In fact it sounds like something rammed through at committee, rather as London’s Mayor tells us the bikes themselves must be rammed into their docking stations for the system to register their return. The moral is clear: if you label too generically, the people will name it, and it may not be something you like.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. A great company, with a great animating vision at its heart, is very likely to find itself doing more than one thing and there’s no law to say that it can’t do them very well indeed. Sony’s massive consumer offer does not make the brand less respected in professional video and photography, for example.

Yet somehow the Sony brand does not shine as brightly as it once did. I believe the reason is precisely that its products are over-branded, existing in a parasitic relationship to the corporate name. Bravia, Vaio, Cybershot, Walkman, Playstation…the energy and resource that goes into fashioning these champion product brands is partly gained at the expense of the parent. There is no doubt that ‘Sony’ adds lustre to all of these. It’s impossible, in fact, to imagine Bravia or Vaio without Sony in front. This may be less so for Playstation.

The issue seems to be one of, for want of a better word, philosophy. As a group essentially unified around two poles, technology and entertainment, frequently responsible for launching new product categories as well as products per se, Sony may often question the role of the group brand in motivating buyers in different product segments. Depending on the primary buying group, the Sony brand may enjoy more or less perceived esteem and relevance. Where these are relatively low, as with new category products such as Playstation, there must be a temptation to develop a strong brand to command a share of mind and wallet. Unfortunately the stronger this brand becomes, the more it saps the energy of the group brand, making it increasingly a formal ‘umbrella’ rather than itself a motivating and exciting presence in the product’s allure.

Groups like Unilever or P&G whose brand portfolios are crowded with strongly contrasted products and product types, linked only by high level associations and competencies, have a reason to maintain brand equity where it already exists – ie, in the product brands they own. The relative ‘quietness’ of the corporate presence is sensible, given the concentration of expertise within these groups around the individual brands within the portfolio. There is no automatic synergy between these products, either – a deodorant and a breakfast food may be bought in the same supermarket but the fact that one group is responsible for making them is of very little consequence to consumers. Sony products, by contrast, often can be used in combination: video from a camcorder can be played on a TV screen or uploaded to a computer hard drive, for example. Unfortunately, with Sony, one gets the impression that the product divisions practice a kind of brand tribalism, dedicating themselves to the totem of Bravia, Vaio or Playstation and only incidentally acknowledging the presence of the ‘parent’ despite being a wholly owned and legitimate offspring of the group.

In terms of consumer perception Sony has lately begun trying to establish an explicit positioning that unites all its many products and activities. The formula ‘make • believe’ seems to aim at conveying the relevance to consumers of Sony’s technology + entertainment expertise in a would-be inspirationally abstract (some might say poetic) phrase. I hate to say it but this strikes my ear as dangerously close to trivialising Sony. ‘Make believe’ after all, is a pre-existing concept in English, the resonances of which include insufficiency, sketchiness, provisionality, transience, immaturity and unreality. Writing it slightly differently, with a punctuating dot separating the two terms cannot entirely cancel all these negative resonances, at least for native English speakers. To be honest, although less economical, ‘making is believing’ would be a more powerful way of encapsulating this message, playing off the commonplace idea ‘seeing is believing’ in a way that’s surprising and fresh. ‘Making is believing’ also implies, more strongly yet less aggressively, that Sony products are tools that enable consumers to be creative, projecting a relationship with customers that celebrates their creative drive and positions Sony as a partner to the realisation of their dreams.

But the main criticism of ‘make•believe’ must be that it answers the wrong question. Sony’s difficulty is not that consumers can’t understand what their products have in common. Despite their variety, Sony’s product portfolio is far from incoherent or chaotic. What could be problematic, in terms of consumer awareness and loyalty, is the tension between the power and ambition of the individual product sub-brands and the Sony group brand – an institutional and cultural issue within the group.

