Primal Branding: Response & Reaction Part 1

A friend of mine recently recommended Patrick Hanlon's "Primal Branding." Overall, I find the book to be an easy read and appreciate Hanlon's ability to help marketing people move beyond the rote practices of awareness generation to a better understanding of how humans create communities around brand (or symbolic reality). However, I still find the explanations incomplete. I believe that the work done on Symbolic Convergence Theory is a more thorough and parsimonious explanation of human behavior. For many in marketing, it was an important evolutional step to understand the emotional connection that people have with brands - we do things for reasons the rational mind can't explain or understand on an empirical level. I believe Hanlon moves the dialog further in a more intelligent direction with "Primal Branding" yet I feel that if fails to explicitly account for the four major components any person, group or communities' connection to a "brand" (belief system, symbolic entity, etc). The four components are (1) meaning, (2) motive, (3) emotion, and (4) identity. SCT helps us continue to evolve our thinking around communities and symbolic identity.

These help get us on the road, but don't quite get us to the destination. Over the next week, I will post the similarities between Primal Brand and SCT (along with Sanctioning Agent's SymbolicID process and other big ideas in communication theory and practice) and ways that SCT can help you better understand the meaning, motives, emotions and identities associated with brands, symbolic realities, and communities. Topics to be covered include:

- Compare the technical terms or constructs between Primal Branding & SCT*

- Look at the shelf life/life cycle of symbolic realities

- Address the master analogues that compete for explanation in a symbolically created reality.

* Note: The technical terms of SCT (and Bormann's dramatism theory) have appeared in hundreds of articles from the 1970s to present day.