Brands are worth more, worldwide, than all counterfeits combined. Why? Because brands are the targets of counterfeits. Without brands, all products would be generics. There would be "counterfeit generics" but it just wouldn't be as lucrative to go after them.

Brands take a long time, even in the Internet era, to generate. And, they are very sensitive beasts, easily damaged and finicky. Take AYDS, for example. A successful appetite suppressant (using benzocaine, then phenylpropanolamine, and by the end, who knows, bromoschlomobenzofenzodiaminetetrafemtosupercallifragilisticmercuric sulfate for all we know). The point is, once the general public became aware of AIDS (as in the symptoms associated with HIV infection), well, the old adverts about "Why take diet pills when you can enjoy Ayds?" just weren't effective except for the George Carlins of the world.

AYDS was destroyed by AIDS. A brand name gone. Could it happen to another brand? Maybe. But it's unlikely that SUN, for example, would suffer sales losses if a new heart disorder were name systolic ultrastructural neopathy, or that IBM would suffer from a new mental illness dubbed idiopathic bipolar mania. In one case, there's more than one sun/Sun under the sun, and in the other there's too far a distance between the associations. After all, a diet pill is associated with health--AYDS and AIDS share some contextual overlap. Keep in mind, "2001: A Space Odyssey", didn't hurt IBM, even though the evil antagonist, HAL, was a computer whose name is simply IBM with each character shifted forward one place in the alphabet.

Still, it's possible that the AYDS/AIDS scare did significantly affect new branding. In the 1980's, the "faux brands" became popular, where marketing gurus came up with nice-sounding, content-free names such as Lexus, Acura, and New Coke.  Oh, wait, never mind the latter. The point is, a brand name unassociated with a real word presumably avoids any negative association whatsoever (Prius, anyone?).

I spent much of this week visiting the East Coast on some security-related work I will overview in upcoming blogs. But, in so doing, I spent a lot of time in airports. So, I was thinking how poorly branded many of the U.S. airports were. LaGuardia, for example. If it were out in Colorado (my home state), then it would surely be called La Giardia (a waterborn parasite now ubiquitous in Colorado streams), and so heckled into being renamed something clever like Denver International Airport. Hmmm...Giardia, right by Flushing Bay and Flushing Meadow, and giardia can be transmitted by improper hygeine after, well, flushing. It's too easy. But the real LaGuardia was the real deal (and part of the New Deal) and his name will likely still be valuable for branding the airport for years to come.

What about the "bald man's express"? Flying from Chicago to Washington D.C. from No'Hair International to Rogaine National might help put some fuzz on his scalp. At least he wouldn't have to land at the Dullest airport in the country and take a much longer cab ride to the Capitol.

Maybe you're thinking, "Hey, Steve, airports aren't branded. They're named!" A name *is* a brand, though, and I'm sure these airports weren't named after LaGuardia, O'Hare, Reagan and Dulles to chase away passengers. After all, brands are not brand new. Just ask the "discoverers" of Greenland. They didn't name it FrozenSolid9MonthsOfTheYearLand, did they?

 -Steve