Obsessive Branding Disorder: Who's Getting Hurt?

Journalist Lucas Conely is hot on the circuit promoting his book Obsessive Branding Disorder. We've heard a bunch of interviews with him, including a particularly good discussion with Tom Ashbrook on NPR's On Point, and saw his post on Huffingtonpost.com this week.

He's raised some interesting points in the media coverage we've seen/heard. That companies are using advertising to fill the void of real product innovation; there's more style to brands than substance these days; that marketers have (we'd say unjustifiably) bought hook, line, and sinker into the notion "emotion works faster than logic" when it comes to increasing sales for a brand; that every touchpoint is now treated as a branding opportunity—oh the horrors!—in an effort to own and control the message.

In his bit on Huffingtonpost, he says the question he gets a lot goes something like, "Aren't today's marketers just doing the same stuff they've been doing since the 1950s?" He says it's a silly question, for one there's just so much more advertising and it's everywhere. "School buses, beach sand, Porta Potties, weddings, body parts, babies names—nothing is off limits." We get the sense he's reading something insidious into the efforts of American advertisers to go to whatever lengths to reach us and maybe he has a point.

But for all of his talk, it doesn't sound like any of these efforts to overwhelm Americans with branding messages at every turn are all that effective. As he points out, folks have "grown slowly inured" to advertising, even with all the emotional appeals that are, according to him, based on a far more scientific and comprehensive understanding of what consumers need and want. Certainly all the studies which use different methodologies but come to the same conclusion that marketing programs produce a negative ROI much more often than not raise questions about the performance of OBD-driven marketing efforts.

So insidious or no, it doesn't appear society is in immediate danger of suffering the negative effects of OBD. Brands and the companies that manage them maybe, but not society.

Now we're throwing the question out to you, the marketing masses. Whatdayathink about OBD? Who's getting hurt?