Currently it is nearly impossible to discuss branding without bringing up Tiger Woods. Though most of his sponsors have ended their deals with Tiger, except unsurprisingly Nike (there are just too many jokes to be made here with their slogan), Accenture is a particularly interesting case. Many journalists/bloggers have noted that Accenture has gotten some of the best publicity because of the Tiger scandal, because before no one really knew what Accenture was. Accenture is a consulting firm, but everyone just knew them has a company that endorsed Tiger. This issue is extremely relevant to the Naomi Klein chapter. She discusses the risks companies take when using the images of celebrities. Often, the celebrity can become bigger than the brand and the brand gets lost. For Accenture, they never really had a brand to begin with. For them, Tiger Woods became their brand, which is especially odd as I personally do not see the connection between a consulting firm and golf/Tiger Woods, and clearly neither did anyone else.
The above article also mentions how risky it is for any company to use a celebrity because, after all, celebrities are human and extremely capable of making mistakes like anyone else (probably more so). Not that the Tiger Woods episode is going to end celebrity endorsements. However, perhaps it will make companies think more carefully about who they choose.
This post is partially in response to Charlie's. but it was too long for the limiting comment boxes to display it easily. The Seabrook article had me thinking about "Avatar," and particularly the so-called "Pandora Effect."
I liked Seabrook's analysis of the Lucasfilm employees he met, that they are happy because "feeling successful in their jobs for "Star Wars" helped prove that the lessons of "Star Wars" do come true. The narrative of the film and the power of its brand becomes so ingrained in the consciousness of its fans that it has (for Seabrook, who certainly takes some speculative liberties in his otherwise journalistic analysis) a measurable impact on their quality of life. It is important to remember that Lucas was basically taking an American master narrative--one that he felt a particularly strong connection to--and re-branding it as something new and appealing to a technologically-obsessed generation. There is nothing particularly original about "Star Wars" as a story--and even the visuals are culled from numerous other sources--but the way it was sold was part of the key to its success.
I wonder if the obsession with Pandora in Cameron's film--which is based rather blatantly on the fictional European/American post-colonial narrative about infiltrating and sublimating the "other"--appeals to an inherent desire to become another. Just as Seabrook applies Lucas' biography to "Star Wars," I would apply Cameron's noted obsession with deep sea diving to his newest blockbuster. Certainly the "Pandora Effect," a psychological malaise that occurs after realizing that the in-theater world isn't real, reflects the power of the narrative mixed with the technology. I think that's what's so smart about the way that Cameron and his PR experts branded his new form of 3-D and motion capture technology. People were convinced going into "Avatar" that it would be an experience of experiencing another world first hand. It was sold almost as a 2.5 hour vacation, and it's only natural that people who bought into the 3-D and the adventure narrative it supports would have difficulty coming back to reality.
I don't think that "Avatar" will enjoy quite the same merchandising success as "Star Wars"--partially because the narrative isn't quite as ripe for expansion as Lucas' universe, but more importantly because the brand that has made it such a popular film is so reliant on the technological aspect of the experience. In some ways Cameron's film is closer than Lucas' to an unadulterated cinematic experience--it seems almost self-contained, a world that cannot be expanded upon because the technology is so essential to the brand's impact on the psyche. Just days after the film premiered, I began seeing new ads for old Second Life-style social MMOs that emphasized the ability to become and play as a Na'vi. Whereas, as Seabrook's article discussed, "Star Wars" was a perfect bridge between cinematic narrative and real life, giving a grandiose meaning to the lives of its fans, "Avatar" doesn't seem to make that connection. The desires created by its narrative and the technological brand--most importantly becoming the other"--cannot be applied to or satisfied by "normal life" as a whole. "Avatar" is "Star Wars" for a virtual reality age--if someone could develop an MMORPG based on the game for 20th Century they would be a billionaire.
I thought some of these articles may be relevant for today's discussion on consumer branding/marketing and the larger ideological threshold of corporate activism through a brand and embodiment (ie: case study in looking at American Apparel).
