Iâve been thinking about brands for many years and writing about them, in articles and chapters in books as well, but the idea of writing an entire book on brands only came to me recently. When I asked a friend of mine who is a well-known futurist and who lectures widely how he got so many invitations to lecture, he said, âBecause Iâm a brand.â Just recently, in the New York Times, there was an article about grade school teachers as âbrands.â So people are brands, like almost everything else.
On the Ubiquity of Brands
And then it occurred to me that just about everything I own and have purchased, except for fruits and vegetables and certain foods I buy in bins in grocery stores and supermarkets, is branded. And since almost all national brands are advertised on television, then all the commercials we see are about brands. In supermarkets, there are nationally branded products, which are heavily advertised, and generic store brands, which are generally much less expensive and, if Consumer Reports is correct, generally as good. Brands, then, have a cost.
So I decided to write a book about brands. Iâd written a book on advertising, Ads, Fads and Consumer Culture, a book on shopping, Shop âTil You Drop, and two books on marketing, Marketing and American Consumer Culture and A Dictionary of Advertising and Marketing Concepts. Given my background and interests, a book on brands made sense to me, as part of my continuing investigation of American consumer culture.
A No-Brand or Brandless Brand
An article in the October 2017 issue of San Francisco magazine has an article about âThe Brand That Hated Branding.â It discusses a new company,
Brandless achieves its economies by making its supply chain more efficient and by avoiding traditional marketing. It has its products move directly to the Brandless distribution centers in Indiana and California. It has 165 products. Whether it will succeed is hard to say.Brandless, which sells a pared-down line of high-quality household staples, from organic peanut butter and fair-trade coffee pods to premium face cream and porcelain rimmed dishware, that each cost no more than $3.
The article also compares some Brandless products with the same products at Whole Foods and found that in some cases, products at Whole Foods were less expensive than Brandless ones and with other products, much more expensive than Brandless. I would describe Brandless as an Internet Dollar Store on steroids, with products that are often more expensive than branded products. Brandless may not put a brand label on its products, but Brandless is, in the final analysis, also a brand. It is what we might call an âunbrandedâ brand.
I have made use of information from many sources in writing this book, which can be seen as a kind of literary documentary full of quotes from experts on brands, and an analysis of brands and their role in our lives and in society.
A Semiotic and Cultural Studies Perspective on Brands
Let me offer a quotation from the International Journal of Marketing Semiotics that offers a semiotic overview of brands and marketing.
My subtitle, âAnd Cultural Analysis,â refers to my methods of analysis. This book can be considered a cultural studies text. That is, it uses many different disciplines, such as semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, and sociological theory, in trying to understand what brands are and their role in our lives and in consumer cultures in America and also in other advanced countries. Bishop Berkeley, the philosopher, said: âTo be is to be perceived.â To this I would add, the brands we use help determine how we are perceived. We use brands both to help shape how we are perceived by others and to develop our sense of self. And branding is also used by tourist destinations, cities, countries, corporations, political parties, and so on. This book will explore many of these areas.By virtue of semioticsâ ability to account for the processes whereby meaning is generated, it constitutes the discipline par excellence for addressing the issue of brand signification. Semiotic approaches to branding have been furnished both from within the semioticsâŠand the consumer researchâŠSemiotic approaches have been incumbent on different perspectives in the semiotic literature, such as Peirceanism, Structuralism, Social Semiotics. Semiotics have been applied in various marketing related research areas, including strategic brand positioning, brand identity, brand equity and brand image, advertising copy development, advertising encoding and decoding, retail branding, media messages, package design, to name a few. The usefulness of semiotics consists both in furnishing typologies of brands as signs, as well as a conceptual and methodological platform for designing and managing brands as sign systems. As an applied market research tool, semiotics have been used either as a standalone research method or in combination with other qualitative and quantitative research techniques.
On the Importance of Logos and Brands
What I didnât realize when I decided to write on brands was how important they are to the corporations that own brands, to our everyday lives, to our society, and to our economy. Like many people, I thought all those logos and their taglines were trivial concerns, but as I investigated the matter, I found that logos, brands, trademarks, and everything connected with branding are of central importance to understanding our social and political order. As Naomi Klein writes in her book No Logo (2002: 7):
In a sense, brands are the doorways through which corporations and corporate capitalism enter our households and ultimately take control of things. The average four-year-old can identify 100 brands, according to Paco Underhill in his book Why We Buy. And all the advertising to which we are subjected, if you think about it, is about brands of products. If we watch four hours of television a day, which is the average for American households, we are subjected to about an hour of commercial messages about brands. Over the years this adds up to thousands and thousands of television commercials, plus countless other advertisements for brands in newspapers, magazines, and on our smartphones...By the end of the 1940s, there was a burgeoning awareness that a brand wasnât just a mascot or a catchphrase or a picture printed on the label of a companyâs product; the company as a whole could have a brand identity or a âcorporate consciousness,â as this ephemeral quality was termed at the time. As this idea evolved, the adman ceased to see himself as a pitchman and instead saw himself as âthe philosopher-king of commercial culture,â in the words of ad critic Randall Rothberg. The search for the true meaning of brandsâor the âbrand essence,â as it is often calledâgradually took the agencies away from individual products and their attributes and toward a psychological/anthropological examination of what brands mean to the culture and to peopleâs lives. This was seen to be of crucial importance, since corporations may manufacture products, but what consumers buy are brands.