Chapter 2

(1) For Whom Dreams are Food: Non Cerebral Systems as Weaponry

Colin Bennett

(2) Branding Products, Branding People

Norman Rushkoff

(3) Understanding the Concept of Brand

Anon

(1)

Our unique personality, character and identity are in a state of constant change. In the sense that we are affected psychologically by anything and anything pulling us a thousand different ways at once, any system of reference can be considered as a weapons system in that it is designed to change one thing into another. All cultures can be seen therefore as powerful suggestion and persuasion systems whose evolving mythologies structure the sense of reality which gives them their unique character. The non-technological and pre-media systems of the Ancient World were  structures no different in essence to those we find today in our complex electronic structure. In the pre-electric world, royalty, military prowess, religious power, mystical cults were rich in many levels of implicit and explicit persuasions just as is a modern TV commercial break or Party Political broadcast.

Though sociologists and psychologists would hardly have a problem with agreeing with such ideas, it is surprising that military intellectuals have taken little notice of them.

Despite Dr. Goebbels’ prototypal efforts in support of Nazi ambitions, and despite George Orwell, the weapons used by the military in the wars of the last fifty years have in essence changed little since 1945. The present war in Iraq for example is being fought for the most part with tanks, gun, bombs and good old-fashioned infantrymen with rifles. The propaganda front has for the most part been half-hearted, fumbled, mishandled, and has had little first-class intelligence applied to it.

In the sense implied here, Moslem aggressive religious zeal, for example, will never survive saturation by Western TV. It may take time, but television will surely break up their aggressive culture. It will smash it in as corrosive a fashion as the spreading railways and the discovery of electricity destroyed the political power of Christianity.

The Vietnam campaign is another example where it would have been far more effective to have drenched the population with cheap TV sets after having sold them very good VHF communications.

The soap opera is far better at the pacification of societies than bombs and shells. With Britain alone as an example, populations can be effectively tranquillised by such transmissions without any physical harm being done to them. All such weaponry is designed to line up the population, reduce their expression to cliché and stop the development of discursive intelligence. But above all, the soap opera is designed to stop imagination, or at least to restrict it to the mental equivalent of green blooming pond algae. In this state of self-replicating growth, few differences exist between human beings, and everyone is either a Stepford Wife or Husband in a mouse box doing mousy things. (See my essay, “Imagine”) (http://www.phenomenamagazine.com/0/editorial.asp?aff_id=0&this_cat=Area+51&action=page&type_id=&cat_id=&obj_id=3978)

Briefly, the control of image symbol and metaphor is the ultimate power symbol in our own day, induced electronically or in the form of  royal courts which were the entertainment and glamour systems of their day.

Perhaps this is the only way to control such large populations as ours which were not seen in the Ancient World. Such masses can only be fed, sustained and controlled if they can be persuaded to “line up” mentally in certain directions. In doing so they face that catastrophic loss of identity which many writers have observed.

There was a time when each person one met with was as if sculptured from stone.  Now they are almost as identical as the cars and soaps they watch.

Watch a film or TV programme and there is no way of telling how we have been changed. We have just been subjected to a most intense, organized, subtle and deeply penetrative piece of consumer propagandistic ideology.

What is the agenda? The agenda is to offer human beings up to the process eaters, for whom dreams are food.

Perhaps the aliens we talk about so much are merely tissues of advertising protein which make us choose one programmatic form over another.

The role of a particular finite technology is secondary. What technology does, rather, is to launch a state of mind.

In other words, to watch TV we have no need to possess a TV set.

Now playmates, read Norman Rushkoff!

http://www.rushkoff.com/branding.html

(2) Branding Products, Branding People

It wasn’t always this way. Not so long ago, before marketing became a branch of psychology, branding and advertising were simply ways to publicize and identify one’s products.

            The brand began, quite literally, as a method for ranchers to identify their cattle. By burning a distinct symbol into the hide of a baby calf, the owner could insure that if it one day wandered off his property or was stolen by a competitor, he’d be able to point to that logo and claim the animal as his rightful property.

            When the manufacturers of products adopted the brand as a way of guaranteeing the quality of their goods, its function remained pretty much the same. Buying a package of oats with the Quaker label meant the customer could trace back these otherwise generic oats to their source. If there was a problem, he knew where he could turn. More important, if the oats were of satisfactory or superior quality, he knew where he could get them again. Trademarking a brand meant that no one else could call his oats Quaker.

