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Brands and the Self
James Woudhuysen
Despite recent reversals for the
brand, managers still view it as an indispensable and benign kind of
alchemy. Meanwhile, critics hold it a swindle. However, the real
problem with the brand is that it promises therapeutic solutions to
issues that are in fact so big, they can only be resolved by broader
social means. Philosophically, brands can neither overcome the
isolation and alienation of the self, nor replace it with a sense of
belonging.
Introduction
We are watching
out for any sign the brand might be in trouble… I am feeling
urgency. I wish I could agree with people who still believe there is
no connection between how people feel about foreign policy and how
people feel about the US.
Today the decline of America as a
brand is so great that Keith Reinhard feels
obliged to speak out about it. US multinationals still retain
buoyant sales abroad. However, ‘If we
were looking at the US as a brand’, says Reinhard, ‘we would say
this is the time to relaunch the brand’.
Reinhard chairs
DDB Worldwide, an advertising arm of Omnicom, the world's largest
marketing services company. He also leads Business for Diplomatic
Action, a group of advertising and PR firms out to rehabilitate
America’s brand abroad. His words confirm that branding has become
so influential among US managers, some hope it can lessen the
worldwide damage caused by America’s war against Iraq.
Yet despite the
continued domination of the branding mentality, an air of crisis now
surrounds brands. For the US marketing guru Jack Trout, big brands
spell ‘big trouble’. For Which?, a decline in the
historic reliability of German car brands deserves a cover story.
David Aaker, the world’s top professorial authority on brands,
reports:
It seems that
just about every company I visit is struggling with this stuff.
Either they are not sure which brands to grow, or they have too many
brands and can’t cut through the clutter, or they have brands that
are losing relevance.
Brands form one of the
concepts at the core of management. Among the presuppositions of
management theory, brands raise questions about the self among
customers and employees, and about language and rationality. In
applying philosophy to issues facing managers, brands say something
both about performance measurement and about the status of ethics
within management, PR and sponsorship.
This paper reviews the empirical
facts about brands, and the positions of their supporters and
critics. My source for many of the writers boosting brands is US
management literature. As for critics, I concentrate on Naomi
Klein’s bestseller No logo (2000), the most comprehensive
attack on what the author herself calls the ‘brand bullies’.
Throughout, I give my own views, focusing on the relationship
between brands and the self.
The domination of brands, and the
crisis surrounding them
Though brands have met mixed
fortunes since 2000, they appear more central to capitalism than
ever before. Though the Coca-Cola’s company is in trouble, ‘it’s a
testament to the brand’s strength that it has remained vigorous in a
time of management fiasco’. Similarly, in his bid for Marks & Spencer, the
entrepreneur Philip Green talks of the need to rehabilitate the M&S
brand with shoppers – and, significantly, with employees.
CEOs still see brands as the key to
success. Giorgio Armani calculates that his name alone will
vindicate his strategy of brand extension, or brand stretch, from
clothing into chairs and sofas. Meanwhile, the acquisition of
corporate brands has revived after several years of downturn.
Every day, millions of brand
managers give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to brand dinosaurs. They
also pursue line extensions – upmarket or downmarket variants of a
product, tweaked by flavour, form, colour, ingredient or pack size
(think Smirnoff Ice, with Diet Coke). Occasionally and more
expensively, brand managers build wholly new brands, as Toyota did
with Lexus. Last, brand managers rationalise over-heavy sacks of
brands by performing brand deletions. The two $40bn companies that
pretty much invented branding – Cincinnati’s Procter & Gamble (P&G),
and the Anglo-Dutch concern Unilever – often cull their brands.
Firms take branding very seriously.
However, only a minority really see themselves as brand wizards,
which is why many outsource their branding effort to Omnicom, WPP,
Interpublic, Grey Group and France’s Havas and Publicis. These six
global groups, quoted on international stock exchanges, today take
60 per cent of the US advertising industry’s $146bn revenues.
The domination of brands is far from
over. Today the race is on not just for Western firms to build
brands in China, but also for Chinese firms to build brands
worldwide.
Indeed Harvard professor John Quelch
now thanks Chinese brands, in advance, for providing the world with
what he calls ‘an alternative to US brand hegemony’.
The purpose of the brand and the
conception of self it embodies
Much euphoria surrounds brands, but
there is also a dark cloud over them. Even before their phenomenal
ascent today, marketing people used to say that brands needed
continual maintenance. But since the collapse of Enron in January
2002, maintenance has become more akin to life support. David
Aaker gives some of the reasons:
…. we find brands
that are very strong – with high awareness, high quality, high
loyalty – but are losing market share. Sub-markets are emerging
where they are just not relevant.
Faced by the relentless possibility
of corporate scandals and the loss of corporate reputation, the
brand today gets more and more management caresses. The brand is in
intensive care.
With all this attention lavished on
it, we might well ask exactly what it is that the brand is supposed
to do in the first place. After all, the task of the brand today
goes further than the clarification and differentiation of product
benefits.
