Breaking the brand is carefully safeguarded, i.e., our collective consciousness. For instance, the brand of America as a free state of free thinkers where anything is possible.

Thanks

Don’t mistake design/product design for art. If you would have been talking about art, you would have a point, but with product design the goal is clear: usability. If you put branding into the equasion you’re aiming for impact and recognizability as well. The goals are clear and whether these goals have been reached can be judged in an objective way.

Now how these goals have been reached, whith what message that is where your taste and your liking and disliking comes into play, but if the goals are reached you can end up with a strong brand and well done product design, but you still think it sucks, becaus you cannot identify with the message, or you simply hate the color pink or whatever.

I think that bottle has the power to kill the Coca Cola brand. Recognition value zero. The design is too messy, the visual message too blurry. I wouldn’t have known that those bottles were from Coca Cola if it weren’t for the logo.

From the three strong brand attributes of Cocal Cola they killed two (red/white high contrast and the shape is not recognizable anymore) and they made the logo so small that you have to search for it.

With Coca Cola the orginial shape of the bottle has been “watered down” several times over history, but now they’ve come to a level of “watering down” where you cannot recognize the bottle by the shape alone anymore. In German I’d call this the classic “Griff ins Klo”. Fire up your dictionaries for this one ;-)

I don’t know the context, but Friedmans is certainly a funny guy. He is running into a double paradox: 1) It’s not a question why people don’t like American foreign policy. For people abroad it’s very very obvious why. 2) American foreign policy sells extremely well. In terms of mere marketing, American policy sells better than ever:

• Right now the word “Impeach Bush” attracts almost as much attention as “Free Sex”.
• Abroad we have all become Americans, following American politics more than our own, as it affects more than any national should-we-dig-a-tunnel-through-that-mountain-or-not-debate. I wish I could vote.
• Non-Americans certainly hope, that the pendulum swings back and America becomes the great nation it once used to be with visionaries in power like Franklin or Kennedy or Larry David. In that sense, we have all become American:

“Ich bin ein Amerikaner.” And I want the real Coke. Not the one with the label “classic”. The one that just said “enjoy”. The one that was sold with a white mark in transparent glass bottles with an aluminum cap, that hurt your ear, when you tried to opened it silently, secretly on a Sunday morning, while your parents were still asleep, while someone was talking about Elvis on the radio and those “verrueckten Amerikaner” that went to the moon in rockets called “Apollo”, which as you might know, was the ancient Greek god of art. These crazy Americans made boys like me want to become chief astronauts, Jedy Knights, writer of a show like Seinfeld. Yes, it’s this fantastic America that Bush&Co are selling out – but in the mean time they make us long for it to come back even stronger. Larry David for president!