Today, when most people 😉 have returned back to work after a long Christmas holiday, I myself feel urged to change my working speed back to normal and give more attention to my blog posts again as well. I picked up a post on the designobserver blog this morning about branding that reviews the book »Obsessive brand disorder«, by Lucas Conley .
I do not want to add a comment to this review. I want to just give our perspective on this fluffy issue that escapes substantiality so fast. Right from the beginning when we started our biestmilch business in 2000 to create a brand was one of our major aims. During these years we learned many lessons, but interestingly not those ones we were told by the experts of marketing (we have been strongly advised not to use the product name »biestmilch«).
We don’t follow branding as formal design oriented process, we left he dogma of the much fuss about recognition under which wild mixtures of opinions, predilections, ideologies, philosophies, aesthetics, ethics and morals are boiling. We try to tell the biestmilch story as consistent and exciting as possible, we sometimes also do things that by the rule shouldn’t be done.
Whether a powerful man or women will one day call biestmilch a brand is like many other things left to the uncertainty of future ;-)… and whether our targeted audience/customer or an unexpected other one will accept or better receive us as a brand lies beyond our control.
I think there is a big difference between »doing branding« or talking about branding (to write a scientific paper or book about this topic may be interesting but has to avoid a lot of pitfalls not to become a propaganda oeuvre in many ways).
Branding is a relational thing among …. ???? I avoid the answer because the pitfalls are opening immediately!
If you do branding in the wild as we do, you try to anticipate, observe and analyze on the one hand, on the other you have to be passionate, assured and persuasive. Whether we reach our goal, is not up to us to judge. We can only observe our sales figures.
