CBT is King...Freud is dead - wots that got to do with brand?

Why is this graph interesting for brand & marketing people?

Because the "science" of brand (as created in the 50s and 60s), is based in Freudian psychology. It is, at its core, a top down endeavor. The old world of brand marketing saw doctors, (agencies) deliver diagnoses, (insights) to patients (the brand) about their issues (customers).

Now, everyone who knows what they're doing in the business of psychotherapy (marketing), knows that Freud (advertising) is a load of old misogynistic bollocks (the big idea / insight), based on the sexually repressed society of late 19c Vienna.

Instead, forward thinking agencies (therapists) are delivering earned media strategies (relational therapies) to clients (brands) that are rooted, not in abstract insights (diagnosis), but in the relationship between the brand and their customers (clients' issues)

This could be a book....

Brand and earned media...where you build a marketing strategy from....

The saying goes....

If you're a builder, you solve every problem with a hammer.

If you're an academic - its a document.

If you're me - you see everything as overly complex to be made simple....

So when it comes to marketing and brand - I only really have 2 models. 2 simple ways of thinking about what I consider are the critically important aspects of marketing. The ones you really can't do without.

• brand
• earned media

I don't mean everything else (offline, bought, advertising - all the other concepts, channels and categories one could throw up around marketing) aren't useful at a practical level - they're just not as important as brand and earned media.

brand - my model based on "primal branding" - 7 areas - creation story, creed, icons, rituals, pagans, sacred words, leader

earned media - 5 stages to think about - listening, content, applications, support, data

The rest is subdordinate to this. Subjective. Someone else point of view.

Brand and earned media...where you build a marketing strategy from....

Using the handbrake to stop at traffic lights...

Whilst watching some bad late night TV I found myself wandering what ads the 70 year old me would be watching (we have a 3 month old daughter – late nights are the norm…)

A part of me assumes media will descend into a Kafkaesque, Minority Report style advertising blur..... but is that really likely?

Assuming limits of person freedom remain fairly constant (and I accept that could be a big if) - peoples right to manage access to their own data might well be a hedge against the worst excesses of our advertising age.

Much more likely - we'll look back on late 20th century brand culture with a quaint distain. The idea of wealthy elites being able to pay to attached meaning to simple, commodistised products as bizarre an idea as Aparteid or a war on terror....

A bygone era.

A product of historical circumstance and cultural ignorance in a disrupted transitionary age - a mismatch between what everyone – and the individual knew - an asymetry of cultural information.

Who - my frail self will ask - would accept the tenuous associations made between a hair dye and sexual prowess, when - by speaking a single sentence to whatever type of computer exists in 60 years time - the origin, utility, environmental impact, social credentials, executive pay structure and ultimate manufacturer of any product can be ascertained as quickly as we now find a brands’ facebook page.