With everything from oxygen to operations now branded, LUCAS CONLEYtraces how brand management has become the key arena for modern competition.
'SHALL WE charge that to your Vatican Visa, Miss?" Yes, you read that right: The Holy See is venturing into the credit industry, stamping its brand across a new line of credit, debit, and gift cards. Created for Catholics who don't mind the idea of their spiritual leader and credit lender being one and the same, the new cards are the products of a recent licensing agreement between the Vatican Observatory and Global Brands Group, an international brand management firm serving clients like Warner Brothers and FIFA.
According to Mark Matheny, Global Brands' chief executive, the cards will be set up to allow any funds they generate to be divided between the user's parish of choice and ongoing research efforts at the Vatican Observatory.
In today's increasingly brand-obsessed culture, it should come as no shock that the Catholic Church is branding its way into the credit game.
Papal-approved credit cards, while sure to raise a few eyebrows and spark a few cracks (will His Holiness hire a collection agency or just hold delinquent borrowers in Purgatory until they make good?), are actually just one of a number of gifts and keepsakes that now bear the blessed brand, from coins and jewellery to clothing and housewares.
Indeed, cynical readers no doubt stopped indulging in incredulity at the excesses of branding years ago.
That was back when liquor brands began sponsoring weddings in return for product placement, perhaps, or once word-of-mouth marketers started rewarding consumers for covertly promoting products to their friends and family, or mothers first saw fit to sell the naming rights to their unborn children to online casinos.
These were just a few of the early symptoms of the social malady I've come to know as Obsessive Branding Disorder (OBD).
Where a company's brand was once the cumulative result of its products, services, and packaging, today, the reverse is true: products, service, and packaging - even the entire company itself - are all subject to branding. But a brand is a result, not a tactic; the experts have bottled an ends and sold it as a means.
The affects of this upheaval are clear. Saturated, we increasingly see the world through a branded lens in which things are defined more by their packaging than their content. Where shoppers once relied on brands as shorthand for qualities like consistency and reliability, modern branding often attempts to distract them from these very elements, blurring the lines between good products and bad.
Forced to compete in discount stores, brands formerly defined by their quality, like Coleman Lanterns and Levis Jeans, stoop to produce low-cost, low-quality lines, losing their only remaining competitive advantage by becoming parodies themselves. How on earth did we get here?
A new business religion
Beginning as convenient mental shortcuts, brands have always served to relay information and unlock deeper, more nuanced concepts, such as quality or origin. The mark on a 9,000-year-old clay pot may speak to the craftsmanship of its maker, for example, while the seal stamped into the lid of a 2,000-year-old terracotta wine jar testifies to the region from which it came.
Even in the modern age, as branding legends like Procter & Gamble began reverse-engineering the process to contrive brands from scratch, wrapping bars of soap in colourful paper and mass marketing them under fanciful names and mascots, branding's strategies remained largely confined to the world of consumer packaged goods. This is no longer the case.
A vague and idealistic new business religion, branding has risen to prominence during an age of confusion. The media businesses rely on for promotion and positioning are splintering and frustrating any attempt to deliver the brand message to consumers in one piece. Their products are rapidly copied and commodified, rendering hard-earned innovations obsolete in a matter of weeks or months.
Investors, demanding fractions of pennies on a quarterly basis, are often storming the gates, ousting executives after just months on the job. Worldwide, annual turnover of CEOs soared 59 per cent between 1995 and 2006. CMOs, those executives in charge of branding, now average just 26.8 months on the job. Frazzled, panicked, executives have turned to branding, a business strategy formerly reserved for laundry detergent and diapers. After all, what is a brand? Nothing we can measure or explain, precisely. It's a fictional property, often illusory and evocative - the emperor's finest duds.
Branding's spread didn't stop at the executive suite. Branding offers a unique example of a business philosophy that has jumped the tracks, barrelling through popular culture unchecked.
Unlike most business theory, which has remained largely contained in the business world, the tenets of branding have been embraced across mainstream society.
Be it Vatican charge cards, Brand Obama, What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas, or The Brand Called You, every industry has seen some the benefit from branding's bromides. Stretching from the grocery aisle to gross absurdity, there seemed no limits to branding's spread. Naturally, the branding experts agreed.
"A brand is like a promise," says Todd Sebastian, a veteran of the €49 billion branding juggernaut, Procter & Gamble. "Every person, place and thing has its own promise to the world."
True enough, if you can imagine it, someone's likely already packaging and selling it. Simple commodities like water, soil, and concrete now come branded - as do complex entities, like cities, states, and entire nations. Need a moment to catch your breath? Branded oxygen is easy to find. Tired? Dozens of entrepreneurs, in clinics and hotels and "nap centres", offer their own proprietary brand of sleep. Branding is encroaching on areas of our lives we never imagined, from hospitals and education to sex, psychiatry, and cemeteries. We're branded, quite literally, from the cradle to the grave.
Inevitably, all these brands have to find a way to market. Ironically, while the fractured media landscape has empowered consumers in recent years, it only exacerbated the spread of OBD.