Over the decades, product brands
such as Tide have tended to give way to corporate brands such as
Sony. Yet corporate brands can’t be reduced to product qualities and
attributes. They work
at a different
level, often relating to the values and purposes of the organisation,
what sorts of relationships it tries to build with its stakeholders,
how it contributes to the wider community.
Since 2000, branding experts have
come to agree on the organisation’s chief purposes, and thus the
purpose of the brand. By behaving ethically, the management
of an organisation can get its corporate brand to win the trust of
consumers. That way, the brand can help consumers avoid suffering
the strains of everyday life, and in particular the modern tyranny
of branded choice.
At once, then, brands bear witness
to what the sociologist Frank Furedi terms therapy culture.
The brand is at risk, in crisis, and
has an immanent tendency to victimhood; but it must at the same time
come to the aid of human beings who themselves have moved from Abram
Maslow’s ‘perpetually needy animal’ to today’s stressed-out,
diminished selves.
Despite a baffling, irrational range
of typefaces on it, a rebranded Barclaycard will be issued in late
2004 to act as an ‘enabler’ to consumers through life.
But this is about as upbeat as
branding can be nowadays. For the rest, the philosophy of management
is that brands are needed to edit, simplify, signpost, solve
problems in or even run parts of people’s lives.
Brands are, in this framework,
umbilical. They act as a kind of helpline for the self, which is in
turn conceived as overloaded, damaged and in need of professional
support.
The application of the branding
concept seems more and more universal.
The concept itself has become more
capacious. However, as brands have become more about the self and
thus more personal, so distaste for them has become more
institutionalised.
Ethical critiques of brands have
become a staple of mainstream discourse
While managers see the brand as a
kind of indispensable and benign alchemy, critics hold it a gigantic
swindle. For critics, brands overwhelm space, whether urban,
electronic or educational. They commoditise culture, from magazines
to live music.
The cost of brands is so great, it
must be met by ending jobs, reducing jobs to McJobs, and moving
factories from the First to the Third World.
Brands mean products and services
that are never genuine, natural or ethical.
Despite the flagging fortunes of
anti-capitalist protesters, their ethical critique of brands has had
its effect. More and more philosophising about brands has come to
centre on corporate social responsibility.
In just a few years, management has
incorporated the Kleinian critique of brands, and the state has
enforced that critique in its regulation. At Starbucks, every aspect
of the supply chain is subjected to ethical investigation.
Today Wal-Mart is, among
businessmen, America’s most admired company; but its brand looks
quite likely to be tarnished in the courts, as a class action
against its discrimination against female employees gets underway.
Last, New Labour looks askance at British food and drinks suppliers,
believing them to thrust their brands in front of schoolchildren in
ways that can only encourage the moral crime of obesity.
As much as brands, therefore,
anti-branding as a philosophical outlook has become a staple of
mainstream discourse. Today, it is the Financial Times that
tells brand managers ‘to endure a long and frustrating trip on
Virgin railways next time some bored executive is tempted to expand
into hairdressing or dentistry’.
Critique: branding and anti-branding as expressions of personal
identity
With brands, neither management
boosters of brands nor puritan critics may have it right. The
problem with brands may not be that they’re big, nor even that
they’re bad. Rather, they promise therapeutic solutions to problems
that can in fact only be resolved by broader social means. They are
not a fake, but they do prove a let-down.
Even before 11 September 2001, many
already felt that they had lost a sense of community, church, or
trade union. Many also thought that we had lost family and job
security too. Since 9-11, then, brands have striven to help us
overcome our sense of loss and replace it with expressions of
identity and even personal meaning.
To buy and display the right brand
at home and work is to try to do right, be creative and gain
self-esteem.
Today’s critics of brands have roots
that go back to the 19th century of American pastoralism
and trustbusting, and of European social democracy and state
regulation. But they are not just a rebranding of old philosophies.
Consumers active against consumerism, they resemble enthusiasts for
brands. In revolt against commerce, they want to express identity
and personal meaning. They, too, try to do right, be creative and
gain self-esteem.
What boosters and critics of
brands have in common is the premium they put on the emotional self.
While critics believe that they and only they resist the Sin of
Avarice with the Good of the Soul, brand boosters believe that they,
too, have a role in this enterprise. In brand circles, indeed, ‘it
has become a truism that brand marketing is in the business of
communicating and selling emotional connections and benefits rather
than just products and services’.
The brand as social power
Boosters (1): measuring the
performance of intangibles in dollars
Brand boosters take the power of
brands as a presupposition. They do not inspect the current
movement of capital in its totality or in its essence, but fasten
upon just one of its features: brands. The power of capital is taken
simply to be the power of the market. The market is then reduced to
the purchasing decisions of the sovereign self, whether in the
present or over the consumer’s whole life. Even the decisions of
managers of corporate procurement are represented as an emotional,
consumer affair. As a result of all these superficialities, the
intangibles upon which buying decisions are supposed to depend
are seen as vital to capitalism. Finally, the brands that connote
these intangibles become all-powerful.
Years
ago, Philip Kotler, the doyen of marketing in the USA,
anticipated today’s brand critics.
