Brand anti brand

Brand/Anti-brand: Branding in an Age of Ad Overkill by T.M.Hoy Brands were invented to help distinguish a company from its competitors, and as a way to make their mass market products stand out. This is just as true today as it was the first brands appeared in the mid1800s (it can be argued that brands emerged with the first joint stock companies of England and Holland in the late 1600s, such as the notorious British East India Company, but this is quibbling). A brand is the essence of your company's identity, one might even say its 'spirit', and its purpose is to establish an emotional tie with your customers. The traditional recipe for building a brand is straightforward: find your message/image, trademark and protect it, and endlessly repeat it through as many interrelated and coordinated platforms as possible. Typically, brand builders seek out “authentic scenes, important causes, and cherished public events” (as anti-brand activist Naomi Klein puts it), and attempts to associate the company with the positive feelings these things create within their 'target market'. Building a brand is more than mere advertising: it is the selling of an idea, a concept that appeals to your customer's desires and aspirations. It is a shift from the selling of products and services to the production of dreams and images – a kind of corporate mythology. This change is so widespread as to be the new norm in the way companies do business in post-industrial countries, where corporations routinely outsource everything except design and marketing. It is a corporate race to inhabit the minds of their target market, as study after study has shown that consumers have only so much attention to spare, and on average, two brands dominate the consumer's consciousness in any given category of product or service. From the introduction of the 'Marlboro Man' in the 60s to the present, the competition for psychic space in consumers minds has grown so intense that there is very little that hasn't been co-opted in service of commercial messaging. Some companies like Nike and Pepsi, perfected the use of celebrity sponsorship and promotion to hype their brands – converting music, art, sports, community and school events into advertising tools. Others like MTV and Disney create their own fantasy world with contests, concerts, movies/videos, giveaways, and so on where ads become art, and brands become culture. Still others have gone the 'viral marketing route', or sell a set of values, notably Richard Branson's Virgin brand, and the Starbucks coffee shop chain. A glance at the International Events Sponsorship Report – the ad industry 'bible', gives you a glimpse of how far this trend has gone. Of course, there is a spectrum of brands, from purveyors of ultra-cheap – the price slashers and category killers like Walmart, Amazon, and Home and Office Depot at one end, to the high-priced, obsessed brand builders like Gucci, Calvin Klein, and their ilk at the other. All of these companies, however, share much in common – all use hard-sell marketing machines and economic manipulation to try and dominate their industries, and blanket consumers with their brands and so wipe out the competition. It is a very successful model, one which celebrities are racing to mimic, with rappers, sports stars, and entertainers selling themselves as brands. But since the focus is on creating an attractive image, the actual manufacturing of goods or offering of services has fallen by the wayside, and these corporate brands have become little more than marketers who organize specialized subcontractors. All too often,

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