Branding a Movement

from: http://feministriots.tumblr.com/

Earlier this semester, we discussed in class the importance of branding.  Companies are now selling us ideas > products.  It's not the product you are buying, it's how the product makes you look.  It's about outside appearances.  It's about flashy, bold, memorable campaigns that can be mass produced.  (Ex: Sites like tumblr and pinterest, where you see is the image, placed above a description by the user.  It's all about drawing the eye.)

By now, we've discovered how to brand a product, a product line, a corporation, a celebrity, even to some extent ourselves.  But what about the brand of a movement?  The brand of an unregistered collection of like-minded people, with varying degrees of passions and a giant range of ideas?  How does a group brand themselves when there is no weekly board meeting or member facebook group (actually, I'm sure there are facebook groups about all types of movements, but who's to say they speak for the whole?)?

This is the dilemma that some feminists are approaching today.  This movement has experienced quite the history, with many wins and loses.  An argument that is growing momentum is that the word "feminist" is outdated.  Some believe it's outdated, others find themselves unable to relate with it.  Joss Whedon finds it ugly.

Whedon suggests coining a term to collect all the negative behavior feminists fight against.  In her article in The Atlantic, Abigail Rine expresses her exhaustion of having to continually defend the term from it's preconceived negative terms:

http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/05/the-pros-and-cons-of-abandoning-the-word-feminist/275511/

While Rine is tired of having to defend the term from the misinformed, she only has one reason to keep from dropping it that holds a lot of weight: nostalgia.  The term has been through it all with past generations.  It's been dragged through the mud and held up on shoulders.  Would dropping the label in order to reinvent the movement be "letting them win"?  Would it be disrespectful to the hard workers of the past?  There would hardly be a way to make everyone happy, even if the movement somehow agreed name-changing was the best course.

In my naive opinion: a change of name is something to consider.  As mentioned above, there would be no way to make everyone happy, but maybe a gender-neutral name would keep would-be feminists from shying aware if they understood the movement is not about female dominance, but equality.  I understand that I have much more to read and understand about this topic, but I'd love to hear from you.  Do you think feminists should consider re-branding?  Have any other movements taken this route?

Thanks for reading,
Sam