COMM 150: Branding, cross-platform convergence and giving the audience what it wants (... or needs?)

In his discussion of Tyler Perry's "House of Media Convergence," John Vivian says, "All Perry's works regardless of medium are branded with the possessive, 'Tyler Perry's ...'" and speaks of "branding his own creative output" (147). Later he discusses the Walt Disney Studio Entertainment in the same terms: "Disney had become a brand name for family-oriented entertainment [by Walt Disney's death in 1966], and for the next 20 years the mandate at Disney was to cultivate the brand" (159). This they did with theme parks and a variety of media, as corporate "managers worked to exploit the synergies, reissuing the earlier films in cyles [and] creating new ones in the Disney spirit" (159). What Vivian calls a "Disney spirit" is also called the Disney brand.

[To see how the "Disney spirit" played out in the design of Springfield's Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, read Andrew Ferguson's article "How To Design a Lincoln Museum: Step 1: Ask Disney for advice. Step 2: Build a roller coaster?" in Slate.com on July 4, 2007, and "How To Design a Lincoln Museum: Do you feel what Lincoln felt?" the following day. These articles are excerpts from his book Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America, by the say, so they're also an example of convergence from a print (ink-on-paper or dead tree) platform to the Internet. ]

Wikipedia's definition is precise, and has links to related concepts - so let's go there. But here's the gist of it:

The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. The legal term for brand is trademark. A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller. If used for the firm as a whole, the preferred term is trade name." [1]

A brand can take many forms, including a name, sign, symbol, color combination or slogan. The word branding began simply as a way to tell one person's cattle from another by means of a hot iron stamp. The word brand has continued to evolve to encompass identity — it affects the personality of a product, company or service.

Let's look at the Wikipedia page on brands, and follow the links under "See also" to the discussions of brand equity and brand loyalty. They will suggest how important the issue of branding has become and how useful the concept is. Let's discuss it in class; if discussion lags, we can always write about it. How do people use branding in mass communication? In business? How does a consistent brand serve a company like Disney? How does it serve members of the audience?