The challenge may be to rethink these relationships and make the products support rather than compete with the group brand. This may look like a brand architecture issue, but in fact it goes to the heart of a key strategic decision about the commercial productivity of competing approaches to managing the portfolio.  At stake here are a common vision and internal cohesion, a cultural as much as a technical marketing matter.

I remember the days when Sony itself was the focus of excitement, rather than its product lines. I believe, too, that those days could return, and that the company’s fortunes would only improve if they did. But it is a major task for any brand to motivate a workforce of almost 170,00 people worldwide, most of whom are primarily concerned with making only with one product. All the more reason why the energy and resource that fuel Sony’s internal, as much as external, branding should not be diluted by brands themselves so powerful that the Sony connection appears secondary and insignificant. The meaning of Sony is getting lost, not because the group makes many different things, but because some of its products have become such strong brands in their own right. Is this, to borrow a concept from economics, the ‘paradox of heft?’

Fifteen years ago I said to a major UK client that I could remake his brand to be like Apple. He said he knew which brand he’d rather his company resembled and it wasn’t Apple, it was Microsoft. News this week that Apple has surpassed Microsoft in value reminded me of that conversation.

Of course the Apple success story will be subject to a lot of analysis. And with the relative decline of Microsoft’s fortunes its partisans, once overbearingly smug in their assurance of superiority, now tend to sound a little shrill. Those of us who have been using and enjoying Apple products from the 68K days of course feel our judgement has finally been vindicated by the market. We always knew Apple was cool. Now enough people know that to make it clear that Apple is also smart.

Let’s be clear about this. The products are great. The focus on the user experience is way better than anything MS has ever been able to offer. But the whole thing has a branded completeness, a gestalt, that MS appears completely incapable of delivering. If you care for Apple’s modern, minimalist, high-quality aesthetics MS can only make you feel dirty, and not in a good way.

It’s the brand that has made the difference, as much as the strategic boldness and vision. The look, feel and values, and the model of brand management which has allowed for so much ground-breaking innovation over the years, to the point where the whole company has been on an epic journey, from computer maker to a major presence in entertainment retailing. Steve Jobs, in the keynote to introduce the iPad, said Apple is now the world’s leading mobile devices company. And Microsoft? They’re no longer the world’s leading anything company, it seems.

Brands are like a currency. Trust is an essential factor in their value. When trust is impaired, the currency is debased. This has been the impact of the recent revelations regarding the contract manufacturer Foxconn. Foxconn makes devices for a number of high profile technology brands, among them Apple. Shortly before the iPad became available in the UK news came of a serious problem at the huge Foxconn works, a sealed factory-town of 400,000 workers, near Shenzhen.

Ironically, Apple had just overtaken Microsoft in market capitalisation, something Steve Jobs described as a “surreal moment”. This made headlines on one or two days, but Foxconn has been a gathering storm for at least two weeks.

Few brands in the tech sector have achieved the brand equity of Apple. The new device, the iPad has sold over 2 million units in less than 60 days (regardless of the Foxconn issue). Apple has policies in place for suppliers which appear excellent and thorough and Steve Jobs was prepared to address the issue in a televised interview last week which went round the world and was used, for example, on the BBC website.

Nevertheless, the wide publicity that Foxconn has now received undermines the trust of tech consumers who care about the costs involved in making their devices. Because there are costs you can account for in the price, including labour costs. But you can’t account for human misery in that way. You can’t feel comfortable with a brand or a product you suspect was produced in ways that were horribly exploitative. And the fact is that the starting wage for production line workers at Foxconn in Shenzhen is just USD90 a month.

At this level, damage to one brand is damage to all. Revelations of this kind can easily erode brand equity. Every company sourcing in China should now be looking to see what its exposure could be, and working with suppliers to ensure better working conditions. There may even be an opportunity here, to develop a trust mark like ‘Fair Trade China’. Consumers will reward those brands which can establish such a mark. And in this way the trust that underpins their value can be reestablished and sustained.

