We seem to run into some conceptual challenges in trying to square
"brand" with
"kool-aid".
First, however, it seems worthwhile to point out that when somebody expresses their personal impressions drawn from their own experience, those expressions are true for the person, but are not necessarily true for anyone else. In this respect, those 'truths' are unassailable.
We walk the same streets and each of us have different experiences and so our expressions of those experiences, true enough for each of us, remain 'subjective.'
***
Because 'Brand' is borrowed from the marketing world, it possesses a precise definition, although what it means to users here surely deviates from this definition.
From the AMA Dictionary of marketing terms,
http://www.marketingpower.com/mg-dictionary-view329.php?
brand
- A name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. The legal term for brand is trademark. A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller
Since it is a marketer's job, where he or she is involved with 'branding,' to reinforce the positive features underlying the brand, it is understood that underneath a brand are found an array of a product's
positive features,
But, the Lakewood product and Lakewood brand is not a result of the explicitly intentional 'symbol-making' (etc.) procedures of a marketer.
The Lakewood brand is altogether much more interesting because, (as I look at it,) at best (and falling well short of explicit procedures,) it expresses the instance of agreement between different subjective views of what are Lakewood's good qualities, but, at the same time, cannot do much more than this.
Because the Brand is, by definition, positive, it doesn't express the negative features. (We could term the negative array, the 'anti-brand,' i.e. those aspects which make a product or service distinctly
unattractive.
There's no normative brand possible. Some people may think Lakewood is diverse and is attractive and unpretentious; others may think it is mostly whitebread and grimy and full of its self.
***
Kool-aid isn't found in the AMA dictionary. I'm reminded of the electric kool-aid acid test.
To drink the kool-aid harkens back to taking a sip of the watery kids drink with the charged difference: somebody put some LSD in it. The sip that spins one out!
I think it has a more positive flavor in Lakewood usage. But, it also has recently come to have a dual usage for to drink the Lakewood kool-aid is to 'go on the trip of
getting it, whereas it is possible to drink some other kool-aid and find after which the Lakewood kool-aid has no effect.
***
Alas, there is a partial loss of 'faculties' associated with going on the kool-aid acid trip.
Eventually, as it is with marketing, the reality of the product transcends the attempt to reduce it--intentionally--to its positive qualities.
The 'city that knew itself better than any other,' ironically is part of the recent iteration of Lakewood Observer brand.
But, the city that actually knows itself well, obviously, knows its self warts and all; knows itself unsparingly and veraciously. The hope is that unleashing knowledge building projects impacts the brand at the same time it
blows the brand up. Wow!
***
(As any professional marketer knows, all Brands are, finally, fantasies...what I heard a marketer aptly describe as 'the product wet dream'.) Ken and I have spoken of the collective intrapsychic processes causing the community persona ('the brand') as an effect emerged out of the community archetype ('the imago').
In (analytic) psychological terms, the persona is the least capacious and resourceful aspect of the Psyche.