Because capital took flight to low-cost, Third World destinations,
it had to build brand power:
The power of brands, boosters hold,
lies in the intangibles that distinguish one firm’s offering from
another. Kotler held that the most durable meanings of a brand are
not its attributes (a Mercedes is well built), or even the ensuing
benefits (I am safe in the event of an accident). Firms must instead
follow the values that a brand suggests its owner holds (I
own a Mercedes because I value high performance, safety and
prestige), and its personality (consumers might visualise a
Mercedes as a middle-aged executive).
Brand boosters rate the values and
character traits of a Mercedes higher than the quality of its steel
or its crashworthiness. For them, a brand is a matter of perceptions
and associations. As a result, ever since David Ogilvy, Bill
Bernbach and Leo Burnett took American advertising by storm in the
1960s, the irrational, ‘right brain’ factors of intuition, flair and
talent are very much part of the brand booster’s creative marketing
mix.
Here heart must beat head. Yet as
the management consultants McKinsey earnestly point out, ‘marketers
rely too much on intuition… the next level requires a more rigorous,
data-edged base to branding’.
So next, bizarrely, brand boosters
proceed to take the feeling that things go better with Coke,
that Coke is the real thing, and calculate its value… in dollars! As
Business Week insists, ‘While the concept of brand is
intangible, brand equity is far from it’.
In the professional practice of
branding, then, feelings are monetised. The social power
vested in a brand, through its appeal to consumers, is held directly
responsible for its economic power.
As the Cold War drew to a close,
efforts grew more feverish to measure the market performance
of brands. The year that gave brand boosters their ace was 1988.
Then, Philip Morris bought Kraft for $12.6bn, six times its paper
value, while Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co paid a record $25.4bn for
RJR Nabisco, a ‘house of brands’ (Oreo biscuits, Winston cigarettes,
etc). For the first time, it seemed incontrovertible that brands
ruled – if only because intangibles appeared to have a clear dollar
value.
Today, the crisis of the brand is
such that even J Walter Thompson’s top man in north-east Asia can
declare ‘There is no proof anywhere that branding works’.
Yet for a simple piece of graphics,
the brand seems to have all the force, and all the irrationality, of
myth – and not only with marketing professionals or stock
market slickers. Moreover it is not just the individualistic
American self of folklore that is infatuated with brands.
The European self, which some
might feel more given to collectivity and reciprocity, began to be
interested in brands well before the American one.
Today, only 29 of the world’s top
100 brands are European.
But as early as 1997, management
consultant Erich Joachimsthaler and David Aaker suggested that, in
brands, US firms ‘would do well to study their counterparts in
Europe'. Their reason: America had entered an Internet world.
Traditional mass media were a thing of the past. Thus European
firms, which, unlike their opposite numbers in the USA, had never
relied on cheap continent-wide TV commercials, would ‘point the way
for others to succeed in the new media age'.
Europe’s special expertise in
branding escapes the anti-capitalists.
Yet the historic origins of branded
corporations begin not with Mid-Western farmers in the 19th
century, but with fashionable Paris in the 18th. The
world’s luxury brands today reveal the historic contribution
of Europe in general, and pre- and post-revolutionary France in
particular, to the establishment of brands. Cartier, Dior, Johnny
Walker, Prada and others easily elbow aside American Express and
Kenzo fashion.
That American brand boosters should
uphold Europe as an example of what intangibles can do for the
prosaic world of products is entirely proper. For from its historic
luxury brands to all its big brands today, Europe shows that
brands are about ‘class’. European luxury brands were always a
mark of Europe’s traditions of quality craftsmanship.
But luxury brands were also a more
or less aristocratic emblem of the rich man’s or woman’s wealth,
status and aesthetic judgement on different aspects of
‘culture’.
How rational was all this? The
branded products of Europe’s owner-managers once inspired the
living-rooms of the slave-owning Confederacy.
Today LVMH’s Patrick Arnault
inspires American brand boosters. But Europe’s historic adroitness
in luxury brands, and America’s continuing fondness for the European
aristocracy’s branded good taste, reveals branding as a sign of
commercial and cultural decadence, not of social progress. In the 20th
century, at least, European branding has not been about rugged
entrepreneurs, but those distinctly corporatist and statist
traditions of atrophy that Americans usually abhor.
The strong association Europe has
with brands isn’t a badge of vibrancy. There are exceptions; but, on
the whole, EU brands suggest that, whatever their trappings of
modernity, brands represent a struggle to preserve the past more
than they do an ability to point a way forward to the future.
Space only allows me to touch,
occasionally, in this paper, on the impact that the conservative
nature of the branding endeavour has on innovation. It is
enough to note that the communitarian, preserving impulse behind
today’s brands also gives, today, a special role to ‘heritage’
brands. As a result, America’s individualistic Harley Davidson brand
has plenty in common with Europe’s most mutual financial services
companies – Britain’s Cooperative Bank (‘Customer led, Ethically
guided’) included.
One thing
Naomi Klein agrees on with brand boosters is that brands make
capital go round. The brand is ‘the core meaning of the modern
corporation’.
