Brands, branding and a yearning for the country life

I tried this experiment a few months back: I showed a group of businesspeople various Chinese paintings and asked them to guess what the paintings were worth. Staring at a canvas with paint on it, most people had absolutely no idea. They couldn't tell paintings that were worth a million from one that was worth fifty bucks. The true value of a painting, or any other piece of art, only starts to surface when we get a story about the painting and the painter:

" . . . this piece was recovered from the vaults of . . . the artist lived a life of solitude in a cave on the Isle of . . . this Dutch masterpiece was held hidden in a garden shed for fifty years . . . born into a peasant family, hobbled by polio, the child picked up a twig and started painting at the age of three," etc. etc.

As with innovations, these stories are often exaggerated: they are turned into myths. They are not lies per se, but the grain of truth that allows the story to be regarded as "authentic" is often stretched to breaking point.

It's the same with a brands. It's the story surrounding the brand that provides its real value, not the logo, the name or the tag line (the canvas and paint). This story gets reinforced by a market (a very human construct) and the firm that owns the brand at any particular point in time. Brands help satisfy the universal desire to transcend the purely physical, rational world.

Despite the fact that Jaguar and Land Rover, two British car marques, will soon be owned by Tata, an Indian organization, people should still enjoy living the dreams that these two brands provide. You can talk about the fact that these cars might be mass produced in a production line in India 'till you're blue in the face, but the owners of these cars will still be dreaming that they are living the rural life on some British country estate.

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