotional, non-short-term and often a non-budget-friendly campaign.
To paraphrase Malcolm Gladwell, the word brand is like the word Africa. You know the general direction of travel but you’re not sure if you’re going to South Africa or Somalia.