Brands dominate our lives as
workers, citizens and consumers. As workers we are in a ‘branding
economy’ in which the strongest brands are the ones generating the
worst jobs. It is branding that forces firms to sever their
traditional ties to steady job creation, seek out youth culture for
more aggressive branding than ever before, and use ‘real live youth’
to pioneer ‘a new kind of disposable workforce'.
It is brands, defended by lawyers,
which restrict our choice of writing, music, movies and Internet
content. It is brands that limit civil liberties and call free
speech and democratic society into question.
Finally, Klein argued, brands invade
our lives as consumers.
Altogether, Klein agreed with the
brand boosters that brands accumulate vast power. Her difference
with them was that she felt that workers, citizens and consumers
were victims of brands. It is because Klein took the social
weight of brands as a presupposition that she favoured ‘consumer
jujitsu’ against them. She accepted the boosters’ chosen terrain for
debate: the polarity between brands and consumers. She thus approved
of ‘culture jamming’: the practice of parodying advertisements and
hijacking billboards in order to alter their messages drastically –
a 'semiotic Robin Hoodism.'
To go culture jamming was to use the
weighty appearance of a brand opponent against it. It was to use the
tools of graphic and Web design and of desktop publishing to make
brands the object of social satire among consumers.
Because Klein took life as ‘the
branded life’,
she shared with brand boosters a
rather disagreeable trait: condescension – an attitude that takes
the self as the dupe of brandsmiths. Of course, as Thomas Frank
notes, the modern brand booster believes that a brand is not a
static, top-down thing, but a popularly-constructed, democratic,
dynamic relationship.
Corporate brand managers and
marketing services brand consultants – ‘postmodern cultural
radicalism come home to Madison Avenue’, as Frank puts it – see
themselves as interpreters of and advocates for the popular will.
But with her own training in
postmodernism and communication theory, Klein saw culture jamming as
exactly the dialogue upheld by the modern brand booster.
Culture jamming, she said, ‘baldly rejects the idea that marketing –
because it buys its way into our public spaces – must be passively
accepted as a one-way information flow’.
Like Frank, Klein recognised that
brand managers rush to make their brands receptive to and
constructed by their audiences. But for her this did not denote
brand managers forced into the resuscitation business, but the power
of brand puppet-masters to treat the self as a marionette. ‘Genuine
political empowerment’, she rightly announced, ‘cannot be reconciled
with a belief system that regards the public as a bunch of ad-fed
cattle’.
But what were Klein’s two principal
tactics? They were ‘exposing the riches of the branded world to the
tucked-away sites of production’, and ‘bringing back the squalor of
production to the doorstep of the blinkered consumer’.
Everyone is condescending from time
to time. But the anti-capitalist’s condescension is ingrained,
because the task of culture jammers is not to leave dissonant
graffiti on the slick face of advertising, but ‘to mesh with their
targets, borrowing visual legitimacy from advertising itself'.
Just as brand boosters cry out with
glee in the hope that brand intangibles enslave the masses, so Klein
believed that advertising had conquered the myopic self.
For the booster, brands lead
people’s lives, and that’s good. For the anti-capitalist, brands
lead people’s lives, and that’s bad. ‘There is no doubt’, Klein
concluded,
that
anticorporate activism walks a precarious line between
self-satisfied consumer rights and engaged political action.
Campaigners... have to be careful that their campaigns don't
degenerate into glorified ethical shopping guides...
But as she caricatured the attitudes
of the ignorant masses toward enlightened activists:
Talk
about government, talk about values, talk about rights – that's all
well and good, but talk about shopping and you really get our
attention.
Both boosters and critics attribute,
to the brand, a gigantic social power. They are obsessed with
brands; they point out that stock markets and consumers are pretty
obsessed, too. They are wrong, but they are not all wrong.
Let’s now seek the origins of
today’s myth around brands.
Risk – the origin of brands as a
managerial myth
as history has
shown time and time again, a bevy of in-house scientists gives no
guarantee that their output will protect their employer from
technological change. Xerox, AT&T and IBM spent billions on research
but … ended up being caught out by new technologies. It is far
better if big firms' managers keep their binoculars well trained on
the outside world and their minds open to any new ideas they spot
there. They can then buy them and do what they do best: find
innovative ways to bring them to market.
It is the manager’s concern to
avoid risks that accounts for his obsession with brands. It is
up to the outside world to innovate; the responsibility of the
managerial self is no longer progress, if it ever was, but
rather marketing.
For firms, brands represent the more
or less safe haven of the exhausted, not the accumulating power of
the confident. Brands reflect trends toward incipient recession:
they are an easy way to meet short-term demands on profitability.
Brand costs are modest compared with the costs of genuine
innovation. Yet though brands are a less risky course than
innovation, brand management is seen as more and more iffy.
Brands are parachutes, but, like
parachutes, are fraught with risk. In 1997, the ascent of Nike
tempted many CEOs to follow in the shoe company’s footsteps. But
before investing in the construction of a ‘power brand’, McKinsey
reps from Dallas, London and New York suggested, CEOs had to pause,
had to walk before they ran. Their investment ‘really must be
prudent’. Consumers, McKinsey noted, were
cautious when hitherto focused brands moved in to unrelated product
areas; so if a company planned to take this route, it should only do
so with ‘extraordinary energy, commitment, and effort’.
Firms are obsessed with brands
because they tend to panic about doing much else. The prominence of
brands reflects not corporate economic power or the lure of market
opportunities, as Klein holds, but a culture of fear. Moreover
brands themselves are repositories of fear. They amount to the
opposite of rationality in management thinking.
Three examples – line extensions,
‘private label’ goods and sub-brands – bring out the irrational
aversion to risk that today inspires management’s lurch into brands.
Line extensions as means of avoiding
risk – and as risks themselves
The date 2 April 1993 is known in
marketing circles as ‘Marlboro Friday’ – the day it became clear
that the premium Philip Morris charged for its product could no
longer face down cigarette discounters. But if Marlboro Friday
falsely signalled the death of the brand, John Quelch, then
Dean of the London Business School, together with US marketing
expert David Kenny, soon warned against tweaking it. Rightly
attacking the ‘lure’ of relatively
inexpensive ($5m-a-pop) extensions to a branded product line as
a product of management fears, they warned, however, that too
many line extensions would endanger business.
Managers, Q&K argued, see line
extensions as a ‘low-cost, low-risk’ way to meet the needs of
various customer segments. So today’s Smirnoff Ice extension of the
Smirnoff brand is a low-risk repackaging of a standard product
designed merely to attack the youth market. It is a strenuous,
defensive effort to bolster profitability.
For Q&K, line extensions were about
quick rewards with minimal risk. Nearly all the 20 brands that led
US consumer awareness in 1994 had been dominant for no fewer than 20
years: beating them with a US launch of a wholly new brand would
cost all of $30m. Yet line extensions could be sold to stock markets
as real innovations, despite relying on little investment:
…senior managers
often set objectives for the percentages of future sales to come
from products recently introduced. At the same time, under pressure
from Wall Street for quarterly earnings increases, they do not
invest enough in the long-term research and development needed to
create genuinely new products. Such actions necessarily encourage
line extensions.
But without corresponding brand
deletions, Q&K continued, extensions risked leaving a product line
with ‘weaker logic’. Line extensions in categories such as
groceries and toiletries rarely expanded the total demand for those
categories – people wouldn’t eat, drink or wash their hair more.
For Q&K the era of risky,
unrestrained line extensions had to end. Instead, cost-accounting
systems would help have to help manufacturers work with
ever-more-powerful retailers together in category management.
In making this point, Q&K highlighted another risk forcing
manufacturers to take refuge in more refined forms of brand
management: that of being outplayed by retailers.
Manufacturers should not endanger
brands via ‘private label’ work for retailers
As early as 1987, retailer pressure
made P&G reorganise its 11 different US product sales forces into
account teams designed to obey specific supermarket and department
store chains. US supermarkets and drugstores had anyway brought in
IT-based barcode scanners, and had consolidated. In 1989, when P&G
introduced the retailer-friendly post of category manager into its
offices, just 100 chains handled 80 per cent of its sales.
By the mid 1990s, mass retailers
were in a position to revive a risk to manufacturer brands not seen
since the recession of 1981-2 – that of their own, ‘private label’
brands. But the risk manufacturers faced was new. First,
private-label brands might beat them on the shelves: quality had
been improved, and new categories had been entered (colas, clothes).
Second, more than half America’s makers of branded consumer packaged
goods made retailer private-label goods as well. They ran the risk
of cutting directly into their own sales – of cannibalisation.
It was these risks that management experts pointed do when telling
manufacturing management to stay obsessed with brands.
McKinsey’s Madrid office argued
that, though making goods for private label retailers might give
manufacturers of leading brands immediate additional production
volumes, to do so was to run real risks ‘on a longer view’.
And soon enough, Quelch and Kenny
concurred. For 10 years, a constant 60 per cent of US consumers had
preferred ‘the comfort, security and value’ of a national
manufacturer brand over a retailer private-label brand. ‘In the
time-pressured dual income households of the 1990s’, Q&K opined,
‘brands are needed more than ever’. Manufacturers should stick to
their brands, because, like consumers, they should realise that
other options were risky.
The significance of the debate on
private label highlights an important issue in the philosophy of
management. The world is seen as a risky universe. In this scenario,
the scope for the self to express freewill is strictly
limited. In turn, that fact is confirmed in the infantile
language of branding.
The brand is not only born out of
risk. Brand management has become risk management. In 1997,
Aaker argued that moving a brand down-market or up-market was wisest
with sub-brands – provided these were managed seriously, in a
way that minimised risk.
Jiggling brands by price, Aaker made
clear, was most tempting when markets turn hostile. But the
battlefield was littered with dead and wounded brands. For a brand
to move down-market ran the risk of losing its stature. But when
Toyota moved up-market with Lexus, ‘changing its image took more
than a decade, involved impressive product improvements, and cost
billions of dollars in advertising'. The safest bet for an upscale
sub-brand, Aaker concluded, was
a
driver-descriptor strategy... Special edition, premium,
professional, gold or platinum descriptors... can be very
effective.... Wineries use private reserve, library reserve,
or limited edition. Airlines have connoisseur
class.
