Sony are a brand torn between positive and negative recognition, but their Bravia televisions are regarded as the most desirable in the industry, showcased in their inventive ‘Colour Like No Other’ advertising campaign.

There’s a sense of wonderment to those adverts. Knowing that they were made by hand, not with computers makes them more compelling and appreciable. The combination of colour, pace and music makes for very watchable shorts. The final fading text — ‘Colour. Like No Other’ — doesn’t stand out as a marketing slogan. It’s softly spoken, blends in to the calm conclusion of each visual feast.

Of course it’s a slogan, but you never think of it with such a dirty word. An illusion, but the words bring recall of the video, as well as directly describing a superior product. That was until Sony did something silly.

A common problem with monstrously large companies is to use the success of one product to prop up another, less successful product by association.

Sony are displaced in the portable music arena. For decades ‘Walkman’ has been the catch-all term for a portable music device, yet always held a slim, powerful distinction between owning a rival cassette player ‘walkman’ and a real, branded Sony Walkman. There are a number of reasons Sony lost that place in branding paradise to iPod, not least that Apple built an entirely better product. Sony have not yet recovered.

Now, travelling on the underground there are new posters. ‘Music like no other’ they declare. The new Sony Walkman MP3 player. One associated advert is rather good (view on YouTube), another is appallingly uninspiring (view on MyVideo).

The problem is, that regardless of the quality of one of the ads, the magical association of ‘Like No Other’ with Sony’s television line has been broken. The words no longer mean anything at all. It’s just a tagline. Just a slogan in the dirtiest sense. The televisions are not like ‘no other’. That’s just Sony branding. They could be the best televisions in the world for all I know, but because those words are now tacked onto Sony’s product lines. The words mean nothing to the individual products.

The illusion is broken. Now, if you didn’t before, you will notice that ‘Like No Other’ is just another layer of branding, rather than a promise of quality. For a little while, Sony had achieved that for their televisions. Their slogan was matching the acclaim of their customers. That meaning could not be diluted by sharing it with other products, it could only be destroyed altogether.