The Origin of Brands or How I Wasted $14.95

My Amazon search engine let me down. I know that Al Ries has contributed quite a bit to the body of popular knowledge around advertising, positioning, and PR, but man was “Origin” a waste of time and money. Published in ’04, Al & Laura (Al’s daughter) use Darwin’s theory of evolution as a guiding principle for brands. Their thoughts about divergence (when species branch off or diverge to fit a special need as they adapt to survive) is interesting, but interesting in the way a half-baked hypothesis is interesting after a pint or two at the pub. Team Ries seem to despise all the hype about convergence and give poorly illustrated examples about how products and services don’t work well (utilizing a Swiss Army knife as metaphor) when they try to be many things. Two years is all it takes to start to poke holes in their anti-convergence arguments as we see industries and products readjusting to the best ways to build, own, and deliver digital content. I believe that a major component of the book that is missing is audience meaning, motive, and identity, as people utilize products are services.

While some of the hard sciences, physics and biology especially, provide rich metaphors for the understanding of communication and brands, I feel that divergence is not the one anchor an argument. As all symbolic identities are organic and have shelf-life, an adapt or die understanding of specialization could have been more useful. An analog from physics could have been entropy and neg-entropy as systems come together or fall apart. From physics we could also have a Zen-like lesson, transcending the dualities of quantum physics and quarks – the rules for the movement of large objects don’t apply to the movement of small objects. I believe that all science (social, pseudo, or otherwise) still seeks the silver bullet of a unified theory. It is safe to say that divergence is not it – it will explain parts of a brand’s survival, but is too specialized to be taken seriously. No matter how many times it is repeated, it is not true. The book reads like the current administration’s communication philosophy, if you say it enough people will believe you.