Does Too Much Brand Make You Bland?

I’m not entirely sure of the psychology behind it (I’m still waiting for my master’s degree in doctorology to come in the mail) but I think 9 straight hours talking about brand is unhealthy. Yesterday some members of the team at work got an amazing lesson in branding from a professor of… brand? Don’t get me wrong, it was inspiring and extremely helpful if not only for the lesson, but because he reiterated basically everything a couple of us have been trying to convince the “powers that be” that we should be doing. I guess it doesn’t matter how the message is sent, as long as it’s heard and understood. Anyways, the lesson itself was about 5 hours, which wasn’t bad at all; it was the inevitable follow-up that destroyed my temporal lobe.

Have you ever just sat there and watched people try to be creative after 5 hours about talking about being creative? It’s like watching humans turn into zombies in slow-mo. The irony exists in the ideas that we all tried to pitch. They were incomplete, didn’t achieve any of the goals we set and, dare I say it – bad.

To me, and this is just me, branding is a long process. You can’t just wake up one morning and say “hey, I gots me a new brand!” It’s organic, it’s personal and it grows with the users/audiences/readers/targets. If we’re always searching for the big “Eureka” moment, isn’t that a contradiction?

In any case, it’s nice to be set along a better path – even if it took a university professor to convince “the powers that be” that we should think about our actions before making decisions. Here’s hoping we don’t divert.