Obsessive Branding Disorder

Loyalty beyond reason. Lucas Conley’s book Obsessive Branding Disorder opens with a story about Japanese women forgoing motherhood in order to afford Luis Vitton products. It’s an extreme case of brand loyalty but one that gets his point across.

He follows that story up with one firm’s suggestion to rebrand the War on Terror as the “Fight for a Better World”. After that he brings up the city of New Orleans’ ill-fated attempt to rebrand its image in the wake of violent crime surges after Katrina. And the list goes on. With case study after case study, Conley successfully illustrates that the concept of branding—anything from a handbag to the war on terror—is “corrupting our culture by heralding emotion over reason, surface over core substance, and packaging over experience.” At the risk of casting aspersions to some of our agency clients, I must say I couldn’t agree more.