“The New Labour brand has been badly contaminated.” There can be no better testimony to the significance of the brand than Philip Gould’s leaked memo to the Labour hierarchy in mid-July. Labour’s gradual slide in the opinion poles since 1998 - a 29% majority slashed by over half according to MORI - is due not to the loss of political vision but the contamination of the government’s brand. The solution is not a re-invigoration of public policy but “to reinvent the New Labour brand”. We no longer buy or wear brands, it seems. We elect them.
It would easy to mock these sentiments or dismiss them with the same casual wave of the hand with which all marketing is treated nowadays. However, to do so would be to be guilty of arrogance and cultural myopia. The brand is the icon par excellence of the West today. Christians ignore it at their peril.
Philip Gould, moreover, is no inane pseudo-guru of marketing. A pioneer of the political focus group, he had written a prescription for the public’s ailing faith in political democracy before most people had even taken its pulse. His memo shows that he understands branding - and the reason for its necessity and success - with great clarity: “In government, virtue will not reap its own reward. Delivery alone will not produce deliverance. We have to win hearts as well as minds in every single one of our core areas.” ‘Delivery does not equal deliverance’ could well be a proof-text of a post-modern society… what you do is less important than what you are perceived to do. It is against this backdrop that the brand has triumphed in the West in the last half-century.
The Consumer Need
When, in their advertising campaign, lineone invite you to “design your own universe” they are, intentionally or otherwise, going to the very heart of today’s culture. Their strapline is almost a paraphrase of Lyotard’s definition of post-modernity as the breakdown of the meta-narrative. There is no longer one acceptable and universally agreed story of who we are or what we should do. Our purpose and values are not defined by our class or religion or region or job. The ethical and existential market place has opened up. It is up to us to choose who we want to be.
This in itself is not unique to the last ten years. Ever since the First World War this vista of absolute liberation has been slowly opening up before our eyes. What is different now is not the vision itself but those to whom it presents itself. Figures from the Office of National Statistics show that we are better off than ever before. In real terms, our income has risen by over 40% in real terms since 1986 and forecasts give no indication of a change in this upward trend. Perhaps more tellingly, ONS figures also show that in 1999, for the first time ever, as a nation we spent more on leisure goods and services than we did on food and non-alcoholic drinks. Not to put to fine a point on it, a lot of people in the UK today have money to waste.
This cash-wealth is, however, accompanied by a trend towards time poverty. The average working week is longer in the UK than anywhere else in Europe. In a recent survey, over 60% of respondents agreed with the statement ‘I never seem to have enough time to get things done’. The self-creation offers by a post-modern world is a time-consuming process and time is the one thing that most of us cannot afford. The solution? Pay with what you can afford rather than what you can’t. Why build yourself when you can buy yourself?
The Market Need
There is another side to the coin, however. If today people are in the market to buy identity and values, products are in the market to sell them. There is enormous confusion about what a brand actually is. Ask two brand or marketing consultants for an explanation and you can almost guarantee that you will hear different answers. Given such a tangle of definitions, it is best to take an etymological approach. Brand shares the same root as burn. Its modern meaning comes from the permanent mark burnt onto the skin of animals or criminals by means of a hot iron in order to distinguish them from others animals or criminals and/ or to denote ownership. In other words, in a retail context, a brand is a means of telling one product or service from another. To this extent, the brand is exactly the same now as it was a hundred years ago.
There is an near-infinite number of ways of marking out one product from another but ultimately they all relate to two fundamental areas. Describable as tangible/ intangible, performance/ affinity, physical/ emotional, they boil down to what a product does and what it is. The former is, of course, the more obvious mark of differentiation. Products are designed, manufactured and bought for a purpose. They do not have innate or distinct identities. Historically, therefore, the tangible has been sufficient means of product clarification. If the buying public either does not own a widget or has one with only basic functionality, all you need to do to sell your new widget is to spell out why owning a widget would make a difference to someone’s life or explain what your product does differently from the basic widget. Your brand is based on performance.