            Advertising in this innocent age simply meant publicizing the existence of one’s brand. The sole objective was to increase consumers’ awareness of the product or company that made it. Those who even thought to employ specialists for the exclusive purpose of writing ad copy hired newspaper reporters and traveling salesmen, who knew how to explain the attributes of an item in words that people tended to remember.

            It wasn’t until 1922 that a preacher and traveling “medicine show” salesman-turned-copywriter named Claude Hopkins decided that advertising should be systematized into a science. His short but groundbreaking book Scientific Advertising proposed that the advertisement is merely a printed extension of the salesman’s pitch and should follow the same rules. Hopkins believed in using hard descriptions over hype, and text over image: “The more you tell, the more you sell” and “White space is wasted space” were his mantras. Hopkins believed that any illustrations used in an ad should be directly relevant to the product itself—not just a loose or emotional association. He insisted on avoiding “frivolity” at all costs, arguing that “no one ever bought from a clown.”

            Although some images did appear in advertisements and on packaging as early as the 1800s—the Quaker Oats man showed up in 1877—these weren’t consciously crafted to induce psychological states in customers. They were meant just to help people remember one brand over another. How better to recall the brand Quaker than to see a picture of one?

            It wasn’t until the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, as Americans turned toward movies and television and away from newspapers and radio, that advertisers’ focus shifted away from describing their brands and to creating images for them. During these decades, Midwestern adman Leo Burnett concocted what is often called the Chicago school of advertising, in which lovable characters are used to represent products.

            Green Giant, which was originally just the Minnesota Valley Canning Company’s code name for an experimental pea, became the Jolly Green Giant in young Burnett’s world of animated characters. He understood that the figure would make a perfect and enticing brand image for an otherwise boring product and could also serve as a mnemonic device for consumers. As he watched his character grow in popularity, Burnett discovered that the mythical figure of a green giant had resonance in many different cultures around the world. It became a kind of archetype and managed to penetrate the psyche in more ways than one.

            Burnett was responsible for dozens of character-based brand images, including Tony the Tiger, Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, and the Marlboro Man. In each case, the character creates a sense of drama, which engages the audience in the pitch. This was Burnett’s great insight. He still wanted to sell a product based on its attributes, but he knew he had to draw in his audience using characters.

            Brand images were also based on places, like Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing, or on recognizable situations, such as the significant childhood memories labeled “Kodak moments,” or a mother nurturing her son on a cold day, a defining image for Campbell’s soup.

            In all these cases, however, the moment, location, or character went only so far as to draw the audience into the ad, after which they would be subjected to a standard pitch: “Soup is good food,” or “Sorry, Charlie, only the best tuna get to be Starkist.” Burnett saw himself as a homespun Midwesterner who was contributing to American folklore while speaking in the plain language of the people. He took pride in the fact that his ads used words like “ain’t”—not because they had some calculated psychological effect on the audience, but because they communicated in a natural, plainspoken style.

            As these methods found their way to Madison Avenue and came to be practiced much more self-consciously, Burnett’s love for American values and his focus on brand attributes were left behind. Branding became much more ethereal and image-based, and ads only occasionally nodded to a product’s attributes.

            In the 1960s, advertising gurus like David Ogilvy came up with rules about television advertising that would have made Claude Hopkins shudder. “Food in motion” dictated that food should always be shot by a moving camera. “Open with fire” meant that ads should start in a very exciting and captivating way. Ogilvy told his creatives to “use supers”—text superimposed on the screen to emphasize important phrases and taglines.

            All these techniques were devised to promote brand image, not the product. Ogilvy didn’t believe consumers could distinguish between products were it not for their images. In Ogilvy on Advertising, he explains that most people cannot tell the difference between their own “favorite” whiskey and the closest two competitors’: “Have they tried all three and compared the taste? Don’t make me laugh. The reality is that these three brands have different images which appeal to different kinds of people. It isn’t the whiskey they choose, it’s the image. The brand image is ninety percent of what the distiller has to sell.”1

            Thus, we learned to “trust our car to the man who wears the star” not because Texaco had better gasoline than Shell, but because the company’s advertisers had created a better brand image.

