Continuing the Discussion about
Brands and Branding

Over the past few years, brands and branding have been knocked about, beat up, discarded as worthless. We've heard, "Do brands really matter any more? Brands are declining, even dead."

Yet, at the same time, we see companies spending millions of dollars in advertising and marketing to put brand new brand names in front of us, keep old ones front and center, and even start to revive forgotten ones. As the pendulum swings back toward center, a more productive question
might be, "what's next?"

We asked some experts of both the"old order" and "new order" to share their thinking with us. While their words were quite different, there were
common underlying themes in their views that
you can read starting on page 12.

Charles Cadell, president of ARC Worldwide Asia Pacific, aptly summarized one recurring theme: "In this era of the value-exchange,if we want our public to trade a precious moment of their time interacting with our brand, then we have to give them something very worthwhile in return."

Ivan Pollard, partner, Naked Communications, put it this way: "Brand building has to be a much more organic process these days...They are not buildings; they are coral reefs or gardens or forests. They are not built; they are nurtured and cultivated."

One person putting that into practice is Mario D'Amico, vp-marketing of Cirque du Soleil. Nurturing the brand since leaving the agency business as general manager of Publicis, Montreal, in 1999, he has expanded Cirque into a global brand, attracting the likes of Audi, BMW, and IBM as high profile sponsors. These companies want to piggyback on the emotional connection this brand, long identified with creativity and entertainment, has with consumers. Read about his views in the Profile written by Kathleen Barnes starting on page 19.

Clearly, the world of brands and branding is changing, but from our experts' columns, we also conclude it's just as clear that brands are far from dead but are morphing into different kinds of entities. Do you agree? We would like to hear your opinion too.

Nancy S. Giges
Editor

GO TO: [1] [2]