by Shauneen Procter. There’s an old saying that goes something like this: “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
In the world of branding and reputation, this idiom has never been more relevant, particularly when you figure out that the silk purse can be a metaphor for a company or product. No matter what you do, a wallet made of pig’s skin isn’t going to become silk. In branding terms, this aphorism is translated into the understanding that the quickest way to hasten a bad product’s downfall is to advertise or promote it.
The intelligent question, of course, is whether the converse is true: Do good companies perform better than others, and what happens when you promote them properly?