            While Burnett and his disciples were building brand myths, another school of advertisers was busy learning about its audience. Back in the 1920s, Raymond Rubicam, who eventually founded the agency Young and Rubicam, thought it might be interesting to hire a pollster named Dr. Gallup from Northwestern University to see what could be gleaned about consumers from a little market research. The advertising industry’s version of cultural anthropology, or demographics, was born.

            Like the public-relations experts who study their target populations in order to manipulate them later, marketers began conducting polls, market surveys, and focus groups on the segments of the population they hoped to influence. And to draw clear, clean lines between demographic groups, researchers must almost always base distinctions on four factors: race, age, sex, and wages. Demographic research is reductionist by design. I once consulted to an FM radio station whose station manager wanted to know, “Who is our listener?” Asking such a question reduces an entire listenership down to one fictional person. It’s possible that no single individual will ever match the “customer profile” meant to apply to all customers, which is why so much targeted marketing often borders on classist, racist, and sexist pandering.

            Billboards for most menthol cigarettes, for example, picture African-Americans because, according to demographic research, black people prefer them to regular cigarettes. Microsoft chose Rolling Stones songs to launch Windows 95, a product targeted at wealthy baby boomers. “The Women’s Global Challenge” was an advertising-industry-created Olympics for women, with no purpose other than to market to active females.

            By the 1970s, the two strands of advertising theory—demographic research and brand image—were combined to develop campaigns that work on both levels. To this day, we know to associate Volvos with safety, Dr. Pepper with individuality, and Harley-Davidson with American heritage. Each of these brand images is crafted to appeal to the target consumer’s underlying psychological needs: Volvo ads are aimed at upper-middle-class white parents who fear for their children’s health and security, Dr. Pepper is directed to young nonconformists, and the Harley-Davidson image supports its riders’ self-perception as renegades.

            Today’s modern (or perhaps postmodern) brands don’t invent a corporate image on their own; they appropriate one from the media itself, such as MetLife did with Snoopy, Butterfinger did with Bart Simpson, or Kmart did by hiring Penny Marshall and Rosie O’Donnell. These mascots were selected because their perceived characteristics match the values of their target consumers—not the products themselves. In the language of today’s marketers, brand images do not reflect on products but on advertisers’ perceptions of their audiences’ psychology.

            This focus on audience composition and values has become the standard operating procedure in all of broadcasting. When Fox TV executives learned that their animated series “King of the Hill,” about a Texan propane distributor, was not faring well with certain demographics, for example, they took a targeted approach to their character’s rehabilitation. The Brandweek piece on Fox’s ethnic campaign uncomfortably dances around the issue.

            Hank Hill is the proverbial everyman, and Fox wants viewers to get comfortable with him; especially viewers in New York, where “King of the Hill”s homespun humor hasn’t quite caught on with the young urbanites. So far this season, the show has pulled in a 10.1 rating/15 share in households nationally, while garnering a 7.9 rating/12 share in New York.2

            As far as Fox was concerned, while regular people could identify with the network’s new “everyman” character, New Yorkers weren’t buying his middle-American patter. The television show’s ratings proved what TV executives had known all along: that New York City’s Jewish demographic doesn’t see itself as part of the rest of America.

            Fox’s strategy for “humanizing” the character to those irascible urbanites was to target the group’s ethnographic self-image. Fox put ads for the show on the panels of sidewalk coffee wagons throughout Manhattan, with the tagline “Have a bagel with Hank.” In an appeal to the target market’s well-developed (and well-researched) cynicism, Hank himself is shown saying, “May I suggest you have that with a schmear.”

            The disarmingly ethnic humor here is meant to underscore the absurdity of a Texas propane salesman using a Jewish insider’s word like “schmear.” In another Upper West Side billboard, Hank’s son appeals to the passing traffic: “Hey yo! Somebody toss me up a knish!” As far as the New York demographic is concerned, these jokes transform the characters from potentially threatening Southern rednecks into loveable hicks bending over backward to appeal to Jewish sensibilities, and doing so with a comic and, most important, nonthreatening inadequacy.

