A brand exists for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most important of these is to develop a psychological relationship between a person and a product. Every brand does this. From the beginning of branding straight up to the not-too-distant past, the way that brands worked was to build consumer confidence through repetition: by providing stylistic consistency, brands reassured customers that the products under their umbrella were similarly consistent in quality (and therefore trustworthy), and thus eventually became symbols for contracts regularly fulfilled. By employing advertising to regularly alert potential customers to the various products and services a brand represented, brands became part of the wallpaper of American life in the form of billboards and television and magazine advertisements. It was a pretty good strategy for quite a long time, but then along came the Internet.

"A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it..." — Andy Warhol

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Promises entail promissory obligations. That is to say, what it means to promise to do something is to create — apparently out of thin air — the obligation to do it.

On Wednesday, I talked about the advertising strategy of committing a company to a minimal obligation, or one that's already in place. Today I'm going to look briefly at two related types of canonical advertising promises: namely, vague promises and insinuations.

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