What Happened To Branding?

Today was the rare type of day when I have a sort of vision, a clairvoyant look into the world. In return, I get to either create something awesome, go through an anxiety attack, or both. Today, I had both.

Posted on my new blog, Larry West Productions: The Blog, this is a snippet of my article on branding.

Sometimes I feel older than I should.

This isn't a figure of speech your about to read, nor am I over-simplifying what happened. I woke up this morning, eyes aching from the attempts to open them after basically rubbing away the protective layer on them last night and then having it grow back this morning. After I got both eyes open, watching TV, I realized something: There is no branding anymore.

I was watching "Morning Joe" on MSNBC when that hit me. I was watching the logo in the background as it was displayed on a screen and that made me think about what it meant, which, really, was nothing. It's a sloppy logo. Joe Scarbrough is a straight-laced Republican and the logo is a liberal-minded, coffee-shop logo. It doesn't work. It's not a brand. The show was slapped together after the Don Imus thing and they never made the logo work for the show. Joe just doesn't look good against the logo, against this "brand", and he always looks awkward.

Then I started to think about my logo and branding.

There's a lot more to this, including Spongebob Squarepants, Apple, and Virigns! Enjoy!