Nike's Swoosh offers up a simple, ease to grasp storyline for building brand value, but Nike's real brand value is the interplay between athletes, designers like Tinker Hatfield and Phil Knight's management of a product focused company culture. Branding experts relied upon the simplicity of "brand building" as a discrete, complementary activity to sell their visions to company leaders who did not want to undertake the management challenges of integrating disparate elements within their organizations.

The reality is that great companies build brands by listening closely to their customer, then processing that information through disciplined iteration to deliver what the consumer wants; high quality product that solves a problem either physical or mental. Marketers can create brilliant visual representations, but if the product does not reinforce the message the value add of the marketing is lost and marketing becomes a sunk cost, not an amplifier for a product or service. Those companies who do make product the core value also have the most enduring brand imagery as advertising agencies are able to visualize this consumer, designer, management interplay in iconic marketing messages.

Interesting to watch how the emerging reality manifests itself in the relationships between companies and agencies. As I wrote in the Brand Bubble, if management does not make the unification of product and messaging a core value then the value of their companies will suffer in this transparent marketplace.

OK, so I buy the idea that if your product is lousy, people will eventually figure that out and you'll have destroyed your reputation in the minds of consumers.

But to go from that to assuming brands are universally of no value seems awfully reductionist. How do you explain luxury goods, for example? Do you really think that a Prada handbag sells for what it does on the basis of the actual value of the materials and its value for schlepping around stuff? That company has cultivated an image for itself that allows it to charge obscene prices for a very basic product. The idea that being to charge higher prices than the competition has no value to a company seems rather absurd, yes?

Here is another obvious example: people do not have an unlimited amount of time to investigate their purchases. Brand image, when managed correctly, can substitute for this due diligence in the minds of consumers. For example, Costco and Wal-Mart both have developed a very careful brand identity that they sell things for less. Do they actually sell for less on everything? I have no idea, but I'm not going to go to 4 places before a buy a package of toilet paper to save 15 cents. I'll go to one of those stores and just assume I am getting if not the lowest price, a pretty good price, because the information costs for the individual transaction are higher than the expected variance in prices. This reputation allowed Wal-Mart to become the largest retailer in the world, so to say that the Wal-Mart image has no value is pretty silly.

So does that mean the article is entirely wrong? No. There is plenty of hype and BS surrounding the importance of brand identity. But it also entirely wrong to assume that the merits of a product, standing entirely on its own, determine the success or failure of any product. Brand identity does have value in many circumstances.