G.K. CHESTERTON got it half right: when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in brands. Companies spend as much time thinking about their brands as their products. Countries and cities hire brand consultants. Up-and-coming footballers want to brand it like Beckham. Writers cultivate their brands as assiduously as their literary style.The idea that not just bars of soap but organisations, people and places can have brands is such a commonplace that it is easy to forget how recent it is. In the 1960s admen concentrated on devising brands and campaigns for specific products and markets, rather than on creating an identity for the companies that made those products. The industry that churned out these campaigns was dominated by a handful of giant ad agencies, each divided between an officer corps of “suits” (who managed the accounts) and an army of lower-status “creatives” (who wrote the jingles).Wally Olins started his career as an officer in one of these companies: as a history graduate of Oxford University he could, in those days, hardly be a private. He spent five years running Ogilvy & Mather’s office in Mumbai (and kept...
from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1ii049D
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