            Today, the most intensely targeted demographic is the baby—the future consumer. Before an average American child is twenty months old, he can recognize the McDonald’s logo and many other branded icons. Nearly everything a toddler encounters—from Band-Aids to underpants—features the trademarked characters of Disney or other marketing empires. Although this target market may not be in a position to exercise its preferences for many years, it pays for marketers to imprint their brands early. General Motors bought a two-page ad in Sports Illustrated for Kids for its Chevy Venture minivan. Their brand manager rationalized that the eight-to-fourteen-year-old demographic consists of “back-seat consumers.”3

            The real intention of target marketing to children and babies, however, goes deeper. The fresh neurons of young brains are valuable mental real estate to admen. By seeding their products and images early, the marketers can do more than just develop brand recognition; they can literally cultivate a demographic’s sensibilities as they are formed. A nine-year-old child who can recognize the Budweiser frogs and recite their slogan (Bud-weis-er) is more likely to start drinking beer than one who can remember only Tony the Tiger yelling, “They’re great!” (Currently, more children recognize the frogs than Tony.) This indicates a long-term coercive strategy.

            The abstraction of brand images from the products they represent, combined with an increasing assault on our demographically targeted psychological profiles, led to some justifiable consumer paranoia by the 1970s. Advertising was working on us in ways we couldn’t fully understand, and people began to look for an explanation.

            In 1973, Wilson Bryan Key, a communications researcher, wrote the first of four books about “subliminal advertising,” in which he accused advertisers of hiding sexual imagery in ice cubes, and psychoactive words like “sex” onto the airbrushed surfaces of fashion photographs. Having worked on many advertising campaigns from start to finish, in close proximity to everyone from copywriters and art directors to printers, I can comfortably put to rest any rumors that major advertising agencies are engaging in subliminal campaigns. How do images that could be interpreted as “sexual” show up in ice cubes or elbows? The final photographs chosen for ads are selected by committee out of hundreds that are actually shot. After hours or days of consideration, the group eventually feels drawn to one or two photos out of the batch. Not surprising, these photos tend to have more evocative compositions and details, but no penises, breasts, or skulls are ever superimposed onto the images. In fact, the man who claims to have developed subliminal persuasion, James Vicary, admitted to Advertising Age in 1984 that he had fabricated his evidence that the technique worked in order to drum up business for his failing research company. But this confession has not assuaged Key and others who relentlessly, perhaps obsessively, continue to pursue those they feel are planting secret visual messages in advertisements.

            To be fair to Key, advertisers have left themselves open to suspicion by relegating their work to the abstract world of the image and then targeting consumer psychology so deliberately. According to research by the Roper Organization in 1992, fifty-seven percent of American consumers still believe that subliminal advertising is practiced on a regular basis, and only one in twelve think it “almost never” happens. To protect themselves from the techniques they believe are being used against them, the advertising audience has adopted a stance of cynical suspicion.

            To combat our increasing awareness and suspicion of demographic targeting, marketers have developed a more camouflaged form of categorization based on psychological profiles instead of race and age. Jim Schroer, the executive director of new marketing strategy at Ford explains his abandonment of broad-demographic targeting: “It’s smarter to think about emotions and attitudes, which all go under the term ‘psychographics’—those things that can transcend demographic groups.”4 Instead, he now appeals to what he calls “consumers’ images of themselves.”

            Unlike broad demographics, the psychographic is developed using more narrowly structured qualitative-analysis techniques, like focus groups, in-depth interviews, and even home surveillance. Marketing analysts observe the behaviors of volunteer subjects, ask questions, and try to draw causal links between feelings, self-image, and purchases.

            A company called Strategic Directions Group provides just such analysis of the human psyche. In their study of the car-buying habits of the “forty-plus baby boomers and their elders,” they sought to define the main psychological predilections that human beings in this age group have regarding car purchases. Although they began with a demographic subset of the overall population, their analysis led them to segment the group into psychographic types.

            For example, members of one psychographic segment, called the “Reliables,” think of driving as a way to “get from point A to point B.” The “Everyday People” campaign for Toyota is aimed at this group and features people depending on their reliable and efficient little Toyotas. A convertible Saab, on the other hand, appeals to the “Stylish Fun” category, who like trendy and fun-to-drive imports. One of the company’s commercials shows a woman at a boring party fantasizing herself into an oil painting, where she drives along the canvas in a sporty yellow Saab.

