品牌是一种企业废话吗？作者：埃文·戴维斯

Evan Davis is the main presenter of theBBC2 current affairs show,Newsnight.Before taking up that role in September 2014,he was a presenter of theTodayprogrammeon BBC Radio 4. He is also well-known asthe presenter of the BBC2 business realityshowDragons Den. And on Radio 4, he hostsa weekly business discussion programme,theBottom Line. Prior to theTodayprogramme he was theEconomics Editor of the BBC, the most senioreconomics reporter in the corporation. He has made several BBC documentaries,including the influential two-part 2014 BBC2seriesMind the Gapwhich explored theeconomic disparities between London andthe regions. In 2011 he presentedMade inBritain, a three-part BBC2 series with anaccompanying book on how the country paysits way in the world. In 2011, Evan was alsoone of a number of journalists involved in aBBC1Panoramaspecial calledBreaking intoBritain, a moving account of the journeysmigrants take to get into Europe and the UK.Before joining the BBC in 1993, he was aneconomist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies,and at the London Business School. Hehas written numerous papers, articles andnewspaper and magazine columns as wellas the book,Public Spending(published byPenguin in 1998). He is also a co-author of thePenguin Dictionary of Economics and the NewPenguin Dictionary of Business. His latest book is calledPost Truth: Why wehave reached Peak Bullshit and what wecan do about itwhich sets out to explain whythere is so much mendacity and nonsense inpublic discourse and why it became more of aconcern in 2016. Are brands a formof corporatebullsh*t? Evan DavisEconomist, journalistand BBC presenter and on and on: ‘We must earn and keep theirtrust by ensuring that the products we sell areunderstandable and appropriate.’ Are brands a form of corporate bullsh*t? Firstly, I must apologise for using that word.I have just written a book, conceived in 2012,which was going to be called Peak Bullsh*t. As ithappens, when 2016 came along we realised thatfar from being at a peak, we had only been in thefoothills at the time of the book’s conception andwhen it was published earlier this year it wasgiven the more fashionable titlePost-Truth. Butwhat the book has taught me is that the wordbullsh*t now has popular currency and is reallythe only word that describes the phenomenonwe are assailed by in all walks of life, often inthe corporate world, more often at the momentin politics, but also in our daily personalencounters too. This is what I mean when I talk of corporatebullshit. It is detached from reality but designedto offer a flattering portrayal of the company. Itis perhaps pretty harmless as no one would havebelieved it at the time anyway, and I suspect fewpeople read such paragraphs, so you might call itat best a load of vacuous nonsense. Tonight, mymain focus is to ask whether brands are in thatsame category. Are people gullible? However, there is a second question that I wantto pose, very much related to the first. It is, ‘Arepeople gullible?’ Now this is closely related tothe question as to whether brands are bullshit,because if brand managers and their consultantsdo generate lies and nonsense in promoting theirbrands, they presumably do so in order to suckerconsumers into buying their products. And if weare suckered into buying their products on thebasis of lies and nonsense, well then we mustgullible. If people are not gullible, if we are nottaken in by the corporate bullshit of brands, thenwhy would companies invest so much money inthem? I can see why a Barclays annual reportmight contain bullshit text, because it doesn’tcost much. But would you invest so much inbullshit marketing unless people were gullible? Bullshit is not just lies. It is not just deliberateattempts to mislead. It includes a whole rangeof things that are simply detached from fact– obfuscation, economy with the truth anddisregard for facts (as opposed to deliberatedeceit). The specific phenomenon of corporatebullshit is something I am sure you have allencountered multiple times. By way of example, let me cite a paragraphfrom the annual report of Barclays Bank in2007, a time when Barclays was cheating onLIBOR, selling PPI insurance and saddling smallbusinesses with inappropriate fixed interestrate products. The annual report says, ‘In allof this, the customer is absolutely central if weare to make sustainable banking successful andsuccessful banking sustainable. We must putour customers at the heart of everything we do,and build our services around them.’ It goes on So the answers to both of questions ‘are brandsbullshit?’ and ‘are people gullible?’ are stronglylinked. And I think the latter is particularlyinteresting in 2017, as there is a ferocious public own preferences, and companies make rationalchoices too. This is the economic equivalent ofassuming frictionless surfaces in physics andalthough it is unrealistic to assume rationalityon the part of everybody, as an approximationto the way the world works, it nevertheles