Chapter #99. Brands Are Bullshit
I don't mean brand in the sense of visual identity—a good logo, wordmark or tagline is a great idea. I mean brand in the modern sense—a woolly definition that's come to be commonplace over the past 10 years or so.
The word brand has come to allude to the company or to stand for the entire personality of a corporation or product . It is seen as the "feeling" of interacting with products and services, and inevitably the core interactions of those products.
The problem with this approach, developed for over a decade by multinational branding corporations, is that we already have a discipline for this: UX. By crafting a product to adhere to a brand (in the modern sense of the word), we defer control of the UX to the marketing and branding teams, not the UX professionals.
I'm not talking about the megabrands with a billion customers; Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Nike, and so on are so big and their brands so powerful that it does and should make a difference...
