Saturday, June 3, 2017

George Lakoff — Disaster Branding: The Importance of Naming

Donald Trump knows the power of branding and actually make huge profits by selling the use of his name. But the power of naming and branding can be a double-edged sword: when a president creates and perpetuates real human disasters, we can truthfully attach his name to them and allow well-earned disaster branding to spread naturally.
This is a pretty standard political tool. Because it works. In fact, there doesn't even need to be a real disaster, just a manufactured one like the "failure" of the ACA aka "Obamacare."

It's not only a matter of naming as denotation, but also connotation.

George Lakoff
Disaster Branding: The Importance of Naming
George Lakoff | Director of the Center for the Neural Mind & Society and retired Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley

5 comments:

Noah Way said...

Which directly supports my comment on the "myth of the caring liberals" thread, which I will repeat here.

Blanket classifications are very useful in dividing people against each other. Left/right conservative/liberal etc. Many of these terms have been redefined with derogatory meanings.

Peter Pan said...

C'est un catastrumphe!

Matt Franko said...

We have to discriminate Noah... qualitatively, logically, quantitatively

How do you suggest we deal with the "we're out of money!" people?

Or the monetarists? who claimed the QE was "printin' money!" and we were going to get all sorts of "inflation!" because of that meanwhile prices went down...

No use for identification/labeling of these unqualified cohorts?

Tom Hickey said...

How do you suggest we deal with the "we're out of money!" people?

While I am not a PR person, I have friends who are and I suspect they would recommended finding the funding for a public awareness campaign with celebrities doing the heavy hauling, backed up by some photogenic and media savvy experts to deal with questions.

Noah Way said...

How do you suggest we deal with the "we're out of money!" people?

Start by exposing their finances, tax evasions, lobbying, bribery, duplicity on positions of corporate vs social welfare, etc.

If that doesn't work there is always tar and feathers, or Mussolini's necktie.