Unbranded

At one point in my life I considered marketing as a career path. My initial attraction to the field stemmed from promises of creatively reinventing outdated concepts and so forth. Branding was what I really wanted to do, and I still seem to have a knack for it at times. But the more I researched and considered the prospect, the more I came to personally associate the word branding with deception. RED ALERT! God was whispering to me...Erin (although there are some Christians in this world strong enough to compete in the realm of marketing without denying me), YOU are not one of them. Okay, so maybe God didn't directly tell me, but He did give me the good sense to know myself well enough. This instinct is right. If I were to pursue a career in Marketing at this point in my life, Satan would snatch me right up. Afterall, he is the great deceiver.

The following contains a selection of information I gathered on the topic at hand:

A brand is a collection of symbols, experiences and associations connected with a product, a service, a person or any other artifact or entity.

Brands have become increasingly important components of culture and the economy, now being described as "cultural accessories and personal philosophies".
The psychological aspect of branding, sometimes referred to as the image, is a symbolic construct created within the minds of people and consists of all the information and expectations associated with a product or service.

Careful brand management, supported by a cleverly crafted advertising campaign, can be highly successful in convincing consumers to pay remarkably high prices for products which are inherently extremely cheap to make. This concept, known as creating value, essentially consists of manipulating the projected image of the product so that that the consumer sees the product as being worth the amount that the advertiser wants him/her to see, rather than a more logical valuation that comprises an aggregate of the cost of raw materials, plus the cost of manufacture, plus the cost of distribution. Modern value-creation branding-and-advertising campaigns are highly successful at inducing consumers to pay, for example, 50 dollars for a T-shirt that cost a mere 50 cents to make, or 5 dollars for a box of breakfast cereal that contains a few cents' worth of wheat.

The brand name is often used interchangeably within "brand", although it is more correctly used to specifically denote written or spoken linguistic elements of any product. In this context a "brand name" constitutes a type of trademark, if the brand name exclusively identifies the brand owner as the commercial source of products or services. A brand owner may seek to protect proprietary rights in relation to a brand name through trademark registration. Advertising spokespersons have also become part of some brands, for example: Mr. Whipple of Charmin toilet tissue and Tony the Tiger of Kellogg's.

The act of associating a product or service with a brand has become part of pop culture. Most products have some kind of brand identity, from common table salt to designer jeans. A brandnomer is a brand name that has colloquially become a generic term for a product or service, such as Band-Aid or Kleenex, which are often used to describe any kind of adhesive bandage or any kind of facial tissue respectively.

GENESIS 3:1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the
LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not
eat from any tree in the garden'?"