Aaker’s italics summed up branding
as a search for the familiar. Indeed, he posited the
family as a model for managing sub-brands. Earlier, under a
section titled CREATING A DIFFERENT PERSONALITY: THE PARENT-CHILD
RELATIONSHIP, he had observed:
Because family
relationships are so familiar to consumers, they offer a clear and
rich opportunity for creating distinct but related sub-brand
personalities. The sub-brand could be a child (either son or
daughter) of the original brand (the father or mother), one who
cannot yet afford or appreciate the better version. Or it could be
the grandparent of the original, one who appreciates good value more
than premium quality.
Aaker’s highly emotional choice of
language for brands and sub-brands was not accidental. It
suggests that he would acknowledge the fact that language
functions not just as parole, but also as langue,
creating a pool of possible identities, feelings and meanings on
which its users draw. Indeed, it is exactly because the broader
language of brands is all about langue that every
brand manager believes omnipotence to be within his grasp.
The political economy of brands
The five dimensions of branding:
B2C, B2E, B2B, B2S, B2G
While brand boosters use the family
to model brand hierarchies, brand critics single out children as the
most obvious consumer victims of brands. But this strategy has a
significant precedent. In fact, today’s critics trail more than 40
years behind the muckraking American
journalist Vance Packard. Packard devoted a whole chapter of his
1957 bestseller The Hidden Persuaders to what he called the
psycho-seduction of children. Corporations, Packard argued, were
after children’s minds, wanting to turn kids into ‘loyal followers
of a brand’.
The longstanding focus that critics
of brands have had on children is interesting for two reasons.
First, children are vulnerable symbols of the future, and thus a
great stick with which to beat corporations. Second, the
business-to-consumer (B2C) focus on children, who are necessarily
outside the business-to-employee (B2E) world of work, suggests that
personal consumption is the Alpha and Omega not only of brand
boosters, but also of brand critics. From the mid-century onward,
radical social and economic theorists such as C Wright Mills, Paul
Baran, Paul Sweezy and Herbert Marcuse, building on the work of
Thorstein Veblen, viewed consumption ‘as a seduction, a form of
captivity’.
The brand critic’s feeling that
brands = child abuse highlights the perennial focus, among
opponents of capitalism, on the B2C dimension of brands.
Love it or loathe it, then, the rise
of the brand is in the first place a symbol of the Western self’s
growing belief that it is a consumer. But to consume, one must
work. So in the second place, the brand is the publicly
recognised organisation that you are proud or ashamed to work for.
What brand boosters at least
recognise, and brand critics tend to forget, is that brands have
dimensions to them that go beyond B2C. Will Hutton is clear about
this. His point, as a Labour booster of brands, is that they are the
opposite of commodities, and that they belong to everyone. He
writes:
People dislike the sense that market capitalism
is commoditising everything, your holiday, your marriage, your
death. And actually what a brand says is, ‘Hey, this isn’t a
commodity. There’s an idea in here which is actually independent of
the price you’re paying.
I PASSIONATELY BELIEVE in stakeholder capitalism.
The brand is
an attempt to transcend market forces and so reach everyone – and in
brands, as elsewhere, everyone is a ‘stakeholder’. So ‘stakeholders’
in a business don’t just embrace consumers and workers. They also
include suppliers and those customers that are not consumers –
distributors, for example. In the third, business-to-business (B2B)
dimension of brands, therefore, the brand is, to suppliers, a
symbol of a reliable business customer and, to corporate purchasing
departments, of risk-free product and service supplies.
In the
fourth, business-to-shareholder (B2S) dimension, the brand, because
it represents a more or less reliable claim on future revenues, can
inflate market capitalisations.
Finally, as Microsoft and Equitable
Life know to their cost, a brand, whether it likes it or not, has
a relation with ethics, community, civil society and with Government.
There is a B2G dimension to brands.
Across each and all of these five
dimensions, it is clear that all the special magic that causes
boosters to make an irrational fetish out of brands is by no means a
natural characteristic of them. The boosters’ beloved
intangibles have nothing to do with the red in Coca-Cola and in
Virgin, or the smile on the face of a McDonald’s crewmember. The
apparent power of a brand’s intangibles to generate brand equity, in
dollars, on the stock market, flows not from the occult
characteristics of its logo or its shop staff or even its three-day
rock concert. The brand has become a social power because it is,
as the boosters say but do not understand, indeed a relationship.
Indeed, there are five dimensions to that relationship.
For ‘the consumer’, the worker, the
businessman, shareholder and regulator, each brand must nowadays be
zesty, colourful and increasingly experiential. But each brand has
this power because, for these five constituencies, the brand is a
materialisation of today’s social relations of production. The
Russian II Rubin wrote:
Today, if the consumer owner of a
credit card, the worker owner of his ability to work, or the
supplying or buyer firm are willing to pay extra or make sacrifices
for a brand, then (1) the value, the money, paid or foregone is
named ‘brand value’ (2) shareholders then interpret it as a claim on
future revenues, a net present value or ‘brand equity’ (3) brands in
sectors as varied as utilities, petrol, mobile phone networks and
fatty foods have to submit to a government cut on these
future revenues. In this case the value paid is re-branded as
nothing to do with brand equity, but rather as ‘Green taxes’, taxes
on ‘windfall profits’, ‘selling off the radio spectrum’, ‘obesity
levies’ and so on.
