The power of branding, particularly when it comes to automobiles, is overwhelming. You go back to the seventies and eighties with the General Motor situation I was describing? Literally, folks, the Camaro and Firebird were identical cars but you'd so have the Firebird buyers, the Pontiacs, "No way I'm I buying that Camaro!" " It's the same car." "Nooooo, it is not. That is a Chevy and mine is a Pontiac."
Branding is overrated.
Nationalism as we know it, is the result of a form of state-sponsored branding.
In China, going public has a cachet from a branding standpoint. It will improve our image to ad agencies, government regulators.
It can be tricky with branding these days, because everything is kind of branded.
TV feels quite constipated, and the thing I find particularly difficult is the branding of the channels where it's not 'Is it a good script?' but 'Is it a BBC2 script?'
You can trace a through-line from the eighties to the present, and in retrospect Trump was always one of the minor avatars of a certain business model, all through that time. One based on branding, celebrity, and exploiting certain quirks of media form for fun and profit. In some ways he is not all that exceptional.
I've always thought that a name says a lot about a person. So naturally, being named Howard, I always wanted to crawl into a hole.