Now on London’s Regent Street and in Singapore’s Vivo City you can experience National Geographic as … a retail experience. Indeed, so surprising and inclusive is the translation that I’m tempted to reach for a more traditional category and call it a department store.

Speaking as a brand consultant I am, frankly, in awe. The sheer range of products, the number of apparent tie-ins between the store and such premium brands as Sony and Ray-Ban, the extraordinary completeness and seeming maturity of the offer are simply staggering. The concept, design and layout of the spaces appears both accomplished and imaginative. A little research quickly reveals that their on safari looks in fact house a lot of very sophisticated multimedia kit, also courtesy of Sony. This is a seriously audacious undertaking – a brand extension on a surreal scale – yet amazingly it seems to work.

Musing on why such a thing is possible I realise that what is really on sale here is the promise of authenticity. National Geographic could almost from the beginning have been called, with equal accuracy, National Ethnographic. And one of the deepest beliefs of contemporary urbanised humanity is that we are in some sense denatured, deprived of the struggle for existence that characterised the lives of all peoples before modern affluence arrived, and still burdens those who do not live at that pampered level. Nomads, tribal peoples, the inhabitants of poor and less developed lands, are credited with a simpler, stronger attachment to the true roots of being human. This is our modern mass romanticism, a belief system so general and so submerged that it is hard to either challenge or view with detachment.

And then it struck me: authenticity is one of the key tropes of contemporary marketing. Ironically it is a near impossibility for any product actually advertised to partake in the true quality of authenticity but perhaps for that very reason the trope is perennial; the quest eternal because a priori hopeless.

An amusing sidelight on this is provided by the current campaign for Young’s bitter, which looks as though it was originally run forty years ago. There is almost no copy – a headline of slightly mind-bending ingenuity: If beer drank, it would drink Youngs; and a strapline of masculine obliquity: Know your stuff. Whether true or faux vintage, the charm of this poster is precisely its determination (as with all Young’s advertising) to assert the uncompromising authenticity of the drink. Of course, in the country which gave birth (how many decades ago?) to the Campaign for Real Ale this can be taken to be something of a national neurosis. After all, if you were drinking several pints of something almost every day, wouldn’t you want it to be … authentic?

If you’re like me, you don’t let the newspapers limit your understanding of what’s going on in the world – you try to find out what’s really happening. Before the internet there were precious books that came along quite infrequently and shook things up for you. Now you can entertain a dozen unmentionable opinions before lunch, every day, and still get some work done, if you’re quick.

Lately I’m finding that the prophets of doom are ranged in opposing ranks – free-market ‘purists’ on one side, Marxists and others of the left on the other. All are convinced – the collapse of civilisation is at hand. The world we all know, which first took shape in the mid to late 1940s, is soon to be no more. The message, for anyone who thought Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ smacked a little of hubris, is that nemesis has now found her moment and history is moving on with a vengeance.

I find this almost unimaginable. We are talking about the basic configuration of power and wealth acrosss the globe, a pattern so established that it doesn’t seem strange when phrases like ‘manifest destiny’ get trotted out to describe it (or at least, the situation of the winners).

The other weird-ish thing is that we both expect and are unfortunately quite likely actually to witness these changes in ‘real time’. Once history moved at the speed of a slow ox cart. Today it’s probably accelerating as fast as gobal computing power – what formerly would have taken a time lapse camera a century to record now occurs in a couple of years, if not weeks.

With this backdrop, what’s the future for branding? _Is_ there a future for branding?

Let’s not fall into the modernist trap of assuming that the new is a complete displacement of the old. A decade ago we heard _ad nauseam_ about something called the new economy. Where is that now? Well, some of it happened and is real. Most of it wasn’t and didn’t. The real new economy, the only one that counts, is the one we’re actually living with, knocked out of whack forever, from a Eurocentric perspective, by the sudden addition of two billion more workers in China and India to the global labour market. Computers and the internet, the source of the ‘90s new economy hype, are driving all sorts of changes, but they can only drive them from the base of the earlier status quo. At one level that’s so obvious we should never need to say it – but the myth of modernity is so entrenched and widespread, so much part of our shared intellectual furniture, that it can take an effort to recognise the logical force of the statement.