            Psychographic targeting is more effective than demographic targeting because it reaches for an individual customer more directly—like a fly fisherman who sets bait and jiggles his rod in a prescribed pattern for a particular kind of fish. It’s as if a marketing campaign has singled you out and recognizes your core values and aspirations, without having lumped you into a racial or economic stereotype.

            It amounts to a game of cat-and-mouse between advertisers and their target psychographic groups. The more effort we expend to escape categorization, the more ruthlessly the marketers pursue us. In some cases, in fact, our psychographic profiles are based more on the extent to which we try to avoid marketers than on our fundamental goals or values.

            The so-called “Generation X” adopted the anti-chic aesthetic of thrift-store grunge in an effort to find a style that could not be so easily identified and exploited. Grunge was so self-consciously lowbrow and nonaspirational that it seemed, at first, impervious to the hype and glamor normally applied swiftly to any emerging trend. But sure enough, grunge anthems found their way onto the soundtracks of television commercials, and Dodge Neons were hawked by kids in flannel shirts saying “Whatever.”

            The members of Generation X are putting up a good fight. Having already developed an awareness of how marketers attempt to target their hearts and wallets, they use their insight into programming to resist these attacks. Unlike the adult marketers pursuing them, young people have grown up immersed in the language of advertising and public relations. They speak it like natives. As a result, they are more than aware when a commercial or billboard is targeting them. In conscious defiance of demographic-based pandering, they adopt a stance of self-protective irony—distancing themselves from the emotional ploys of the advertisers.

            Lorraine Ketch, the director of planning in charge of Levi’s trendy Silvertab line, explained, “This audience hates marketing that’s in your face. It eyeballs it a mile away, chews it up and spits it out.”5 Chiat/Day, one of the world’s best-known and experimental advertising agencies, found the answer to the crisis was simply to break up the Gen-X demographic into separate “tribes” or subdemographics—and include subtle visual references to each one of them in the ads they produce for the brand. According to Levi’s director of consumer marketing, the campaign meant to communicate, “We really understand them, but we are not trying too hard.”

            Probably unintentionally, Ms. Ketch has revealed the new, even more highly abstract plane on which advertising is now being communicated. Instead of creating and marketing a brand image, advertisers are creating marketing campaigns about the advertising itself. Silvertab’s target market is supposed to feel good about being understood, but even better about understanding the way they are being marketed to.

            The “drama” invented by Leo Burnett and refined by David Ogilvy and others has become a play within a play. The scene itself has shifted. The dramatic action no longer occurs between the audience and the product, the brand, or the brand image, but between the audience and the brand marketers. As audiences gain even more control over the media in which these interactive stories unfold, advertising evolves ever closer to a theater of the absurd.

FROM COERCION - COPYRIGHT DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF

http://www.philosophe.com/commerce/branding.html

(3)

Understanding the Concept of Brand

Posted by anon

The term brand means different things to the different roles of buyer and seller, with buyers generally associating brand with a product or service, and merchants associating brand with identity.

For the typical buyer, a brand is basically just a product identifier -- this isn't just cereal, it's Cheerios. Used this way, a brand functions as a proper name, at best flagging a specific product with a name that differentiates it from the rest of the product category. This use of brand doesn't denote any judgment of quality or performance, just the characteristic of having been named.

Brand can also identify the company behind the specific product -- that's not just a hot dog, that's an Oscar Meyer wiener. This use of brand puts a "face" behind the name, so to speak, even if the "face" is the result of advertising copy and television commercials. This use of brand also says nothing of quality, just the buyer's exposure to the brand's PR and media hype.

For the typical merchant, branding is a way of taking everything that is good about the company -- positive shopping experience, professionalism, superior service, product knowledge, whatever the company decides is important for a customer to believe about the company -- and wrapping these characteristics into a package that can be evoked by the brand as signifier. The eCommerce Trust Study from Studio Archetype/Sapient and Cheskin Research defines brand as "The corporation's promise to deliver specific attributes and its credibility based on reputation and the visitor's possible previous experience". For a company, success means that people see or hear the company's brand and think "you know, company XYZ is the best at service, product knowledge, and generally good experiences".