American Apparel has begun an ad/marketing/activist campaign on legalizing immigration in the U.S. ("Legalize L.A."). Here are some articles- I will post a clip to watch as well; however, I recommend taking a look on America Apparel's website- paying attention to the construction of a particular identity brand that revolves around the notion of "borderless."
So as I'm sure is expected of me at this point, I was intrigued by John Seabrook's chapter about Star Wars and the way that brand has played a role particularly related to the licensing of products. The article, for me, largely recalled something I read a while ago by Jonathon Gray that is all about the role toys played in that franchise, and I think it's an interesting point to bring up in the context of brands and brand identity.
Not only does Star Wars have toys, but those toys have been an essential part of constructing the entirety of the Star Wars universe and (as many people know) are a large part of what helped make George Lucas a very, very rich man/makes the franchise so incredibly rich. The toys are part of what helped sustain the franchise during the decades between trilogies, and even between the films by providing a space for play for fans, who could take up action figures and vehicles and the like and create their own stories (some even thinking this is part of why there are temporal gaps between the films).
Yet at the same time, the merchandise helped construct the brand in a number of ways. Not only did the huge amount of merchandise/some people's extensive collecting of it set up Star Wars as a clear phenomenon (as if the box office sales hadn't already), but they also are clearly part of the idea of looping. Sales of particular figures were tracked, and fan reactions to particular characters were used in continuing the brand (Fett is a really good and easy example from the series - but it happened all the time, as there are tons of figures/vehicles released that are either of background characters without lines [hammerhead], or vehicles that never appear in the films) and making it expand far beyond just the films.
The sort of personal, emotional value that certain brands can take on is really interesting, as well; some people make incredibly strong connections to a product/brand. The example of a car does give a clear understanding of what it is to continually buy the experience of driving (leasing a Ford), but I think that it understates the role that emotions may play in the experience. I wish I could find it somewhere online, but the short film "The Robot Fixer" is about this convergence - (Bernice Chin (Wai Ching Ho) has never really known her estranged son Wilson. Now a car accident has put Wilson into a coma. And the only clue he's left behind is a box of twenty-year-old toy robots. As her daughter Grace (Cindy Cheung) presses her to deal with Wilson's deteriorating condition, Bernice becomes obsessed with Wilson's toys, as if repairing the robots will help her connect with her unreachable son.). She is trying to complete a collection, but the toys are essentially never ending - she is buying to constantly be trying to get an emotion that ultimately is unable to come from the purchasing. And it comes from a brand of toy, a particular line that. Talk about the power a brand can have over emotion.
The other brand identity that has always intrigued me is the Air Jordan line by Nike, particularly in reference to the Spike Lee commercials - Nike being willing to pay the fine so that Jordan would wear the shoes and attract attention, while making the very stylized commercials...
Update:
In walking to class from the CTCS office, I noticed the poster for Gallipoli and that made me think about The Truman Show - talk about the creation of a total brand identity, with a singular star representing all the products. Jordan could only aspire to have that kind of all encompassing reach (though I'd imagine he'd want to be informed about it all). That unawareness, though, relates nicely to Seabrook's other chapter, and the unrecognition of many people of the role their clothing plays in being advertising.
So John and I watched this video for a course we're taking in video games and critical theory, but I feel as though it is also particularly germane to our discussion of the brand as new media object. Specifically, I'm interested in the video's discussion of the game-ification of culture and how a system of surveillance, competition, and incentivization can be exploited by corporations under the benevolent auspices of "play." Throughout, it's also very interesting to see the speaker, Jesse Schell, tread that very fine line between utopian and dystopian rhetoric...