Examples of this in early advertising proliferate. “Bovril soon puts a man on his feet”. “Robertson’s Golden Shred - Puts the taste on the toast”. “Michelin tires swallow up all obstacles”. At the dawn of the consumer age, there was sufficient scope for a product to differentiate itself by focusing on what it did. The end of the twentieth century presents a very different environment.
Consumerism is over fifty years old now. Many product categories and brands are a good deal older. All but the most nascent are teeming with competitors. Most importantly, a good proportion does not enjoy sufficiently frequent technological developments to allow performance to remain as the sole or even significant point of distinction. The widget manufacturer is less likely now to be able to tell the public that his new widget is effectively any better than his old one, and even when he can there is a good chance that a competitor will have a product that does exactly the same thing in just as efficient, user-friendly a way.
When this happens, manufacturers naturally move towards the area of intangible differentiation. The modern brand is still qualitatively the same the one of fifty or a hundred years ago - a particular and unique sign in the marketplace. It just so happens that the market is so vast and so mature, that the sign, perforce, is written in a new way.
And so, just as the early years of the century provide numerous examples of the functional brand, so the last demonstrate the emotional brand. The recent Renault Scenic advert which presents a shallow and poisonous nest of the chattering classes sitting around a dining table exchanging viperous comments about two ‘friends’ who have decided to open a hotel in an exotic location is selling not a car but a lifestyle. In not such a subtle way it is saying, ‘if you buy this car, you will a) be the kind of person who has the courage to escape the rat race, b) demonstrate yourself as a innovative and untethered spirit, and c) avoid being sucked into the living hell of vituperative and disingenuous vapidity.’ Similarly, the French Connection slogan ‘fcuk’ is not selling clothes but sniggering, adolescent, pseudo-rebellion.
Supreme amongst these image-peddlers is, of course, Benetton. The distance to which they have drifted from functionality is breathtaking and almost comical. Were we not so acclimatised to the existence of the intangible brand, we might be more inclined to see Oliviero Toscani’s executions as Monty Python sketches that were deemed too abstruse for common consumption. What, after all, does death row have to do with jumpers? Peculiarly, Benetton has managed to ride the wave of perplexed and irritated publicity and may well be in the vanguard of the next movement of the branding world - purposefully using advertising with no connection whatsoever to products, simply as a springboard for publicity.
Of course, to suggest that everyone has jettisoned performance for affinity in all their purchases is nonsense. No amount of marketing theory will change the fact that when people buy a product, their first thought is whether it will ‘work’ for them. No matter how much you like the idea of wearing ‘victory’ on your feet and living by the fearless, post-ideological creed ‘Just do it’, if the trainers don’t fit, you won’t buy them. It is only in areas which suffer particularly from saturation and technological stagnation, that ‘brand is’ becomes a serious rival to ‘brand does’. It is, however, just these areas that people have in mind when they talk about ‘the modern branding phenomenon’.
From communication to creation
The success of this migration from ‘brand does’ to ‘brand is’ is, as outlined earlier, predominantly due to the fact that people are in the market for meaning. However, there is another reason more deeply rooted in our cultural climate. As mentioned above, products do not have an innate or absolute meaning. A jumper is about as meaningful as the fibres from which it is woven. Consequently, the meaning of these modern brands is, as it were, plucked out of thin air. Moreover, having no root in reality in the way that a product’s functionality does (either a car has ABS or it doesn’t, etc.), the brand can only be said to exist as the impression that it makes in the consumer’s mind. If the consumer doesn’t think that my widget’s are youthful, autarchic and anarchic, it matters not a jot that I do or that my advertising says they are. The modern brand is an entirely subjective concept, untroubled by such antiquated concepts as truth or verifiability. It is what is seen, not what is.
Every meaning needs something like a justification or context, however. The mere fact that I can write, “a jumper is about as meaningful as the fibres from which it is woven,” is testimony to the fact that these brand values have not yet replaced or even seriously challenged our concept of reality. However, even over the last five years they have taken gigantic steps towards doing so.