Merchants also use branding as another word for consumer awareness, with the idea that the more people are aware of the company and its products/services, the more market the company will capture. This makes sense with the web, since users are encountering a marketplace far larger than they have experienced offline and so may become disconnected from their familiar brands. Users online may have awareness of a brand in context with the web that is so strong it drives the association of the brand with the category. It is hard not associate online book shopping with Amazon.com, even though other good options exist, and even though users cannot have any experience of Amazon as a real-world bookstore.

When Branding Is Successful

A brand has no intrinsic value itself; only through signifying a connotation can a brand be of any value. Branding is very important to the corporation, because the more visible the brand is in the marketplace, the more visible the company is, and therefore the more exposure to potential revenue. If a company successfully places its brand in a position to be the predominant signifier of a category of product or service, that brand will be very difficult to supplant.

Brands are an excellent tool for evoking schemas of an experience or relationship: if a user has very positive attitudes towards a particular brand -- great service, great product, fun place to shop -- then encountering the company's brand may cause the user to recall all of the pleasant connotations of the company. This inflation of a simple sign of the company, the brand, into a full-blown image/memory/expectation of the experience behind the brand and promised by the brand is the eagerly sought result of all the money and effort invested in the branding campaign.

When Branding Is Not Successful

The creation of a schema that describes the positive aspects of a product or company is a very powerful tool in driving consumer awareness for the product and/or company, but this tool can also fail.

Customers with bad experiences tend to be vocal in their displeasure, and may not be easy for the company behind the brand to win back. No company wants to consumers to hear their branding and immediately associate the brand with negative experiences.

Some companies are so successful in their market that they may have difficulty transferring the brand to a new medium, like the web. If a real-world company is renowned for being a great destination and a comfortable place to shop, that quality may not transfer to the web. People may associate the company not with the category of product, but as a place to go.

Branding Doesn't Make Commerce Easier

A brand doesn't help the user add an item to his shopping cart, it doesn't help him figure out his shipping options, and it doesn't help him get through a web site's commerce track any faster. A brand helps the user authenticate the supplier based on past experience with that brand in a different context, or based on reported experiences of others with the brand. If I shop in a neighborhood book store, and I have faith in that bookstore, should I have a need or desire to shop online I will look for that company online because I respect the brand.

The Consumer's View of Brand & Identity

Brand helps users identify the product and or company behind a product. Companies are made up of people, and most interactions customers have with companies in the real world involve some level of contact with real flesh-and-blood employees of the company. The simple truth is that employees represent their company, and if I go to my neighborhood Best Buy to pick up some software, I deal with a salesperson. I am faced by this salesperson and his or her skills, experience, and level of training face-to-face, and I may walk out of that store with no thoughts of the company's president or founder, just thoughts of the representative the placed on their sales floor.

The customer's experiences with a company form the basis of the brand's connotations. When I encounter the Best Buy brand, I recall a very definite expectation of the caliber of salesperson and their level of training and product knowledge.

Employees represent their company, but there are no employees on the web; we can't walk into an online store and gather information about a company by examining the demeanor of its employees. We can't ask the person behind the register about their day, we can't flirt with the person straightening shelves, we can't share in the dynamic between other customers and sales staff. We can gather not one iota of conversational information from an online site, because a web site represents itself. The typical online transaction has no front end interaction with any representative of the company, and this is considered good.

Complaining to a store manager lacks resonance when done through anonymous email. Email has given rise to smileys, emoticons and assicons precisely because straight ASCII text doesn't convey emotional gradients; speak to a person face-to-face and your anger or dissatisfaction becomes much more immediate. More importantly, a store will value you and your dispute more if you are a member of that store's community. Sure, an online store doesn't like to lose customers, but that can't compare to the desire of a store that you patronize every day -- because you live or work down the street -- to keep you satisfied.

The best stores foster community through the interaction of store employees and customers. Any good book store develops a character that is palpable as soon as you walk in the door. In my experience at Borders, repeat customers would come in just to touch base with the employees who stocked their favorite sections of the store, or customers would spend hours hanging out in the espresso bar chatting with other people who worked in the area. An online author chat doesn't compare to hoisting a hot cup of joe with an author, maybe even that same author.

[ Read the next essay in this ecommerce series, Messages For The Users.]