
A "brand" in modern parlance is a person, product, or line of products whose usefulness and/or suaveness is imprinted in the minds of consumers. As I explored setting up my own law practice, I found the web to be full of marketing consultants, some very good but most underemployed, who tell me that I must create my own "brand" as a lawyer. I know what they are saying, and I do not believe they mean harm. Nonetheless, the constant promotion of style and image over substance is what is wrong with the world.
I was introduced to Benetton twenty years ago. I received two pretty sweaters as a Christmas gift. They were colorful and had the label "United Colors of Benetton." I liked to wear them and received compliments whenever I did. Their "branding" I soon learned, however, was despicable, though they always claimed to be fighting for love and its modern twin, tolerance. They caught every politically-correct wind and threw sexual controversies into clothing ads as if no children were ever watching. I never purchased another Benetton product.
Most recently, their mocking of world leaders through the photo-shopped "kissing" images of the
"UNHATE" campaign shows the truly discordant and incoherent colors of Benetton. Nobody has tried to reach out to Muslims and discuss faith and religious tolerance more than Pope Benedict XVI, yet there he is pictured, kissing Sheikh Ahmed Mohamed El-Tayeb. Below the men are the words "UNHATE," as if a big smooch among men would keep young Muslims from blowing themselves up along with the Coptic Christians.
Benetton's brand is "trendy shock" masquerading as moral vision. It is really politically-correct sanctimoniousness.

Penn State had a great brand until two weeks ago. The association of Penn State with "Joe Pa," excellence, "Happy Valley," and clean football is now broken with the images of Jerry Sandusky in handcuffs and his lawyer trying to explain away a scathing indictment and more reports of pederasty. Nobody protected the Penn State brand as zealously as
Graham Spanier, who, until two weeks ago was considered an outstanding university president. It appears that he carried a shovel and broom wherever he went in order to bury the bones and sweep away the rumors at the school and thereby protect the "brand."

The Irish diaspora produced a unique American ethnicity, even a "brand," the Boston Irishmen. Through political machines, trade unions, the public schools, the parochial schools, and the priests and bishops, they overthrew the Brahmins and WASPs and ran the city of Boston and many of its suburbs. But the Church became more concerned with its "brand" than its mission to children, and went down in scandal. If the bishops and clergy had been willing to let a priest or two face scrutiny and moral outrage for their deeds fifty years ago, they would have saved the "little ones" in their charge, set a disciplinary example for the rest, and avoided the millstones that several of them acquired about their necks.

Branding has its costs. Brands are abstractions. They have no relationships. They do not bleed. They do not make the world a better place. They simply, for a very short time, symbolize something people want and perhaps need.
Branding
is one of the costs of over-specialization. Not too many people understand the medicines, machines, and investments they depend on, much less the laws they are beholden to. We depend on people whose skills we do not have time to understand. In the great unknown, a brand sometimes must suffice for reasonable certainty, e.g., good brands such as GM, AIG, Wachovia, and Lehman Brothers.

Steve Jobs had
'a theory about “why decline happens” at great companies: “The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.” So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.” IBM and Xerox, Jobs said, faltered in precisely this way. The salesmen who led the companies were smart and eloquent, but “they didn’t know anything about the product.” In the end this can doom a great company, because what consumers want is good products.'After quoting Jobs, Peggy Noonan goes on to discuss how politics is where branding can hurt the most:'America is in political decline in part because we’ve elevated salesmen—people good on the hustings and good in the room, facile creatures with good people skills—above people who love the product, which is sound and coherent government—”good government,” as they used to say. To make that product you need a certain depth of experience. You need to know the facts, the history, how the system works, what the people want, what the moment demands.'Each party now is in the straight jacket of its own "brand." The partisans of the party of "no new taxes" and "no amnesty" cannot accept the fact that the tax code will need to be rewritten in the next few years to sustain growth and provide for entitlements; there will be winners and losers. (I myself prefer flatter rates, fewer deductions, and few if any tax credits for crony capitalists.) They cannot accept the fact that millions of loyal Americans are not legal citizens yet cannot be deported without a bitter new "trail of tears" and separation from their children who are U.S. citizens. The partisans of the party of "unions and entitlements forever" cannot accept the fact that confiscatory tax rates cannot guarantee entitlements, pensions, giveaways, and union hegemony for my lifetime, much less my daughter's.
We need creative people, producers, and innovators who are willing to sacrifice parts of our sprawling government in order to save it. Branding cannot be the substitute for either integrity or imagination. We need new leadership.