Yes, branding is complex. I want to draw one very simple distinction, between your basic obnoxious MBA-conceptualized "managed brand" on one hand and your seemingly gratuituous "accrued brand" on the other:
The managed brand occurs in the space, potentially solipsistic, in which an entity, often a corporation, fidgets, tweaks, abuses focus groups, and more or less contemptuously runs the gamut of manipulations in order to create some distinctive nexus of identity, value and connotation for something it sells, or for the seller of the something. The point is, it's predicated on attempting to control how buyers, users, markets, etc. perceive the thing or the vendor. It is the managerial dream of writing the poem of the thing, which poem often looks like the rug on a jamook in a leisure suit.
The accrued brand is the will and interest in some product, service or vendor resulting from judgments formed over time by those encountering it through personal experience. The Sopranos (e.g.) has acquired a consensus over time of being "cool." By far the most common way to do this is by demonstrating no interest in whether someone thinks you are cool. But it has also acquired this value by virtue of producing intelligent entertainment. It encompasses trust, appetite and love, the economics of which remain obscure. Will this ardor extend to Artie Bucco's ziti?
Um, Bucco's ziti and all that is a wafer, a communion host - the entrance of the genie of entertainment into the oral cavity of meatworld (cf. Golub passim).
Bless us O Lord for we have sopranolust,
envie du mob
- give us this day our daily psychopomp
and hold the circumstance
- let it become flesh.
We like to think we are the gods, but we are only their consumers. The god rides on the comestible that bears his brand, branding us, wearing it.
