When we think of branding in the United States we think of a product, much like Coke a Cola or Tylenol, but we don’t necessarily think of a person or a presidential candidate as a brand.

However, Steven Heller in his book “Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State,” reminds us of how Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin and Mao effectively disseminated their branded messages to the masses.

The obvious thought comes to mind over the cult popularity of Barack Obama, are we helping to brand a celebrity of change right here in the United States and the populace has no idea of what the empty vessel of change stands for, or for that matter who Obama really is?

He has led an amorphous campaign, yes he is like many have said, much like jello which is impossble to nail to the wall.

But so was Hitler and all of the other designing dictators, using imagery, music, massive symbols to project change for the better but never specifically telling what the change was to be or who the person really was that proposed all this wonderment.

Obama went to Iraq met with the troops and the Generals, went on to Afganistan and did much of the same, touched base in France and London without too much fanfare.  But what was that scene and speech in Berlin before 200,000 Germans — that was branding the likes of which Hitler did during the Nazi regime.

“A popular brand of frozen food or laundry detergent is not forced down the consumer’s throat with an iron fist.” But as Heller notes in his book, “the design and marketing methods used to inculcate doctrine and guarantee consumption are fundamentally similar.”

The intriguing concept in Heller’s thesis is not to diminish the insidiousness of the regimes under scrutiny, but to reveal why they were so effective.

So why was it that the Obama campaign staged such an overwhelming presence in Berlin before 200,000 persons who couldn’t vote in the United States?

It appears to be what Heller is talking about in his book — branding.

Shouldn’t we ask what these words mean, when Obama says, “A nation healed! A world repaired!  We are the ones we’ve been waiting for?”

Or, when Obama says, “A light will shine down from somewhere.  It will light upon you.  You will experience an epiphany, and you will say to yourself, ‘I have to vote for Barack?’ “

The substance is absence as it was in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin and Mao’s China.

I am not suggesting for one moment that Obama is anyone of the branded individuals I am comparing him to.  I am just making a comparison with the unknown.  They were all unknown to the people they were branding themsleves to, much as Obama is unknown to the people of the United States to which he is branding himself.

All of the designing dictators to which I am referencing sold the concept of “change”.

Be careful what you ask for when you seek “change” without knowing for sure the specifics.