Brands

Taken verbatim from Rob Walker, author of "Buying-in," on his site, Murketing:

"There’s a widespread tendency to think 'branding' just means logos and slogans and ads. I see branding more broadly, as the process of attaching an idea to a product. That idea lives in consumers’ heads and can come from an ad campaign—but it can also come from direct experiences. It doesn’t matter if the advertising for a drugstore chain depicts kindly pharmacists going out of their way to help—and the actual experience you or I have at that chain in real life involves a dirty store and a rude pharmacist who makes you wait around for no reason and screws up your prescription—well, the idea that gets attached to that drugstore chain’s brand is going to be the one that comes from real life.

... the one message I try to get across to companies is that maybe it’s better sometimes to stop worrying so much about reshaping your image and start worrying about reshaping the reality of your business. In the book, I bring that up specifically in the context of 'ethical' issues such as sustainability or labor practices.* But the same point holds true for what you’re talking about. Some companies spend absolutely astronomical sums on creating a customer-friendly or creative or 'cool' (or whatever) image through brand campaigns—and then they pay the workers on the selling floor so badly that they couldn’t care less, or outsource customer service, or whatever, and the net experience is bad. And customer loyalty evaporates—yes, precisely because the emotional reaction to a real experience can trump the emotional response to marketing..."

No faster way to kill a bad product than good advertising. No better way to miss the point than to think, "It's the logo, stupid."