In June 2005, Kari Smith, a mother from Utah in the USA, accepted a payment of USD10,000 to have GoldenPalace.com, the web address of a prominent online casino known for unorthodox marketing campaign, permanently tattooed on her forehead in inch high letters. The stunt reverberated around the world, shocking and stunning in equal measure. Even the tattoo artist she engaged spent almost seven hours trying to talk her out of it.
It was one of the most extreme examples of the ways in which branding and advertising has invaded almost every aspect of our lives. For Smith it made a twisted kind of sense: following a failed marriage and the prospect of a low-wage future, the lump sum offered her the chance to offer her son his own educational head start.
But others viewed it as the worst kind of prostitution, on a par with the slum dwellers of India who offer up kidneys and other supposedly less important organs for sale to the rich and sick in the West. And with casinos inhabiting a legally ambiguous position in the minds of many, it came to symbolize the worst excesses of a system of runaway capitalism.
In his book, Brand Warfare, David F. D’Alessandro illustrates why some brands achieve that extra dimension of prominence, if not explaining why someone would suggest tattooing a cash-strapped soccer mom. “Companies with strong brands therefore have a few enormous advantages in the marketplace,” he contends. ”The very best people want to work for them. Their brands help their employees focus and make decisions. Their brands motivate their employees to do more than they otherwise would have believed they could.”
“I like the concept of asking some very basic questions,” adds Malaysian brand consultant Tanner Nagib, a veteran of international agencies like Leo Burnett. “How would I describe Brand X? How does it make me feel? What does it do for me? And how does it make me look? It sounds simple but reaching those definitions can be an incredibly long journey.”
Advertising, and the brands it represents, surround us. There are few places that some creative type in an ad agency hasn’t thought of to brand. And technology only increases the possibilities. We’re now in a world of viral videos that entertain us as they try to sell us new cars or toothpaste. Lasers and massive throw projectors now make it possible to use buildings and rock faces as temporary billboards. And brands now want to be our friend on Facebook and ‘dialogue’ with us on Twitter.
And they’ve been with far longer than the credit cards we habitually use to pay for them. Logos were used by potters and other craftsmen in Ancient Greece and Rome as large empires began to trade across the globe. True to human nature, the first examples of forgeries and inferior copies of these branded products appeared soon after.
The term itself comes from the mark that livestock owners would burn into the flesh of their herds. Over time, those scorched emblems came to be a mark of quality. In the American Wild West it wasn’t unheard for cattle owners with low-grade herds to try and forge the brands of a more successful rancher and secure a higher price for their stock.
But modern branding has its heart in the industrial revolutions of Europe and the United States and the emergence of wealthy middle-classes and a more affluent, non-subsistence working class. Improved infrastructure, railways and faster ships improved distribution and allowed regional and national brands began to emerge, selling through the new department stores and chains like Sears and Woolworths that sprang up in the late 19th Century selling into an emerging real consumer culture.
In their book the Origin of Brands, authors Al Reis and Laura Reis assert: “A brand should strive to own a word in the mind of the consumer.” But our minds often do far more. Think of how many Coke jingles you can repeat in your head, or how a fat yellow man has become instantly synonymous with Malaysian Telco DiGi. Not to mention all the slogans that are like second nature to us. Pure Genius. The World’s Local Bank. The Ultimate Driving Machine. 57 Varieties. Finger-Lickin’ Good. Snap! Crackle! Pop! Quality Never Goes Out of Style. Where Do You Want To Go Today?
Today a brand can be almost anything that makes it recognizable: a name, a catchy slogan, a symbol, even a combination of colours or an Internet identity. In their simplest form – as outlined in Neil Boorman’s book Bonfire of the Brands – most brands have three major components: it will generally be a product or service, it has a value and usually it’s something you can buy or use. Secondly, it has a name that identifies it and demonstrates its origin. And thirdly, there is a company, which may itself be a brand, which owns it and manufactures or provides it.
But with millions of products and brands floating around the world on container ships, waiting for their turn on the retail racks and shelves, owning a brand is only half the story. A successful brand is one that speaks to us and engages us on an emotional and personal level. Or as economist John Kay put it in a 1996 Financial Times piece: “I am irresistible, I say, as I put on my designer fragrance. I am a merchant banker, I say, as I climb out of my BMW. I am a juvenile lout, I say, as I pour an extra strong lager, I am handsome, I say, as I put on my Levi jeans”
“Advertising’s fundamental purpose is to build brand awareness,” explains Eugene Low, founder of Malaysian self-professed Rogue Agency Bombshelter Studios. “So, it’s very important that brand owners understand the difference between them. Branding is a fully integrated experience and it’s only when you achieve consistency in your branding and advertising that you can start to gain the trust of consumers.”
For many people, the products and brands they buy are an extension of their personality. They are an outward representation of identity and, often, an individual’s values too. In using them you accept an implicit promise that this brand typifies and represents you. Wear Prada and you hope that others see you as stylish, sophisticated and successful. Wear Quiksilver and you’re telling people you’re all about the craic, good times, beaches and living life to the full.
So you accept the brand promise; the idea that the brand shares certain values with you. A bit like a portable Facebook page, you’re literally wearing your personality on your sleeve, or at least, the personality you want people to think you have. Increasingly, we accept that brands have a personality and an image and that we are living examples of their brand experience.
Or, as legendary brand visionary Walter Landor, who made his reputation working with companies like Coca Cola, Levi’s, Del Monte, British Airways in the Mad Men years of the post World War II ad boom put it: “Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.”
As much as the people running the creative industries would like us to view what they do as a science and a process, their efforts in creating great and wonderful brands are only part of the story and, as we see every week in American Idol, to get to every finalist there are thousands of failed auditions.
