Unbrandable

How to Succeed in the New Brand Space

Adam N. Stone

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9780500772591
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Graphic Design

The worlds of branding and consumption are changing. Helping to set the agenda are what Adam N. Stone designates the 'Unbrandables', consumers who are sensitive to inauthenticity, hostile to relentless materialism, and suspicious of products they do not want or that are bad for the environment. Then there are the 'Unbranded' brands, such as Nudie Jeans of Sweden and In-N-Out Burger in California, showing that honesty, transparency and a genuine concern for the planet and their customers' needs are essential when it comes to connecting with a more sceptical audience.

Unbrandable provides advertising and marketing professionals with an invaluable guide to this new landscape. Divided into fifty-five easy-to-assimilate sections, the book examines what it means to be Unbrandable, for both consumers and producers, and how companies can thrive by taking a more creative, authentic approach to promoting their goods. Each section focuses on a brand that works, an industry professional who demonstrates the new approaches, an individual who can articulate better than any focus group what the new consumer wants, or a place - Berlin and Sao Paulo among them - that itself flourishes on Unbrandable principles.

#55

Moments in Unbrandable Time

#1

Unbranded Brands:
The Beastie Boys

Let’s kick this off with three guys for whom I have massive amounts of love and respect: three artists from New York who started out as a punk band and ended up as one of the biggest alternative – yet influential – hip-hop acts on the planet. The Beastie Boys are now one of the coolest Unbrandable brands out there, not only because they have succeeded in attracting fans of all ages (thanks to the way in which they constantly reinvent themselves), but also because of the political and spiritual beliefs of the late Adam Yauch, aka MCA. Word of his death from cancer in 2012 at the age of forty-seven was international news, but even bigger was the splash made when it was revealed that his last will and testament includes a clause that forbids anyone from using his music, likeness or any art he’s created in connection with hawking products. This certainly took the Beastie Boys into the realm of the Unbrandables. I’m probably going to get some stick for referring to them as a brand, but that is what they have become, albeit a glorious example of one that embodies the undiluted spirit of rebellion.

‘The idea was “let’s start a hardcore band”, kind of as a joke.’ This was MCA in 1998, speaking to Spin magazine.[3] ‘We called it the Beastie Boys. We were trying to think of the stupidest name, something that maybe sounded like the Angry Samoans.’ Ironically, the Beastie Boys got their first break when British Airways sampled a portion of their song ‘Beastie Revolution’ (1983) in a commercial without seeking permission, an act that resulted in the Beasties winning $40,000 in damages. ‘That money enabled us to make the move for independence’, recalled the band’s Mike D (Michael Diamond) in the same interview.[4] ‘We got a floor in this Chinese sweatshop building on Chrystie Street.’ It was in this apartment that they lived, rehearsed and recorded their early work, swiftly moving from punk rock to hip hop, buying cheap Chinese knock-off Adidas tracksuits from a shop downstairs at a time when Grandmaster Flash and the Sugar Hill Gang were becoming more and more popular, off the back of the growing hip-hop movement (graffiti, breakdancing, MC-ing, DJ-ing). Through their friendship with the producer Rick Rubin, the Beastie Boys were introduced to Russell Simmons, with whom Rick had just started the legendary record label Def Jam Recordings. Russell spotted something unique in the three Jewish boys in a very black world, and introduced them to Run DMC and Public Enemy. ‘The Beastie Boys are one of the key ingredients for spreading rap to suburbia’, explained Public Enemy’s Chuck D in 1998. ‘They did it with their own flavour; they didn’t, like, compromise who they were.’[5]

The Beasties broke through to the mainstream when they toured the world with their debut album, Licensed to Ill (1986), the first rap album to reach number one in the Billboard chart. The band soon caught the eye of the tabloid press, which railed against them in the name of decency (a bit of a joke, really, when you think of the phone-jacking scandal and general sneakiness of the gutter press; ‘Pop Idols Sneer at Dying Kids’ was the lie of one headline in the Daily Mirror) and told the middle classes to lock up their daughters. Licensed to Ill was made as a joke, a pastiche of American frat culture – beers and strippers and partying – but this didn’t stop the millions of people who bought the record and saw the band tour from believing that this was what the Beasties were really about. Both musically and culturally, it was the band’s second album, Paul’s Boutique (1989), that cemented their place in history. Miles Davis said that he never tired of listening to the album, which says it all if you ask me. The album bombed commercially, as the fans of their first record just didn’t get it, but soon the rest of the world began to listen. Today, it is recognized as one of the greatest hip-hop records of all time. What a journey.

The Beastie Boys brand worked because:

1. musically, they never stood still, mutating from punk to hip hop to thrash to jazz to hip hop again;
2. they rapped about what they knew – being white boys, chasing girls and smoking weed;
3. they oozed authentic ‘fight the power’ attitude;
4. they didn’t care about working with brands (although they unconsciously aligned themselves to Adidas in almost every photo shoot) before creating their own: Grand Royal and Oscilloscope Laboratories.

#2

Unbrandable People:
Marylin Cayrac

Marylin, a photographer, first contacted me after buying one of my books: ‘You need to know that Street Knowledge [2010] is my bible. I admire what you do, what you’ve done. I wish I could live and eat thanks to my passions, which are street art and underground culture. Of course, I haven’t seen much about either as I am eighteen years old and live in the south of France. But I travel when I can, and try to find what people can’t see.’ Since then I have done everything I can to help her, including featuring a couple of her photos in my last book. I liked her open and honest attitude, and after I got to know her a bit (in the digital world, as we’ve never met in real life) I knew she would be the first Unbrandable person in this book.

