If you want to keep your cattle herd separate from the neighboring ranch’s, you might need to do some branding. The website for buying L&H Branding Irons features leathery colors and the slogan “We’ve Got Your Brand” on a homepage where you can buy freeze brands, custom-shaped electric branders, and de-horners.
While this is likely to service your cattle needs, L&H is not very good at branding in the sense that we use the word more often now: the advertising one. Its slogan is uninspired and doesn’t communicate anything meaningful. If you spend some time looking at its wares, you don’t come away with an impression of what the company is about or what sets it apart. The whole point of branding as something advertisers get paid to do is to create a memorable, positive, symbolic identity and sear it onto whatever the otherwise-indistinguishable company is that hired them, so consumers note the symbol and not the meat of the thing. The metaphorical meaning of the word is vivid and based on exactly this: The brand is not any feature of the cow itself; it is a separate thing made by some outside firm such as L&H and seared on.
This is why I have found it to be an alarming linguistic development to see “branding,” such as “marketing” before it, make its way from the world of professional advertising jargon into everyday speech. People who are circumspect about the workings of capitalism, either because they hate it or like it, tend to be better at recognizing branding for what it is. The Baffler, one of my favorite magazines featuring mostly socialists, makes a regular point of deriding people who are taken in by the falsities that ads purvey by tweeting reminders that companies are not really taking out ads because they are moved to express their inner moral convictions. “The razor brand is not your friend,” it said when Gillette claimed in a ridiculous ad spot that it was selling products for gender equality rather than profit. I think profit is an ennobling motive, and the Baffler might disagree, but we can all at least be adult enough to know that Procter & Gamble is not where we should look for clues on how we should think about how to be a good man. When it covered Starbucks’s simpering attempt to show how deeply it cares about racial justice by holding HR seminars for employees, the Baffler reminded us that “the coffee brand is not your friend.” And so on.
Possibly partly due to missing this intentionally derisive usage, the word “brand” has sometimes become used as a general noun for “company.” But the whole point of branding is that it is just the image a company projects. Tablet magazine columnist Wesley Yang asked over the summer if “Harvard [is] the most valuable brand America has ever created?” The people who replied clearly thought he meant whether Harvard University is the most valuable institution in owned assets — not whether it has done the best job of prostituting its prestige and name for the most worth.
And then, there is the “personal brand.” In the last half-decade, it has become rote for young people thinking about applying to schools or jobs or their online presence to see a personal brand as something they have and to use this language, which comes from mutilating animals set for slaughter to demarcate ownership, about themselves. I try not to tell people which words to use and not to use. But as for my personal vocabulary, this is one I avoid.