Brands exist and operate within a retail context. If people are in a shopping centre or thinking with a retail-designed mind, Nike really does ‘mean’ bridging the gap between potential and performance. However, when the shops shut at 5.30 and we get back home we see instead a pair of slightly worn shoes kicked off in the front-hall. As soon as God’s or empirical reality (call it what you will) is reasserted, the brand become at best a few squiggles, at worst a joke.
Except, of course, that the shops do not shut at 5.30. Late night shopping, Sunday opening, 24-hour shops and, most importantly, the Internet have made the market ubiquitous. Shopping is no longer confined to shops or opening hours. Indeed, the very idea of opening hours will soon seem very outdated. Your home is a shop; in fact, any shop. Time and space are no longer an issue. The market has assumed them and in doing so is more than ever before a comprehensive and credible reality of its own.
The upshot is that logos have moved from being means of communication to means of creation. Value, meaning, identity - all are within their scope, and the omnipresence of the market means that there’s no peeking round the side to see what’s really behind it all. With their universal environment, commercial drive and social demand, they are a new creation.
A Christian response
Theological language aside, it is easy to see why Christians might reject the entire retail and branding phenomenon with disapproval and distaste. Philip Gould’s phrase ‘virtue will not reap its own reward’ sounds like a parody of the sermon on the mount and is in direct contradiction to Jesus’ teaching on prayer… ‘don’t do things just so that others can see them - be satisfied that God can’. Or, to use Mr Gould’s metaphor, worry about delivery, not deliverance.
Nevertheless, to reject branding and all it is seen to represent would be merely to brand ourselves as reactionary or frightened. We must live in the faith that we have something important to contribute to the debate and the humility that we have something to learn from it.
Areas for our contribution are many and beyond the scope of this essay. They might involve pinpointing each of the ingredients that have gone into baking the branding cake. In a cash-rich society, what are we doing with ‘our’ money? In a time-poor culture, how are we spending our time? In an environment where people spend their weekends buying their latest meta-narrative, how might we demonstrate the narrative in which we believe? In a civilisation where meaning is fluid and can change with every new advertising campaign, how are we exhibiting values and identity which are not contingent on a cash-point or credit card bill? Perhaps most significantly, how are we wearing our logos?
It is in this last point that we should also have the humility to learn from commercial brands. The British consumer is more sophisticated and more demanding that ever before. Focus group respondents regularly complain about advertising saturation and are often deeply sceptical about the integrity of marketing and retail. Consciously or otherwise, many people are able to decode advertisement with alarming speed and precision. The result, when combined with the innate human loathing of hypocrisy is an audience which is constantly evolving and ever more willing and able to see through brands. Those which say one thing in their advertising but do not reflect it in the product quality or corporate structure are severely vulnerable.
This is a curious and somewhat ironic point as far as Christians are concerned. We now see corporate structures being subject to the perennial criticism which is levelled at the church - ‘it doesn’t practice what it preaches’. The irony is compounded when commentators like Jesper Kunde use religion as a lesson and metaphor for commercial organisations. The fundamental thrust of his book Corporate Religion is that companies need a holistic approach to their brand. The brand is not just the logo, it is not even a way of distinguishing your product or service in the crowded marketplace. It should be the over-arching idea governing the planning and execution of everything you do.
We could do well to hear this afresh. From people wearing brands we are moving into an age where companies, for fear of being pulled up for hypocrisy, are living them. Similarly, Paul tells the Roman Christians to “clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ” and also that they are to be conformed to his likeness. In the saturated and mature divine market place of the first century, where people shopped for their narratives in the way that we do today, this was one of the reasons for the rapid expansion of Christianity. As Aristeides wrote in about 150 AD, “Christians… have the commandments of the Lord Jesus Christ himself engraven on their hearts, and these they observe.” Perhaps, nearly two thousand years later, we might be able to learn from the example of commercialism in our quest to live out the power of the logos.
This article first appeared in Third Way.
