intrust

The author Naomi Klein has made a successful career of berating big name corporations, such as Nike, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Tommy Hilfiger, etc. In her 1999 book “No logo” she surveys how firms like these, behind their slick life-style marketing campaigns and domination of public space, ruthlessly violate workers rights and destroy “traditional” values. Klein believes that the success of branding is about the failure of social institutions. "We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we’re not getting those things from our communities or from each other." Thus she appears to share the opinions of Putnam, in seeing brands as a gap-fillers for our diminishing stock of social capital.

We put aside for now her criticism of the exploitation of third world labour, and concentrate on the function of brands as a) surrogates for spirituality and social capital, and b) false declarations of product and intent.

In order to replace or usurp spirituality, branding and advertising campaigns must have something spiritual about them. You can’t replace religion with refrigerators or metaphysical contemplation with dog racing, or well, perhaps you can, – if refrigerators and dog racing are perceived as more than their materialistic incarnations. Advertising, as opposed to fact sheets and content declarations, is meant to be emotional, even spiritual, or as one fan of brands waxes:

...simultaneously arousing anticipation and enabling fulfilment by inviting the consumer to recreate and mentally personalize [...] fantasies of omnipotence, of unlimited sex appeal, of importance, of adventure, etc. First, we instil a promise of a certain feeling in the consumers’ mind. Then, consuming or using the product becomes a cue to ’connect’ to that feeling and experience it (think of Marlboro and the feeling of powerfulness that results from self restrain and control). This is a genuinely hypnotic effect.¹

I have found no proponent for including advertising in the discourse on social capital. Yet arguably advertising and branding are among the greatest promoters of trust in the world today. And at the same time a hefty cultural resource. The combination is remarkably potent. Trust, and enjoy yourself at the same time.

Branding makes life simpler. There are lots of intricate details out there which make the world go around. A lot of decisions to be made. We need help. We need leverage – shortcuts. Brands do that for us. If they are prominent we associate them with success. If they are well crafted they offer personal gratification – even excluding direct consumption of the product involved: We have all enjoyed commercials for products we will never consume.

And everything gets branded; governments, churches, universities, sporting teams, health cures and diets and war efforts, if not directly through the campaigns of ad agencies and spin-doctors, then through circuitous self-enforcing media coverage and word-of-mouth personal networks. Even without the stimulus of a sexy TV personalty or a sports star, we will internally create our own branded versions of most of what we encounter in life. We psychologically flavour the “facts” and more often than not, derive enjoyment in doing so.

Furthermore, inasmuch as an object’s formal and technical connotations are added to a functional incoherence, it is the whole system of needs, socialized or unconscious, cultural practical – in short, a whole inessential system, directly experienced – which surges back on to the essential technical order and threatens the objective status of the object itself. Baudrillard²

In fairness to Naomi Klein, she does not so much object to the existence of brands and advertising as to the falsehoods she claims they perpetrate. She would prefer if their message was more fact and less fiction – more truth and less emotion. She maintains that in painting cool urban imagery or exalting lone prairie cowboy heroes, rather than declaring actually what a product does, what it is made out of and just how and where it is manufactured, brands fail to inform us of what we really want to – , or at least ought to, know.

At the moment many of the brands Klein criticizes are experiencing hard times, but if they are getting beat it is not by conscientious challengers riding the moral high ground and offering better product description and ethic issue disclosures, but by fresher, trendier brands.

Brands solve complexity problems, through the promotion of trust by the simplification of facts or emotions. They are reputational systems. Our perception of science is for example branded; The theory of relativity, Quantum Physics, Moore’s Law, are things most of us only know through branded simplification. Einstein, along with Marylin Monroe and Winston Churchill is one of the greatest brands of the 20^th Century, and his image fortifies our envisioning of science as both brilliant and humane.

One of the most delightful tracts in the literature of Information Technology’s is George Miller’s “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”³ Readily exemplifying the tragedy of the commons, Millers findings are freely cited as proof that humans can’t remember more than seven of anything. And though, when it comes to one-dimensional judgements, such as remembering a series of numbers or selection of colours there is considerable evidence that most of us get stuck at somewhere around seven, we are, Alhamdulillah, gifted with the ability to perceive and think multi-dimensionally. This explains our remarkable ability for remembering faces: we memorize a bevy of multi-dimensional intersections. For example, by keeping track of the intersection of seven sorts of noses, mouths, eyes and hair, we could remember 7ˆ4 or 2401 faces.

But when it comes to making choices, despite the multi-dimensionality of circumstances, environments and specificities, we often – can’t be bothered. We desire simplification and we desire gratification, and though we appreciate, or rely, on the existence of detail and fact, we choose not to carry them around with us in our knapsacks.

// posted by Greg FitzPatrick @ 00:05