We’ll let you know

The people at Wolff Ollins must be kicking themselves. The 2012 logo seems likely to not just make them look like heartless corporate robber-barrons (where’s our £400k guys?), but may be part of the deathnell for the entire “branding” industry.

Russell Davies joins the cry for the end to the overuse of the term and its misapplication to just about anything so that consultants get to do their thing and charge their fees. John Dodd’s wants to see an end to branding experts.

The brand marketing debate seems to me to resemble in format the viral marketing debate. Just because you can perceive a phenomonen (the ‘viral effect’ of interesting information or consumers building long term value into brands), doesn’t mean that you can achieve that effect for yourself.

Is it true that brands exist? Yes of course. Does that mean that your product and service is a brand? We’ll let you know. Brands exist in the minds of consumers. They are what you get when you put together all building blocks of all of the experiences that consumer has of your product or service. You can influence them, but you can’t control them. Especially not nowadays.

And perhaps that’s the especially frustrating thing about 2012. The games was building a really strong brand image, in my perception at least. It was about worthy inclusiveness. It was about the success of the underdog through passion (the story of the bid itself). It was about regeneration and about the rejunivation of an old and tired area of an historic city. And now – all of a sudden – it’s become about a bunch of branding consultants, a large sum of money, and the inventiveness of the British at ripping apart an icon.