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,
the lofty concepts sold by brands don't match the ugly reality of the Third World production such companies use. Further, corporations have made life difficult for themselves by consistently favoring shareholder's profits over employees, the good of the environment, and the societies in which they operate. Still worse, the platitudes and attitudes displayed by companies brand promotions come across as hypocritical, fake, and deceptive. This has created an anti-corporate backlash. To name just a few such movements of recent years, 'Reclaim the Streets', and Critical Mass Bike Rides seek to reclaim public spaces long converted into purely commercial spheres. The 'Occupy Wall Street' and subsequent Occupy movements protest the social injustice inflicted by corporations on the body politic, and have channeled public rage at corporate policies such as the massive outsourcing of jobs to Third World countries and engaging in a 'race to the bottom' in wages (recall the battle of workers against Walmart to gain a living wage and benefits); destruction of the environment and pollution (think of all the protests against Monsanto, Dow Chemical, BP, etc.), and similar issues. The Seattle WTO protests; the Canadian media attack group Adbusters, the flourishing World Social Forum (whose motto is “Another world is possible”) are all symptoms of a public fed up with the status quo and with corporate marketing of consumerism and promotion of that status quo. Brands can be held hostage by consumer anger, and these movements have made a point of doing so to attempt to rectify injustices. Consumers have been alienated by corporate co-optation of every style, idea, and even counter-cultural rebellion, turning it all into “brand food”. The invasion of every public (and many private) spaces with brands and logos have created a yearning for a society without such dominant commercial control. Authentic communities have been wiped out by big-box retailers and chain-store clones, turned into sterile shopping villages, kept artificially clean and sedate with heavy police and private security pressure, under constant surveillance. Commercial messages plaster every surface and control every type of media. This barrage of brands and corporate power has given the anti-corporate groups the impetus they need to insist the general public help them to change the system. Activists have in many crucial ways won the debate about the kind of society we “should” have, and the majority agree that corporations impede and block this change from occurring. Thus, the overwhelming success of modern advertising has had severe repercussions for businesses seeking to create a brand from scratch. So what's a small business owner, with limited resources, to do? How is it possible to compete against the corporate Goliaths? Simply put, this advertising/branding overkill has created a wonderful opportunity for small and medium-sized businesses to show how they're different. Trends such as 'Buy Local', and sustainability as a core principle are here for the long term, and are tailor-made for SME's (small and medium-sized enterprises). The savvy business owner who wants to establish a strong brand need only associate their company with a concern for their community, and a commitment to improving the lives of all their businesses 'stakeholders'. If authentic, simply advertising how your business is ethical, acts with integrity, and benefits the community is sufficient to get it labeled as an “ally in the struggle”, versus the corporate enemy. Pay a living wage and offer decent benefits to your workers, then shout about it! Use free social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In pages to display how serious you are about making your business sustainable, green, and environmentally friendly. This offers huge public relations and customer satisfaction benefits at relatively low cost. In combination with an emphasis on businesses local ties
and positive impact on your community, a strong brand is both obtainable and desirable. As Karen Fleming, the director of Green Mountain College's sustainable business MBA program in Vermont puts it, a sustainable business has a “triple bottom line” - “profit, planet, people”. She teaches how to create an eco-friendly and community outreach-based business. In essence this is a commitment to support and give back to your community. Most of it is common sense – helping employees get credit, working to be a problem solver for both your workers and your customers. Consistently working from this perspective will yield an incredibly loyal workforce and customer base. The organization 1% for the Planet, asks that companies donate 1% of their sales to environmental organizations. Those businesses that have joined this nonprofit have seen their revenues grow by 20% between 2009 to 2011 (versus a 2% GDP growth in the economy at large). Millennial's and'X & Y' Gen workers are also attracted to such companies. Those businesses that actually work at empowering consumers, that embrace diversity, and are working to make their corner of the world a better place WILL win against the competition. The 'locavore', sustainable, and social and environmental justice movements are the wave of the future, and building your business to incorporate features in tune with this philosophy will ensure your brand resonates with your customers ideals and sense of self. Fight on the side of the angels! Transformation of the here and now is the new meme, one you can embrace for success. For those interested in traditional brand building methods, checkout “How to Brand Sand”, by Sam Hill, Jack McGrath, and Sandup Dayal. For a corrective, and good perspective on anti-corporate movements, I can't recommend Naomi Klein's No Logo highly enough (much of this article is adapted from that work). Hopefully, this is enough to get you started on building your own successful brand. In the near future keep checking this space for more articles on creativity with the 'Net, branding in the Age of Individualism and Mass Customization (using 3-D printing and 'additive manufacturing'), and articles on niches and specialization. If you're reading this on a document sharing website, there's lots more good material to help your company on my website at: <a href= "http://www.smallbusinessfinancingonline.com/page.html"></a> Please pay me a visit !