It’s easy to think of branding as a transparent and almost pointless process: Huge companies buying TV ads to shout their trademarked names at us are pretty much the opposite of honest and authentic expression, let alone novelty. A mere logo, then, seems an unlikely way to achieve Godin’s state of purpleness. But there is more to branding than that. When it comes to bargain holidays and / or package holidays, branding is really a process of attaching an idea to a product. A hundred years ago or more-when consumers started to choose (for instance) factory-sealed containers of flour marked Pillsbury, rather than buying flour of unknown provenance and quality out of open vats-that idea might have been strictly utilitarian and rational: trustworthy, effective, a bargain.
Over time, and thanks in part to the sprawling abundance that production improvements offered, the ideas attached to products have by necessity become more elaborate and ambitious. This is why, for example, a widely discussed and award-winning campaign for Dove skin cleansers-featuring women who were decidedly less svelte than the models traditionally used in advertising images-took the form of a grandiose statement on the nature of beauty itself.
