I suspect Hosni Mubarak will be as surprised as anyone to learn he had a target market.

Perhaps he could have held on longer if only he'd had better brand management.

Sorry, but I find this kind of horrifying pretty much by definition. "Brand" is a word that makes me break out in a cold sweat, because it's such a transparent attempt at Orwellian mind-control and mental conditioning wrapped up in happy-clappy evangelical suit-speak.

I don't want disintermediated non-technological social media (most people know this phenomenon as "friendship"), I don't want target markets, and I don't want brands. I don't want luvvie evangelicals saying silly things like "the pace of change has changed."

I do want people working together with generosity of spirit to solve problems and make the world more fun to live in - not because markets and brands tell them to, but because they're personally involved and they care about what happens to them and the people they know, and they'd like the future to be better than the past.

If there's a lesson from Egypt it's that given even half a choice, people will get involved, and they'll soon learn that once they do get involved, no amount of attempted management and control - short of outright street massacre - will silence them.

These are lessons for "Brands" and for brand managers. Real people do not need to learn them because they have lived through that experience.  The author is a digital media marketeer.  He is using the Mubarak experience to sell his own "brand". Brands are real things too - except that they are the property of commercial and political interests and cannot be considered outside of the context of the power and ownership relationships involved..

Index of Frank's Diaries

`This Is Your Country'

Then, about a year ago, the growing Egyptian youth movement acquired a strategic ally, Wael Ghonim, a 31-year-old Google marketing executive.
...

Mr. Ghonim had little experience in politics but an intense dislike for the abusive Egyptian police, the mainstay of the government's power. He offered his business savvy to the cause. "I worked in marketing, and I knew that if you build a brand you can get people to trust the brand," he said.

The result was a Facebook group Mr. Ghonim set up: We Are All Khalid Said, after a young Egyptian who was beaten to death by police. Mr. Ghonim -- unknown to the public, but working closely with Mr. Maher of the April 6 Youth Movement and a contact from Mr. ElBaradei's group -- said that he used Mr. Said's killing to educate Egyptians about democracy movements.

He filled the site with video clips and newspaper articles about police violence. He repeatedly hammered home a simple message: "This is your country; a government official is your employee who gets his salary from your tax money, and you have your rights." He took special aim at the distortions of the official media, because when the people "distrust the media then you know you are not going to lose them," he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/world/middleeast/14egypt-tunisia-protests.html

Some influences, including an American academic - supported by Chomsky:

Mr. Maher and his colleagues began reading about nonviolent struggles. They were especially drawn to a Serbian youth movement called Otpor, which had helped topple the dictator Slobodan Milosevic by drawing on the ideas of an American political thinker, Gene Sharp. The hallmark of Mr. Sharp's work is well-tailored to Mr. Mubark's Egypt: He argues that nonviolence is a singularly effective way to undermine police states that might cite violent resistance to justify repression in the name of stability.

Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential by Gene Sharp

This groundbreaking new work builds on 50 years of Gene Sharp's academic research and practical experience aiding nonviolent struggles around the world.

It provides unprecedented information about how to strategically plan nonviolent action and make it more effective. Furthermore, it includes twenty-three case accounts of nonviolent struggle in the twentieth century.

http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsc5ed.html

Cf.:

"For want of a better word the four "letters" that Chomsky has attached his name to since June 2008  ...  2) an open letter in support of Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution."

http://www.swans.com/library/art14/barker10.html

The April 6 Youth Movement modeled its logo -- a vaguely Soviet looking red and white clenched fist--after Otpor's, and some of its members traveled to Serbia to meet with Otpor activists.

Another influence, several said, was a group of Egyptian expatriates in their 30s who set up an organization in Qatar called the Academy of Change, which promotes ideas drawn in part on Mr. Sharp's work. One of the group's organizers, Hisham Morsy, was arrested during the Cairo protests and remained in detention.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/world/middleeast/14egypt-tunisia-protests.html

Then again:

Wael Ghonim has been appointed by the US media as the face of the Egyptian revolution. Younger than Mohamed ElBaradei, less scary than the Muslim Brotherhood, articulate in English, married to an American and an employee of Google, Mr Ghonim is the perfect figure to sell the romance of the revolution to a western audience. As the administrator of the Facebook page that first drew demonstrators to Tahrir Square, he was imprisoned for a spell, until emerging from captivity in time to articulate the frustrations of young Egyptians.

Yet some caution about the "Facebook Revolution" is in order. The commentary about the role of social media in Egypt has become so breathless that it is easy to forget that the French managed to storm the Bastille without the help of Twitter - and the Bolsheviks took the Winter Palace without pausing to post photos of each other on Facebook.

FT.com

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.

April 6 Youth Movement brand Logo:

Uses the clenched fist semiot which has a long history in protest and resistance movements.

Not Your Grandparent's Clenched Fist

The fist of protest has its roots in the deep traditions of revolutionary imagery of 1848 and French Romantic painting. It became a staple of banners and logos of unions and political parties. Raised out of the crowd, the fist clenched in strength, anger and determination could serve groups of almost any ideological stripe.

The brand logo of the Tahrir Square/Cairo protests was the 'V-for-Victory' sign:

and seems to have spontaneously emerged.  (?)  

Again, it has a long history of use going back to the 1960s

and its widespread use in World War II

Interestingly, it was consciously deployed:

It came from the creative people at the BBC who were doing everything they could (while working in conjunction with PM Churchill) to rally the people who were still in shocks of fear from the Blitz the Nazis had inundated London with during 1940. By the beginning of the year, a sense of unity and defiance had to be accomplished--and the media would be the one who would ultimately make it happen.

In this campaign, the BBC had the brilliant idea of taking the "V" sign (already known in France as meaning "Victory" and "Freedom" in The Netherlands) and giving a physical sign people could use for solidarity in winning the war without having to use words.

These two symbols were used, consciously and unconsciously, as semiotic representations carrying historically deep emotional and cognitive messages.  Display of these semiots allowed immediate, spontaneous, development of In-Group bonding through an act of individual expression: "I" became "We."  

It was this "We" that, I'd venture, became one of the factors creating the Emotional Space lying behind the remarkable social psychological qualities of Tahrir Square.  Letting one example suffice for all, women tweeters continually tweeted the 100% change they experienced during the protests; formerly sexual harassment in the square was commonplace, that evaporated during the protests.

To qualify this comment, I'm not saying these brand logos were anything more than a causal factor.  Judging how important they were must necessarily wait for the Egyptian revolution plays out.  

[I note this thing isn't over.]

Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere