In “Brands in the news”, a chapter in my book La marca corporativa (“The Corporate Brand”), I made the following assertion: “one of the most complex situations a brand may find itself in is being featured in the news”. It’s been many years since that time when, as a professor at Vic University, I wrote this article, but this statement remains valid. If back in 2005, featuring a brand in the news was a complex issue, and conveying the most appropriate values to sell it even more so, today it is a major challenge.

I said “sell”. Yes. Sell. In times of absolute crisis, I have decided to streamline the way I express myself, to strip my business language of the flourishes we’ve all been making up – to charge clients more, I guess, for a job that already existed, although under a different name. So, why should a brand want to appear in the media as news? To sell more, and this noble purpose is exactly what a business is about.

Are there any other purposes for a business, besides sales? My answer is “no”. If we define “sales”, we’ll be able to see that all the objectives we can set, including some that may seem far removed from this concept, e.g. lobbying, perfectly fall within their realm.