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Wednesday, August 30, 2006

A Brand New Obsession

Looks like Neil Boorman has reached brand saturation point over at the Beeb… As an experiment, his idea is interesting - if incredibly wasteful! Would it be possible to live a non-brand life in today’s Britain? The statement he is making also raises a few questions for anybody who works closely with brands. Is Neil’s disillusionment justified? And can we imagine a world without brands? Of course, there are now precious few corners of modern life left that aren’t now branded. We buy our food from supermarkets, in which even own-brands are, well, brands. Anybody not interested in designer clothes, is still likely to buy from a shop that is in itself a brand. If we want to drive, use a mobile phone or have a drink at the pub – brands again. Even Naomi Klein's anti-branding bible, No Logo, has turned into a brand. Just writing and posting this text, I’m interacting with many brands – Apple, Google and Mozilla being the most obvious. Lets remind ourselves how brands originally came into being. At its most basic, a brand is a mark given to something to distinguish its provenance – literally the cow branded in the field as a sign of ownership. This concept naturally extends to becoming a mark of quality. Even in a place without commercial branding, communist Russia say, we can imagine the flour from a certain region being better quality than that from another. So the mark of provenance on the superior flour becomes its brand and it becomes sought after. To this day brands continue to serve the useful function of helping us to make sense of the world by differentiating between similar but different things. In his disillusionment, Neil seems to be concentrating on the most modern (and vacuous) concept of brands. They may not make you “more attractive, more successful, more happy for buying their stuff” but they can help you to make sense of the world around you. The fact that Neil’s experiment to live without brands is newsworthy is in itself a sign of their significance. McDonalds, Monsanto, Google, Nike – all of these names conjure up feelings for us, they represent something, whatever our interpretations or feelings towards them, whether we buy into them or not. In the end, even Neil does start life afresh, free from any branded possessions, he will still be living in a branded world, in which we derive so much meaning and understanding from the brands that we share as part of our culture. In that sense, there’s no escape for Neil, despite the grand gesture.

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