However, before I get into the video, I think it would definitely be useful to talk a little bit about my reaction to Celia Lurie’s essay so that I might better appropriate its concepts in a clear and specific way. First off, let me just say that while I definitely feel as though Lurie’s claims to the metaphorical equivalence of brands and new media sometimes seem like a bit of a stretch, I do think that the large majority of her points have validity. In line with Canclini, I appreciate the fact that she imagines the brand as an interface between producers and consumers, a dynamic “image instrument” for facilitating a communicative feedback loop between the two parties. Brands really do have a profit incentive to be malleable and heterogeneous in response to the varied and constantly updating demands of consumers. At the same time, I’m also glad that she recognizes that the way the brand works as an information management tool in mediating the dynamic relationships between producers and consumers doesn’t operate under some pure “interactivity,” but under an “asymmetrical” distribution of power.
However, my main point of contention with Lurie’s article is that she seems to imply that because the brand deals in the language of “personality,” “image,” “value,” and “qualitative” judgment, its operation as an object is somehow not rational (I don’t think she is quite saying that it is irrational). On the contrary, I feel that if we just slightly tweak the framing of her key insights, the “totalizing” (but not “total”) impulses of the brand’s “dynamic unity” can be seen as a form of hyperrationality. True, as Eva Illouz told us last week, the mode of address to the consumer must take into account the idea of emotion, but isn’t the whole point of market research to try and figure out how to statistically pinpoint and utilize various emotions as tools in the generation of profit? (Illouz’s notion of emotion as more precise and differentiated than the notion of “desire” might have a relationship to the concept of modality here…) And as Naomi Klein has told us this week (and Baudrillard has told us previously), brands are in the business of signs, culture, and lifestyles rather than just products, but in order to better target their desired demographics, entire armies of marketing researchers and psychologists must do their best to engineer a brand image which simultaneously differentiates itself from other brands within the market, while also establishing a continuity for the brand to which various products can be seen to recognizably belong.
It is within this “logos” of hyperrationalization and the expansion of the brand that I now turn to the video. Although I think that the speaker makes some outlandish claims and sort of makes the opposite value-judgment from the one that I would make, I do think that he is useful in projecting many of the relationships between technology and branding that I think may constitute our near future. In line with what Henry Jenkins calls the “black box fallacy,” Schell recognizes that technological convergence does not necessarily mean the creation of digital swiss army knives, but instead will entail the proliferation and expansion of diverse technologies into ambient space, subsumed under the dynamic unity of the brand. (Although he doesn't choose to call this process "convergence" and retains none of the nuances of Jenkins' use of the term, I would argue that Schell's vision of the proliferation and expansion of technologies at least doesn't fall into the naive reductionism of the black box fallacy). In Schell's vision, user-feedback loops will not just be conducted via consumer surveys and market research but will be incentivized via ubiquitous gaming which melds the brand and aesthetic object so well that we no longer have mere brand sponsorship but complete brand-content integration. Here, those age-old, neoliberal signifiers of freedom, choice, and empowerment get pushed to the next level in the rhetoric of interactivity, which seem to allow consumers to, as Baudrillard so eloquently said, “make the choice imposed on them.”
At this point in Schell's talk, I also couldn't help but think of how surveillance allows g-mail to read your e-mails and profile you in order to generate advertisements customized to your needs. Here, there is a relation between digitization, what Lisa Nakamura calls “menu-driven identities,” and market research that I find particularly troubling. And, as Schell seems to imply, if we can only co-opt ubiquitous sensoring to more "noble" purposes, maybe we can craft better citizens, progressive societies, and, perhaps even most importantly, more efficient and expansive economies. Somewhere, Foucault is turning in his grave...
Sorry for the overly dramatic rant on the dystopian future, but needless to say, this video sort of struck a chord with me. While I do agree that digital technologies offer particular affordances for decentralization and grassroots empowerment, I do think that they also can be implemented in the branding sense for a more efficient methodology of control. I personally think we need to pay more attention to the discourse of the latter if we don’t want to trump the potentially liberating possibilities of the former.
P.S. for Charlie: Watch out for his discussion near the beginning of Wii Games and Facebook applications as more "authentic" or "realistic" gameplay in distinction to more traditional, fantasy oriented games. Third order simulacra anyone?
