Just One Word.

I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Branding.

This is a re-written version of a very famous line from one of my favourite movies of all time, The Graduate (1967). In the original, Dustin Hoffman (whom you might know from the Meet the Fokkers movies, heavy sigh…) plays Benjamin Braddock, a recent university grad with no job or other plans for the future.

Benjamin is cornered at a poolside cocktail party by one of his parents’ friends, Mr. McGuire, who takes Ben aside to whisper The Secret to the future of technology and professional success. In the original, that word is “plastics.” Can a case be made that branding is as powerful an influence on business today as plastics were in the 1960s?

A Shamelessly Derivative Name; A New Idea in Course Delivery

This blog is an experiment in teaching brand management. The primary intention in launching this site is to:

• provide a place to put material that can’t be covered in course assignments and class meetings due to time constraints;
• be a forum for continued discussion and interaction among all course participants.

I am calling it The Campaign for Real Branding as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty.” Like that campaign, this blog was “created to provoke discussion and encourage debate” (1) and hopes to expose, rather than deny, the “wrinkles” associated with brands and brand management. 

This is not a course where I lecture and you listen (well, not predominantly anyway). It’s a course of candid conversations and reasoned debates, of active thinking and applied analysis. There will be theory, but there will also be practice.

Welcome to BrandLand. 

(1) http://www.dove.us/social-mission/campaign-for-real-beauty.aspx