Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

There has always been a thing within me that has resisted this branding hype. Everybody that has said for years how we must "manage our brand."

Now the reason I have trouble with this is it deals a lot with hypocrisy. It would like telling a neighborhood bully to manage himself as a brand, even though he still is what he is. Does he take pictures of himself with a group of little children hugging them and post them around the neighborhood? Does that change who he really is?

That's what's been nagging at me for a long time. Branding, if it is to be real, must be real. Is your company or department really representative of one thing, but through marketing and promotion pretend it as something else? This is wrong thinking to me. PR departments or hiring one, shouldn't be there for the purpose of giving people an illusion of what you are, but to present who you really are.

Managing our brand should be telling the real story of who you are, not creating illusions. That's why a lot of people are getting more turned off by, and pay little attention to marketing assertions anymore. They're tired of the lies. This is why there is a decreasing amount of loyalty among consumers for companies; they try to be all things to all people and create resentment from everybody as they realize and discover the opposing viewpoints and ideas that stand for nothing.

Like the saying goes, "if you stand for everything, you really stand for nothing."