Rubin ends, and the italics are his:
Every type of
production relation among people gives a specific “social virtue”,
“social form”, to the things by means of which determined people
enter into direct production relations.
Branded products and services cannot
just be sniggered at as logos. Brands detain more people than ever
before because, as material displays, as billboards and buses and
banner ads on the Web, they very strongly encapsulate today’s real
and very specific social relations. Let’s look at the five
dimensions of those relations in more depth.
How brands work across the five
dimensions
Consumers; or, rather, workers
owning pay packets
‘The consumer’ has no independent
existence. Since the millennium, rising US consumer expenditure has
in fact coincided with collapsing capital expenditure. But when the
German pays a premium for BMW, and the Briton an even bigger
premium, it is not because different amounts of labour effort went
into each car. People pay extra for a brand because they find a
genuine extra utility, if an intangible one, in purchasing and
owning it. This is not exploitation, but follows from the divergence
between the value involved in making a product and the price paid in
the marketplace for it – a divergence inherent within capitalism. It
does however open up the more notorious premium-chargers to attack
from consumer organisations, anti-capitalists and government
regulators.
B2E: workers who are ‘passionate’
about their company’s brand
In the B2E context, there is only
one thing to do about brands – defend them and be passionate about
them, especially if you are in the marketing department. Since 1999,
management commentators have deemed it impossible to get employee
loyalty, but possible to get employee passion for the
time that workers choose to stay with the company.
If the brand can inspire longer or more committed work for the same
pay, that is a valuable sacrifice as far as the corporation is
concerned.
Klein rightly notes the prevalence
of unpaid internships and worthless profit shares and share options.
Workers may also work harder for
less if their brand ‘pays’ them back in kind, via more playful
workplace environments, etc. In Britain much of the long hours
worked are worked voluntarily and for free. All these things
represent pay foregone.
B2B: ‘Our clients include…’ /
‘Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’
Every supplier – marketing services
companies certainly not excluded! – wants to boast about which
blue-chip brands it does business with. Every supplier will
therefore cut prices and make other sacrifices if, in his portfolio
of branded clients, such habits build his brand.
On the other hand, it has for some
years been fashionable among corporate purchasing departments to
avoid choosing the cheapest supplier and instead pay a premium
(‘best value’, in the case of government purchasing departments).
That this speaks of a new consciousness of the risk that
surrounds management of the supply chain was recognised as early as
1995. Then, writing of the high-tech capital goods bought by
companies nowadays, Chuck Pettis noted:
Reliability means
no hassles in how the product operates (no breakdowns), saving time
and money’ eliminating maintenance frustration, creating happy
users… users feel they’ve made the right decision and don’t feel
open to criticism. That means that users don’t associate stress with
the product and feel more comfortable about their job or task,
enabling them to feel like they’re doing a better job. The values
that these might bring to the individual [purchaser/user] are self-actualisation,
self-esteem, satisfaction in a job well done, and job security.
It was Maslow who distinguished
between the higher needs of man, for self-actualisation and
self-esteem, and the lower, ‘safety needs’ of man – whose ‘whole
organism’ he described as a ‘safety-seeking mechanism’. Unlike his
vulgarisers, however, Maslow was anxious to observe that the
hierarchy he posited was ‘not nearly as rigid as we may have
implied’.
He was right. In selling GE power equipment or Nokia phones to
business buyers, Pettis makes clear, the B2B brand manager must
appeal both to the buyer’s vanity, and to his fear of losing his
job. Safety and security are held to matter as much to the corporate
procurement manager as they do to the defenceless consumer.
Shareholders: brand equity as
fictitious capital
The equity attributed to particular
brands is only one aspect of a general, late 20th-century
divergence between corporate book values and corporate market
capitalisations. When a firm that is the darling of Wall Street
declares massive losses, its share price begins to return to
something realistic. The enormous overhang in market capitalisation
turns out to be fictitious capital. It has nothing to do with the
firm’s opaque brand name, and everything to do with investor
illusions.
Government regulators
In management circles there is
widespread anxiety about litigation and the risk of losing the
public reputation of a brand. The Railtrack and Network Rail brands,
for example, show how what begins as consumer distaste for a brand
ends in state intervention around it. More and more companies
therefore boast only just ‘investor relations’ departments and
sections of their websites, but also specialists in government
relations. At BT, much of senior
management’s time is spent in fraught attempts to project and refine
the BT brand with Ofcom, the telecommunications and media regulator.
Conclusion: brands press the self
into the organisation – and into the state
A century ago, the rise of the
branded multinational prompted, in the realm of consumption, what
Jackson Lears has called antimodernism – a therapeutic
view of the self. Then, the multinational and the brand led to a
mass, middle-class resort to bed with nervous prostration, which was
the disease of the age.
