Post 1

All notions if pursued fail.

Individuals and organisations use brands to better understand how to make their way in the world. It is not helpful to attempt to make the notion of brand to fail. It would need to be replaced with something else more useful. But what?

Brand is not ultimate but it is useful. Brand attempts to find handles on very slippery notions, some of which find themselves in commercial space.

All discrete identities can be usefuly held as opinions and opinions can be usefully held as brands.

People trade in stories. They exchange value packaged and handled in the form of stories. Brands are stories. This is how people make sense of the world – physically, socially, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. If the definition of brand does not include these dimensions then the term should be abandoned. If brand consultants do not include these elements in consulting on brand then they too should be abandoned.

Brand is not just about business. Brand hasn't been invented artificially for financial gain. Brand is latent in all trade. Some brands are just more effectively articulated than others and so make their way more effectively in the world.

Post 2

What exactly is your point Hazel? That 'branding desperately needs to rebrand' itself? If this is your point then you should say so. And also how the statement you've chosen to highlight proves this? You need to show how the statement fails.

It is also important to note that at the outset I asserted that 'all notions if pursued fail', including the notion that 'all notions if pursued fail' in order to be self-referentially consistent.

All discrete identities can be usefully held as brands, all opinions can be usefully held as brands and all brands can be usefully held as opinions. This is what's inferred by my statement. Opinions, identities and brands can be held as the same thing in order to treat them as the same thing.

'Branding desperately needs to rebrand itself', more than anything, points to the failure of the language space used to make sense of brands. I'm proposing we use a different language to make sense of brands. A language space established by conditions such as 'can be usefully held as' – not unrealisable absolute definitions which require little effort to make fail.

There are no absolutes in the world. Brands exist in the world and are therefore also subject to an absence of absolutes. And so we should avoid language which suggests there are absolutes. This why the term brand has been seen to fail, hence the need 'to be rebranded'. Which, for the less philosophically inclined, is an inescapable paradox ie. branding still needs to be branded.

A broader, deeper and more flexible language space underpinned by a correspondent conceptual framework will enable us to guide brands (including ourselves as brands) more effectively in the world.