The new, then, arises as an expression of things latent in the now. There are no revolutions in nature, although there can be cataclysmic events. We, humans, for all our rather specific accomplishments and evident complexity, are ultimately natural beings and our cultural settings are outgrowths of the nature within and around us.

So, does branding serve some need or needs of our natural constitution? For if so, then it will always be required in some form or other. Or is it a secondary phenomenon, a temporary, culturally specific activity – in which case, a transformation in the culture might make it less relevant, less evident, less valued.

It’s a big question, of course, quite why branding has the importance that it does today. A question that goes precisely towards delineating the norms of the present against those of other, imaginary historic circumstances. Living at what may be a crossroads, a turning point in world history, we don’t have to have the answer – we may find out through a practical demonstration.

My own hunch is that the psycho-social foundations of branding are as old as humankind, if not older. If our historic precursors (still surviving into the present) are the heralds of the College of Arms, then our function is analogous to the differentiation of plumage in bird species – it is inscribed at a level where culture and biology are inextricable.

To return, then, to the question which started this musing: who needs branding in a crisis? The answer has to be 1) everyone who needed it before the crisis (although their priorities towards it may change in response to the rapid shift in the climate for business) and 2) anyone for whom the crisis represents an opportunity – and there will be some for whom it does. There always are.

There is no automatic equation between brands and representative politics or principles. However in an era of democratic deficit it is at least plausible that some of the energy once associated with political affiliation gets diverted into identifying with brands. After all the brands themselves make an enormous investment to nurture the potential for a very close identification between consumers and their purchasing choices. Effective branding in the B2C arena means generating strong positive emotional connections between people and the companies that make the products and services they buy.

When this process succeeds and becomes highly pervasive large numbers of people are investing their purchasing decisions with self-defining significance. By my brand choices shall you know me, these people might say. At the same time the brands become seen as agents with power. Indeed, buying choices become surrogate votes, registering approval of this or that company’s position (or perceived position) on issues that matter to buyers.

At one level, the pervasiveness of brands as self-defining symbols is a marketing triumph but at another it loads what may well be unwelcome pressures onto the owners and managers of successful brands, since their behaviour will now be scrutinised, analysed and weighed against a scale of significance that has no real bearing on the making and marketing of, for example, clothing or food products.

An interesting recent example of this is the decision by dozens of advertisers, including Waitrose in the UK, to withdraw from Fox TV. These decisions follow the gradual rise of a campaign by a voluntary organisation called Color of Change (www.colorofchange.org) which aims to provide a clear political voice to African Americans. They have successfully mobilised large numbers of people to lobby against corporate support of Fox in particular because of the presence on the channel of a broadcaster called Glenn Beck whose clear racial bias reached a remarkable point of self-parody earlier this year when he accused Barack Obama of being a racist.

Now, Waitrose is the posh people’s supermarket in the UK. They wouldn’t put it like that (do really posh people even shop at supermarkets?) but that’s a fair, if caricatured, assessment. By no stretch of the imagination could Waitrose be accused of racism or of seeking to support or promote racism. But what is interesting is that even the suggestion that some people might perceive their advertising on Fox in those terms is enough to decide them against continuing with Fox. The owners and managers of the Waitrose brand understand very well how strongly their customers self-identify through their choice of Waitrose and how important it therefore is for the company to act in ways consistent with what their customers take to be decent and respectable behaviour.

Of course long before today’s rampant consumerism people expected well-known companies to be decent organisations. Back then the same assumption extended automatically to the state. Paradoxically as the democratic state has delegitimated itself by becoming deaf to the views of ordinary people (Q. How many referendums does it take to approve the Lisbon treaty? A. As many as it takes to get everyone to say ‘yes.’) it is the corporate sector which is increasingly forced to take those views on board, albeit with primarily symbolic significance.