Critics of the brand miss this
historical episode. They also miss its revival – in a different
form, to be sure – today. But the biggest error of brand critics is
neglect of what the B2E dimension of branding has done to the
self.
Brands, I have argued, are now not
just about ethics and community, but also about personal identity.
In a society defined by identity politics, they form a quiver of
pointers as to who one is and who other people are. They are
spiritual; they are, as the marketing consultants Yankelovitch
observed years ago, a religion. Nowhere is this clearer outside the
supermarket – in the world of work.
North London designers Wolff Olins
are some of the world's leading practitioners of branding. They have
done corporate identities for Akzo, BT, Bovis, Orange, Pilkington
and Prudential. But as early as 1978, Wally Olins, one of the
company’s chiefs, did something just as important as all these
practical accomplishments. In a speech, he stressed that corporate
identity was not just about staff uniforms, but also about ‘the way
in which people who work for the company think about themselves in
relation to it’.
Later on, he pronounced the visual
side of his profession as secondary to giving a company's employees
'a sense of belonging'.
Today, exhortation in the world of
brands is chiefly to do with the absolutist, but rarely challenged
demand that employees change their behaviour. The best
way to control or at least influence what other people say about
your organisation is, we are told, ‘to earn their good opinions:
through your behaviour’: indeed getting employees to embody the
brand’s values ‘becomes an imperative’. Brands, according to the
‘Medinge manifesto’ of international brand boosters who gather
annually just south of Stockholm, allow employees to ‘identify with
their company through its brand’.
For McGraw Hill,
‘branding strategy was critical in uniting formerly divided
business-unit and product-oriented management factions behind new
shared goals’.
For Dave Ulrich,
who combines roles as human resources guru, Michigan professor and
president of the Montreal Mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of
the Latter Day Saints, ‘Shared Mind-set and Coherent Brand Identity’
go together.
The blind spot of brand critics is
precisely management’s increasingly desperate attempts to elicit
what Olins calls 'a sense of belonging' on the part of employees.
Ignoring all this, Klein sees the rise of brand power in trade union
terms: as a result of denationalisation. But the trends she fastens
on – the sharper grip of market forces, leading to corporate
sponsorship of otherwise impoverished public space – form only
part of the story of brands.
The rise of market forces, like that
of Al Qaeda, has made people feel more impotent. As a result, they
feel they need comfort and reassurance more than ever. Unlike
politics nowadays, brands appear to provide some of those things.
So, too, does work. For many employees today, work is a vital site
of sociability and one of the more durable fixtures in their lives.
Many therefore want to work for brands that are ethical. Many want
to see the right kind of brand values at work.
Altogether, modern management has,
with brands, a green light to press all aspects of the personal self
into a professional mould. It is not always successful in this. But
more and more human resources departments today team up with
internal communications departments to engage in branded schemes
of change management. Even more insidiously, HR departments want
corporate brand values and corporate etiquette followed when
employees are on the move, and when – as more and more do – they
work from home. They want to put their own organisation’s brand on
the very personal domain of what government handwringers call
work-life balance.
The upshot of all these trends is
a tendency toward groupthink and the dissolving of the self in the
organisation. And in Britain, at least, this corporate
tendency gets much of its inspiration from the state. Among
private sector posts in HR, after all, many of the new recruits are
people who have experience of leading branded schemes of change
management in the public sector.
It was New Labour that popularised
rebranding – not just the rebranding of Old Labour, but of Britain
itself.
It is New Labour that has done so
much to get members of its organisation on-message and on the same
page, and members of the citizenry inside its Big Tent. From Cool
Britannia in cultural industries through Robin Cook’s ethical
foreign policy and Lord Anthony Giddens’ Third Way to Tony Blair’s
‘eye-catching’ initiatives, New Labour has set the tone for private
sector groupthink.
The government is by far the largest
client for advertising in the UK. Government bodies, quangos and
government initiatives are constantly being rebranded. On the other
side, Ed Mayo, previously chief executive of the National Consumers’
Council, now heads a government committee to get people to change
their behaviour toward Greener lifestyles.
Of course, in today’s
official anti-branding climate, all this can be dismissed as just
‘spin’. Nevertheless, the need to refresh the faltering New Labour
brand still weighs heavily at 10 and 11 Downing Street. It appears,
too, that much of the election manifesto with which Labour will seek
a third term of office will revolve around attacks on branded
manufacturers of fast-moving consumer goods – particularly those
which aim their products at children.
The fusion of brand boosters and
brand critics that now afflicts both the private sector and the
state confirms that no amount of branding, or brand restraint, can
deliver on the promises made by either camp. The 21st
century’s problems of personal identity and meaning can be solved
neither by a new logo, nor new laws against excess consumption and
‘visual pollution’.
Philosophically, it’s a mistake to
believe that brands can successfully overcome the isolation and
alienation of the modern self and replace it with a sense of
belonging. It’s also a mistake to believe that ethical curbs on
brands can bring a better world. It ought to be obvious that the
fundamental difficulties of life and philosophy are in fact so big,
they can only be mastered by broader social means. Branding and
anti-branding have real roots in society today. But they are part of
the problems of the world, not part of its remedies.
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