While media channels have increased, our attention spans remain a finite resource. Overwhelmed by brands at every turn, the average consumer is now subjected to 3,000-5,000 ads a day.
Where a mainstream advertiser like Ford or Hershey could once count on regularly encountering consumers on one or two central media byways, targeting and tracking down the right consumer today demands far more ingenuity. Leveraging technology, science, and psychology, branders have answered the call, pioneering increasingly cunning and invasive methods of capturing our attention.
Branding now demands scanning our brains, monitoring the electrical impulses in our facial muscles, psychoanalysing our most intimate thoughts, even designing software capable of reading our expressions and assessing our feelings as we watch ads in our homes.
Branders woo us with branded smells, rigorously designed branded sounds in formerly overlooked places (fast food straws, car blinkers), and branded foods from such unlikely chefs as like Crayola and Nascar.
With so many brands fighting for so little attention, many are unable to break through the clutter. Ultimately, some branders circumvent mores, morals, and ethics entirely in their attempts to get noticed. Nowhere is this more evident than in word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing, a more-or-less lawless region of the branding world that stretches from the web to the neighbourhood barstool.
This month, the UK will institute new laws governing online marketers. Though there is no indication that the US will follow suit, most WOM marketers adhere to a higher ethical standard than required by current laws. Others, as noted in the panel, take advantage of the lack of oversight.
Every disorder implies a preexisting order, and indeed, brands do have their natural functions in our lives. Look no further than the overzealous attempts to remove brands and branding from society: All have failed.
Impoverished communists in rural Soviet Russia examined warehouse codes on the sides of generic boxes to identify those with consistently higher quality goods. Naomi Klein now reluctantly admits that No Logo, her polemical antiglobalization book-cum-movement is "a brand... in spite of itself." And Adbusters, the anti-consumerist magazine created in 1990 to "topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century"? Not only does the magazine now occasionally print advertisements, its site sells its own brand of runners, calendars, flags, videos, and more. It's obvious brands belong in our lives, but it is up to us to determine where the balance is lost and the disorder begins.
The alternative is no alternative at all: allowing brands and branding to continue marching deeper into our environments and mental space, distorting the existing order. There is certainly no reason to believe our circumstances will improve on their own. Media will continue to splinter into niches, allowing marketeers richer, more targeted access to our time and preferences.
Brands will fill any spaces available to them, be it physical, mental, olfactory, aural, or some new media or environment we have yet to imagine. And though our minds will become more inured to brands, brands will grow sharper honing in on our minds. Conscious of this, we are already better prepared to weigh the significance of our purchasing decisions and behaviours, develop the dynamic human bonds fundamental to our relationships and communities, and realise our identity free of the dissonance of disorder.
WORD-OF-MOUTH MARKETING
May 28th, 2008, 12am
Beginning at midnight, any UK citizen caught creating a fake blog (known as a "flog") or "falsely representing oneself as a consumer" will be subject to criminal prosecution under the UK's revised "Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations".
Unscrupulous marketers posing as independent bloggers, publicists promoting products in the comment sections of websites without revealing their affiliation, frustrated chefs posting anonymous positive reviews about their own restaurants - all will face a fine and up to two years in prison. As harsh as these penalties are for those who continue to violate the rules, regulators admit the laws themselves will be difficult to enforce.
May 28th, 2008, 12pm
Several thousand miles away, on the same day, a pair of vast marketing armies based out of Cincinnati, Ohio, operate under decidedly more lenient guidelines. Creations of Procter & Gamble - Tremor (250,000 teenagers) and Vocalpoint (600,000 mothers) - they are two of the world's largest word-of-mouth advocacy programs.
If P&G's numbers are right, one in every 100 US teenagers belongs to Tremor, and seven in every 100 US mothers is a member of Vocalpoint.
Providing members with coupons, free products and rewards, P&G encourages them to try out the products and evangelise about those they like to people they know. Free from government oversight, P&G's WOM members are free to promote goods as they see fit; meanwhile, the company does not obligate any of them to reveal their affiliation to the company when recommending goods and services to their friends or family.
May 29, 2008, 10am
Taking the stage the following morning at the Baazarvoice Social Conference 2008, in Austin, Texas, Andy Sernovitz will deliver the keynote presentation - "Word of Mouth Marketing: Increase Visitors and Buyers by Creating Conversations" - to a sold out crowd. Author of Word-of-Mouth Marketing and the co-founder and former CEO of the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association, Sernovitz is one of the world's leading authorities on developing "buzz".
A firm advocate for disclosing any affiliations in word-of-mouth campaigns, he has helped establish the standard that nearly all WOM marketeers follow. In his speeches, he offers audiences a detailed guide to orchestrating an effective campaign by building communities, reaching out to influencers, and spurring further dialogue with online tools.
Lucas Conley is author of OBD: OBSESSIVE BRANDING DISORDER: The Illusion of Business and the Business of Illusion. It is published on June 1st by Public Affairs Books: €18