“Brands can fail for any number of reasons,” explain Tanner Nagib. “Managers and Brand Guardians can lose focus, especially when there is more than one product in the brand’s portfolio. Some brands simply become irrelevant. Or, there are weaknesses in the chain: you might have a brand with great promise, a fantastic marketing campaign and great consumer goodwill. But if you have poor distribution or weak sales channels that goodwill won’t convert into the necessary brand equity.
For the victors of these street-level battles, the spoils can be enormous. The big boys are the brands that seem to seep, effortlessly, into our consciousness. They have that all-crucial top of mind recall: Coca Cola in the soft drinks industry, Apple in computing and smartphones, Microsoft and its Windows operating systems, Gillette for men’s shaving products and so on.
These are often called Global Brands because they have the same identity, values and characteristics in every market they operate for. McDonalds and Starbucks offer you a similar dining environment and menu in New York and Beijing. Details may change according to local tastes or cultural requirements, such as committing to halal fast food standards in Malaysia, but overall your experience of the brand is the same wherever in the world you try it.
As John Stuart, an early CEO of the Quaker Oats company put it: “If this business were split up, I would give you the land and bricks and mortar, and I would take the brand, and I would fare better than you.”
Some brands have gone a stage further. Google, Facebook and Hoover have all changed the way we speak. Though the California-based Internet start-up claims to hate the fact, we no longer search for information we google it. There may be dozens of competing search engines but because of the way that one company has cornered the market and the imagination we google things dozens of times a day.
Conversely, when mobile phones arrived in the 1980s and 1990s they were a new and more mobile version of the phones that had sat in our homes for decades. As a result, despite their early global dominance of the handset market nobody Nokia’s anyone; they simply call them.
A flipside to this phenomenon has been the growing trend, mainly by tech companies, to trademark and corporatize everyday words like ‘pinch’ and ‘zoom’ that relate to burgeoning touchscreen technologies. Thankfully, judges have mostly recognized the fact that human beings have been pinching each other and zooming around for thousands of years, and, so far, have decided against copyrighting the entire contents of the dictionary.
Of course, these are all successful brands that have built international or global platforms for themselves. The task that most new brands face is brand-building, the process of establishing themselves, finding a loyal and growing consumer base, engaging with them and winning them over with their superior products and services and, hopefully, making some money in the process.
The most successful brands are those that transcend generations,” says Tanner Nagib. “Brands have to be able to reflect the world around them without betraying those core values that attracted you to them in the first place. Just like people, a brand’s core remains constant. You might not be wearing the Duran Duran-inspired curly ponytail you sported twenty years ago today but you’re probably essentially the same person. And successful, enduring brands are often very similar.”
One of the biggest brand-building success stories of the noughties has to be Apple. An early pioneer in micro-computing and an arch rival to Microsoft, the company’s experienced a mass appeal rebirth with the development of one of today’s most ubiquitous products, the iPod. By chopping off as many buttons as possible, building a white box around a laptop hard drive and setting up a dedicated desktop based management ecosystem, Apple made MP3 players, previously a geek hang-up, sexy back in 2001.
In the decade since then Apple has built an identity and a promise that relies on its range of precisely engineered products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad that make no apologies for their premium pricing. Ironically, by projecting a sense of outsider cool Apple has come to be seen a badge of individuality and creativity even as products like its iPods and iPhones reach market saturation point with tens of millions of global sales and becoming the world’s second largest company by value.
“The digital age has amplified brands to a whole new level,” explains Eugene Low. “In this new media age consumers are part of the brand. And brands can listen directly to their consumers via social media and blogs and speak to them on a direct and personal level. In a very true sense, brands now have a voice.”
With so many of us onboard the brand highway, is it a surprise that we already live in a far more branded world than even the most futuristic movies of the 1980s could ever imagine? One of last year’s sci-fi horrors, Repo Men, starred Jude Law and Forest Whitakers as a new kind of debt collector, one that takes back leased organs from patients who’ve fallen behind on their payments.
The irony is, brutality aside, the idea of renting replacement parts for your body isn’t so far-fetched. We live so far inside the brand world that we already sign hire purchase agreements for new boobs for the missus, butt implants or a cheeky nose job, part of a growing international medical tourism industry that Malaysia is actively courting. It’s only a small step before we upgrade our lungs and turbo-charge our genitals.
So, it’s no surprise that an anti-conspicuous consumption counter culture is starting to emerge. Outright rejectionists, freeganism and off-grid living are all on the rise. Former Sleazenation magazine editor (and now Brand Director at Amnesty International) celebrated the trend in Bonfire of the Brands in 2006 with his diarised account of dealing with his own brand addiction and his successful attempt to wean himself off the labels he once held so dear by literally burning them.
Movements like Freeganism are certainly on the rise, with raiding supermarket and other food outlet bins for food that has reached its sell-by-date. They argue that the still packaged and hygienic food is perfectly edible – due mainly to the difference in sell and use by dates – but that doesn’t stop the supermarkets from slicing open the packaging, covering the food in paint or asking police to arrest the recyclers.
At the other end of the spectrum are the conspiracy theorists convinced that materialism has enslaved humanity, and that corporations and brands are the tools of CEOs who in turn are part of an alien race called the Illuminati (honestly, just google it, you’ll see). Not that they are any less ridiculous than the extreme marketers who would like to see everything from head’s up displays in our cars to implants in our ears carrying targeted ads delivering precisely the message they know we want to hear.
Of course, you can tell we’ve come full circle when you hear that an ad agency in Auckland reputedly redesigned park benches so that they would stamp temporary slogans into the flesh of people sitting on them. So just remember, for branding, have it your way…
This article originally appeared in New Man Malaysia, July 2011