I went to lunch with a friend recently.  He manages a big brand.  We surveyed the state of branding and before long we were shaking our heads. 

Bad ideas flourish.  Bad thinkers flourish.  Good practice never seems to drive out bad practice. The world of branding just churns. 

Marketers have been doing branding professionally for about 100 years now.  But branding is anything but professional. 

I came back to my desk and wondered what I could do.  I’ve written some 1.4 million words on my blog, some of them on branding.  Why not, I wondered, make these more accessible?  Hence this "blog compendium."  Here on 40 posts of branding.

I have a point of view of branding.  I call it "meaning management."  Think of it as a cultural, an anthropological approach to marketing.  I think these 40 posts capture a consistent, practical point of view.  I hope readers will let me know where and when they work in practice.

Here’s how to read this document:  Click on any rectangle here and it will take you to a post.  Close the browser and you will be returned to this file.  Click on the big rectangles for each section, and you will get an overview of the section. (For those who’re interested, I prepared the document using MindManager and Acrobat PDF conversion.)

My credentials: I have a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.  I was the Director and the founder of the Institute of Contemporary Culture.  I have taught at the University of Cambridge, the Harvard Business School and M.I.T.  I have consulted to many firms, including The Campbell Soup Company, The Coca-Cola Company, IBM, and Kimberly Clark, to name a few.  I have written several books including Culture and Consumption I, Plenitude, Culture and Consumption II, The Long Interview, Flock and Flow, and Transformations.   I am a member of the I.B.M. advisory council on Social Networking and a research affiliate at M.I.T. 

Acknowledgments

To Wordle.net for the image.