Branding and Marketing as Instruments of Order

Today, it appears life is full of chaos. It seems as civilization has left the Information Age and jumped headfirst into the Disinformation Age or the Over-Information Age. Our world is consumed with noise, distraction, entertainment, and inspiration. With the advent of digital platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, marketers were swift to seize new means of presenting their message or product, leading to the rise in social media marketing.

Ad-based algorithms, pay-for-clicks campaigns, and data mining dominate much of the marketing world, and the cultural messaging seems less than consistent. Anyone with a voice, position, product, or opinion can attempt to sway the market of ideas, no matter how seemingly arbitrary, obsolete, or radical. Unfortunately, marketing and branding professionals are often responsible for pouring the proverbial gasoline onto the fire, and as a result, lucrative chaos reigns supreme.

Branding and Marketing's Great Responsibility

Branding and marketing play an integral role in how our culture communicates and connects; however, this role expands beyond mere information broadcasting and a memorable logo. These critical elements of advertising can build communities, advance organizational goals, and inspire positive actions from target audiences. Organizational leaders should recognize the great responsibility that comes with branding and marketing, and strive to ensure their efforts work to instill beneficial stabilization vs. destructive chaos.

A brand is an idea - a congealing of aesthetically-pleasing pixels, words, and products into an orderly creation useful to society. Well-developed branding offers our community something to aspire to and has the potential to provide order amidst the chaos. It instills boundaries that define who we are, what we need, and what is most important to us. A brand utilizes words and images to offer up a more complete picture of who we are as a culture or, perhaps at a more foundational level, who we are as humans. People respond to a well-developed brand, as it can provide a glimpse into the collectively-beneficial, community-driven ideal that we aspire to become.

Branding and Marketing Can Inspire Positive Action

This is not to say that branding is an inherent enemy of diversity or individualism, though it has been used as an instrument of such divisive agenda by leaders with malicious intent. Diverse peoples and civilizations, organizations, and families all accomplish more when working towards a common goal. In the commercial, personal and political arenas, branding can provide and define this common goal, providing the framework for what we can become. In this context, it is the marketer's responsibility to communicate this common goal effectively to the target market.

In my former career as a Military Officer, I was given a diverse assortment of soldiers, equipment, and ways to approach a goal and expected to take those often seemingly random ingredients and successfully accomplish something in which I was tasked. To do that, I had to define what I wanted success to look like and decide how to put the pieces together to achieve that goal, and then communicate that image of what the successful accomplishment of that common goal looked like to others. I had to create order out of chaos, define boundaries, and set expectations. If I did this effectively, those under and around me could envision what the end state was and their role in achieving success. We could see what we were to be and how to be it. This desired end state then became our identity, or "brand," and it clearly defined who we were and what we were doing.

Conclusion

The world is chaotic, to be sure, and frenzies can be profitable, even exciting. However, marketing and branding do not always play into creating and feeding off frenetic, disorganized energy but can be used to bring order and definition to our lives. With information flowing freer than ever before and a wealth of knowledge accessible at the stroke of a keyboard, branding and marketing are critical elements to bring order to our world and provide a way of processing the sheer number and randomness of ideas modern life throws at us.

Logos, taglines, graphics, color schemes, and communications strategies offer consistency, inspiration, and stability when deployed in a responsible manner. Quality brands are built on quality performance – not viral videos and misleading social media tactics. Organizations that care about their community, their industry, and their reputation will be conscious of their contributions to our information-saturated world.

If your organization would like to learn more about responsible marketing, please contact Becker Digital to schedule a consult.