How to tell your company has completely screwed up its branding
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by Vikram Bath · May 8, 2014
Vikram Bath
Vikram Bath is the pseudonym of a former business school professor living in the United States with his wife, daughter, and dog. (Dog pictured.) His current interests include amateur philosophy of science, business, and economics. Tweet at him at @vikrambath1.
March 13, 2019
December 11, 2011
January 26, 2012
Thomas Frank (author of What's the Matter with Kansas?) writes in Le Monde diplomatique:
It is the ‘duty’ of American citizens, President Joe Biden announced in his inaugural address last week, to ‘defend the truth and to defeat the lies’. Much of Biden’s speech was an unremarkable stringing-together of patriotic platitudes, but this call for a great truth crusade stood out for its audacity. America is, after all, the homeland of the public relations industry, of televangelism, of Madison Avenue, of PT Barnum. Our leading scholars worship at the shrine of post-structuralism; our brightest college graduates go on to work for the CIA; our best newspapers dynamite the barrier between reporting and opinion; our greatest political practitioners are consultants who ‘spin’ the facts this way or that.
In declaring a national quest for truth, of course, Biden was referring to none of these things. His target was a single man: Donald Trump, the most energetic shit-shoveler ever to occupy the Oval Office.
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This essay is not a brief for free speech absolutism or an effort to rationalise conspiracy theory or an attack on higher learning. It is about the future of the Democratic Party, the future of the left, and here is the suggestion I mean to make: the form of liberalism I have described here is inherently despicable. A democratic society is naturally going to gag when it is told again and again in countless ways, both subtle and gross, that our great national problem is our failure to heed the authority of traditional elites.
Worse, when those traditional elites come together with unprecedented unanimity to insist their high rank proves their correctness and justifies their privilege ... when they say we are in a new cold war against falsehood ... when the news media dumps its neutrality and likens itself to superheroes and declares it is mystically attuned to truth and legitimacy ... when they do those things and then get the biggest news story of the decade fabulously wrong, a society like ours is going to spot the hypocrisy. And we are going to resent it.
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But when they look at liberals, they will shake their heads with disbelief. How could they have thought it was wise to try to enlist the great economic and cultural powers of our time — the masters of Silicon Valley — to try to censor our opponents? Ira Glasser, the old ACLU chief, relates how liberal academics embraced speech codes because they ‘imagined themselves as controlling who the codes would be used against’. What these well-meaning liberals didn’t understand, he continued, was that ‘speech restrictions are like poison gas. It seems like it’s a great weapon to have when you’ve got the poison gas in your hands and a target in sight, but the wind has a way of shifting — especially politically — and suddenly that poison gas is being blown back on you.’
As Glasser’s metaphor suggests, this cannot end well. The mob attack on the Capitol frightened us all. But for Democrats to choose censorship (via the monopolists of Silicon Valley) as the solution to the problem is a shocking breach of faith. There are many words one might use to describe a party that, over the last 30 years, has shown itself contemptuous of working-class grievances while protective of the authority of the respected... but ‘liberal’ isn’t one of them.
Read the whole thing.
Comment →The Rock The Bells family is heartbroken to learn of the passing of Mark “Prince Markie Dee” Morales earlier today. That voice and his presence can never be replaced. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his loved ones. 🙏🏾🕊 pic.twitter.com/Tn6wSJ6soq
— Rock The Bells (@RockTheBells) February 18, 2021
PRINCE MARKIE DEE GOD BLESS YOU FOREVER YOU WERE THE REAL BUBBA
— The Iron Sheik (@the_ironsheik) February 19, 2021
Requiescat in pace.
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All should be well. Please report any problems you might see.
Well, under the old system, was the FX or the JX more luxurious? You’d think the JX, right? Better positioning in the alphabet, anyway. But, apparently, you’d be wrong. Now you can say “oh, you only have the QX60? Yeah, we got ourselves the QX70.”
“I’ve got a Q70.”
“Yeah, we wouldn’t let you play at our country club, but we might let you bus tables.”Report
Yes, there is a justification available for the change, but the whole thing is indicative of a cluster**** even if the new names are great (which I would suggest they are not). It’s an admission that the model names they have been working on all these years haven’t managed to build any equity for themselves (with the possible exception of the “G”).Report
Does someone already have the precious stones (or semi-precious stones) copyrighted?
The Infiniti Onyx. In Red.
The Infiniti Ruby. In Black.Report
The luxury brands have decided by mutual consensus that it’s a mark of sophistication to not give your model a name, but instead some alphanumeric code. I think the idea they are trying to communicate is that “this thing is so awesome, that we think you will buy it, even if we call it “325i”.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for all such monikers. It seems to work much better when BMW and Mercedes do it than when Infiniti or Acura try.Report
One of my nephews recently grew a rattail. I called it a rattail. He yelled at me: “IT’S AN ANAKIN!”Report
Nobody’s going to buy a car named Howard!Report
I’m not sure it works for Kia, either. My wife and I just saw a commercial for the K900, and both spontaneously burst out laughing. Say it out loud, you’ll get it.
So, really, nobody in their marketing department cracked a smile when that name was suggested?Report
Makes me think of one of my favorite posts following a review of one of the iPhone releases. The reviewer noted that the new iPhone has the same look and feel as the previous model, but with improvements in electronics and software. The first poster replied, “The same case? But how will people know that I’m better than they are?”Report
I mean, seriously, what was Apple thinking?Report
The Infiniti QX95 is now the Kia Sedona SLReport
The weird thing to me is, isn’t it the norm for car makers to slap a new model name on (almost, but with minor tweaks) the same ol’ thing and just call it ‘new for [this year]’?
Giving everyone a cypher key for your model lines seems to be against the standards and practices of nearly 100 years of car manufacturing.Report
How long have VW been making Jettas now?Report
That even seems like the opposite sort of trick – the current Jetta is barely even related to the 1979 model. Like, they’re both midsize sedans, is about it.Report
I think the Jetta counts as a compact, the Passat is their midsize model.Report
Infiniti has a history of bizarre public relations. I remember when the brand was first introduced to the US, and the commercials were strange in that they showed things like waves lapping gently on sand or flocks of birds instead of the car.Report
It took a while for them to even reveal that Infiniti was a car company. Some of those were pricey Superbowl commercials too, I think. It was an intriguing move. Whichever ad team that pitched that to Nissan must have had steel guts.Report