‘To me,’ says Marylin, ‘a product is something you can touch, feel or buy if you need it. A brand is just an idea of the product. The majority of brands are so known right now that we don’t even call things by their name; we just say their brands. We are just knocked out by all the commercials, and aren’t even capable of thinking above them. If we were able to think a little, maybe we would stop giving money to the same people every time! Those people who don’t give a shit about us, after all. I don’t even think I have any brand that I’m particularly loyal to, but that may be a bit hypocritical. I may have a touch, as I like some photographers’ touches, some styles that I want to copy, to acquire. I don’t know, I like clean shit. Weird, sinister, grey landscapes. Or sad portraits. That’s what reaches me.

‘I cannot live without some brands. I admire those people who decide to live in a forest or on a farm and can provide for themselves. I would love to do that, but right now I live in a city to study, and money leads my life. As it does with a lot of people. In my own small way, all I can do to avoid liberalism and capitalism is to get some old furniture for my flat, buy some vegetables from local producers … But that’s ridiculous. I work on an Apple MacBook, my underwear comes from H&M, and I drive to school every day. I am money-dependent. But I don’t like it.’

#3

Define ‘Brand’

‘I believe brands are becoming much more personal. We’re moving from broadcasting to narrowcasting. And if you’ve got a good story then people will listen, and if it’s bloody boring then they’re not going to. That’s the market, that’s the Internet: give me your story. You’re as good as the energy you give out. It’s about who you really are, and that’s what people are looking for – authenticity, genuine stories. We’re looking for someone who’s going to share something genuine with us that we love, that makes us laugh and get up and slam the table and sink another beer. But that requires courage. It requires the will to fail, the absence of fear – in other words, love. It requires that people love their customers, and it requires that they remove the illusion of separation. We are not separate from our customers, we are a part of them.

Invite your customer into your brand, into your building. Understand that you’re casting a spell – we are the wizards of the modern age, us brand marketers. It’s about having a good story, putting that story out there, and getting people involved in it, and it’s useful if that story also happens to be true. People mistakenly think it’s about branding and messaging. It’s about who you really are. They will sniff you out, and if you are not telling the truth then they will drop you like a bad habit. The only two questions any company needs to ask are: what’s our point and why should people care? If those questions are answered with a narrative that’s involving and inspiring and interesting then you’ve got something. If they’re not then you gotta think harder, as all you’ve really got is a product.’

BJ Cunningham, propagandist

There is little doubt that brands have become extremely powerful. But as their power is often seen in a negative light, this isn’t necessarily a good thing. If you ask me, however, in an ideal world such power presents a glorious opportunity to do something for the good, for the great – a subject I’ll examine in more detail later in the book. But acknowledging how powerful brands have become also throws up a number of questions: is our obsession with brands the result of a cheap trick? Is a brand a set of cognitive associations linked to something or someone, or is it just a physical object? Is there anywhere in the world that has not been infiltrated by the brand?

So many questions, so little time.

There are brands and there are products: this is the defining line. A brand is something that we have an emotional connection with. It may be completely fake and manufactured, but we nevertheless experience some kind of bond. This is human programming at its best. It takes a certain something to evoke in a prospective consumer a sudden feeling of connection when he or she is stood in the supermarket at 7.30 p.m. after a hard day’s work, hungry as a horse, looking for something half-decent to chow but faced with a shelf of identical brands. ‘Which ready meal do I buy?’ The brand that pulls at our heartstrings – like a puppy at the pound – is the brand that will get our money. Ker-ching!

‘[A brand] is a collection of concepts that have been put into a formal vehicle in order to market and sell and transmit either goods or services from a collective corporation to a collective recipient … Any company is a brand, although any person could be a brand – once they get any kind of notoriety they become a brand. It needs a tribe; it needs a certain mass in order for it to break through as a brand.’

Denzyl Feigelson, Music Synergist, iTunes

The way I see it is that because everything in the cultural world is constantly changing, brands have to adapt to these changes in order to remain relevant. This dynamic relationship to culture, however, is something that the world of brands rarely celebrates. For brands to admit that what really makes them attractive is all the stuff that has rubbed off on to them from the world of culture is way too honest, way to close to the knuckle. But this is what makes a successful brand story stand out. A company creates a product – a sneaker, say – but the real gravity and magnetism of that product is created by the culture that embraces it. In other words, it’s not the brand that made the sneaker cool, but culture. This fact is a game changer, but once the brand story becomes the focus of all communications, nothing can get in its way, regardless of the real story, regardless of the truth.

‘[Companies] see culture as an investment, as a kind of intellectual property that they can get a return on, because that’s the only way the accountants can account for it. But we know that there is this much softer thing at play, and that’s actually a much more powerful thing. And that is the bit that you can’t really brand. That’s the human bit, the bit we can’t disagree with; it’s the truth. What’s the value of MTV? It’s the eyeballs that watch it. The consumers. Facebook – it’s the people on it, right? And again, this is part of the equation, and I don’t think we’re going to be rethinking that anytime soon. But the bittersweet thing is that brands can become so successful that they forget about the people who made them successful in the first place. Or they make themselves so desirable that they create their own problems.’

Jeremy Brown, founde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other Titles of Interest
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction: It’s All Changed – Again
• 55 Moments in Unbrandable Time
• Sources
• Further Reading and Watching
• The Guest List
• Index
• Copyright