Battle of the brands, cable news style

Watch a little election analysis and you’ve likely noticed how the vocabulary of branding has infiltrated the commentary of the talking head crowd. For the CNN and MSNBC commentariat in particular, the word “brand” has become a formula and a fashion. It’s the “Republican brand” this and the “Obama brand” that, et cetera and so on.

It’s not that they’re getting the underlying mechanism of brand equity wrong. Quite the contrary. The major parties and candidates do anchor distinctive constellations of values, perceived strengths, and associations that attract communities of loyalists and spread their influence by word of mouth.

But for those of us who deal in these social and business phenomena regularly, this is old news. Even so, I think there’s a lesson here. The vigor with which the on-camera experts (and party surrogates) have flocked to these terms of art as if they were remarkably fresh and insightful bears out how memes (even concepts that are pretty standard in other communities) can spread with eureka! enthusiasm among cohesive social networks.

 Make no mistake: for all its internal differences in political stance and affiliation, the fraternity-sorority of talking heads is a full-fledged social network. Not an entirely closed one of course, but one with enough commonality of focus, go-to sources of information, and ritualized habits of inter-communication to qualify as soc-nets as surely as the more self-consciously fervent communities of Harley owners, Sam Adams drinkers, and PETA members.