Understanding the role of branding in society requires an understanding of the transition to modernism and postmodernism. With this transition, community institutions outside of the capitalist accumulation process like religious services and extended family had to be attacked and degraded to create room for the ascendancy of the nuclear family, consumerism, and identity-through-commodities.
By reducing the individual from a member of a community to a supposedly independent unit, it makes them far more manipulable, less likely to resist the paradigm shoved on them, and subservient to the stranglehold of capitalism.
Forcing people to seek identity through what they buy is a product of reducing their ability to establish an identity based on community. The differences between brands of magazines, newspapers, and periodicals have far less to do with differentiation in content, but are instead a method of dividing up consumers into different income brackets.
One of the best examples today is Stratfor. It exists entirely as a magazine that is meant for wealthy people to acquire a self-identity as "wealthy", the analysis inside of it is not markedly different from that found in other establishment magazines.
Identity-through-commodities is the driving force of postmodernist capitalism, and it achieves this through branding. Branding is the ultimate result of the contradictions between art and capitalism. Art's goals are two-fold; to create emotions in the audience and express the desires, feelings, and emotions of the artist. The latter has to be suppressed to fulfill capitalism's only goal: expansion. Expansion through the creation of desire is the foundation of advertising, and branding is how it tells people what to feel.
Brands have become our most famous forms of art. In Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock interviews first graders, and they immediately recognize fast food icons like Ronald McDonald but have trouble recognizing the Europeanized version of Jesus.
Branding is designed to smash the barriers between needs outside of the capitalist accumulation process and needs that can be fulfilled through consuming. Olive Garden's slogan, "when you're here, you're family" is part of capitalism's drive to degrade familial bonds, and literally sell people the feeling of family. What used to be a part of everyday life is something that people feel they must pay for. They aren't just buying shitty Italian fast food, they're buying an experience of intergenerational bonding that existed before the implementation of the nuclear family.
Real life is becoming inseparable from what we see in advertisements. Our relationships with others are merely seen as an emotional tie to be manipulated. Take this 90s McDonald's ad as an example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIlix4TJb40
These advertisements instruct people how to behave. Ride BMX! Drive with your friends! but if you want to have a good time doing it, you better be going to the Golden Arches
It is instructing kids that they are supposed to take the tray, they are supposed to be happy when they do it, and that McDonald's is their favorite place.
But brands don't always push emotions on the audience, they sometimes force the audience to push their emotions on the advertising itself. Hello Kitty, which is basically advertising for the huge number of Hello Kitty products, doesn't have a mouth for this specific reason. Spokespeople for Sanrio have said that Hello Kitty does not have a mouth because they want people to "project their feelings onto the character" and "be happy or sad together with Hello Kitty."
They're selling every emotion to their consumers, they're selling friendship, they're selling the feeling of identifying with another person.
It's important to recognize that this is only possible because of the constant degradation of familial and community ties as well as the degradation of community-based identity. In our hyper-individualistic society, people replace family with food, they replace deep emotional friendship with toys, and they use these products to create an identity.
Stratfor is just The Economist a week later and several hundred times more expensive.
Regulation is very important, protect trademarks, worship the Christian God
EmanuelaOrlandi posted:im reading a college textbook on how to design brand identity right now. gonna get rich yo.
someday we should do a brandstorming session
Myfanwy posted:You can see how in an unregulated market, like say heroin sold in new york city, popular brands (stamps or printed logos or stickers on stamps of heroin) are copied and almost always the packet with a copied brand will be garbage.
As a NYC resident and occasional heroin user, wrong
swampman posted:Myfanwy posted:You can see how in an unregulated market, like say heroin sold in new york city, popular brands (stamps or printed logos or stickers on stamps of heroin) are copied and almost always the packet with a copied brand will be garbage.
As a NYC resident and occasional heroin user, wrong
what did i say wrong
i have a sunburn
Myfanwy posted:the wire
swampman posted:Myfanwy posted:You can see how in an unregulated market, like say heroin sold in new york city, popular brands (stamps or printed logos or stickers on stamps of heroin) are copied and almost always the packet with a copied brand will be garbage.
As a NYC resident and occasional heroin user, wrong
the counterfeits are universally garbage. 99% of the time
Myfanwy posted:swampman posted:Myfanwy posted:You can see how in an unregulated market, like say heroin sold in new york city, popular brands (stamps or printed logos or stickers on stamps of heroin) are copied and almost always the packet with a copied brand will be garbage.
As a NYC resident and occasional heroin user, wrong
what did i say wrong
i have a sunburn
Stamps arent brand specific, theyre dealer specific. If multiple kinds of junk are stamped the same way, it's because they at one point came through the same supplier. Most people only have one dealer, they dont have any idea what's going on across the market.
swampman posted:Myfanwy posted:swampman posted:Myfanwy posted:You can see how in an unregulated market, like say heroin sold in new york city, popular brands (stamps or printed logos or stickers on stamps of heroin) are copied and almost always the packet with a copied brand will be garbage.
As a NYC resident and occasional heroin user, wrong
what did i say wrong
i have a sunburnStamps arent brand specific, theyre dealer specific. If multiple kinds of junk are stamped the same way, it's because they at one point came through the same supplier. Most people only have one dealer, they dont have any idea what's going on across the market.
I guess that qualifies as a brand to me, because its stillt he visual representation of the end of the supply chain? And if lots of people talk and live all over the city its not that hard to get a partial picture? But you need to be friends with lots of people who do heroin. I wasn't trying to represent a general trademark landscape , not an individual's view of things. But I thank you for your clarifications and look forward to working together in the future
Real life is becoming inseparable from what we see in advertisements. Our relationships with others are merely seen as an emotional tie to be manipulated. Take this 90s McDonald's ad as an example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIlix4TJb40
These advertisements instruct people how to behave. Ride BMX! Drive with your friends! but if you want to have a good time doing it, you better be going to the Golden Arches
It is instructing kids that they are supposed to take the tray, they are supposed to be happy when they do it, and that McDonald's is their favorite place.
it's almost like if parents had some more responsibility and kids had some brains, they could learn to not trust everything they see in advertisements.
Power trying to con or influence people is nothing new, and has been around under many guises for as long as human society has. Compared to getting expelled from a tribe for not following some arcane ritual, or beheaded because i didn't believe in the right God, an advertisement suggesting I may have fun if i decide to eat a hamburger doesn't seem to "oppressive" in the scheme of things huh?
swampman posted:Myfanwy posted:You can see how in an unregulated market, like say heroin sold in new york city, popular brands (stamps or printed logos or stickers on stamps of heroin) are copied and almost always the packet with a copied brand will be garbage.
As a NYC resident and occasional heroin user, wrong
also, as a trade mark lawyer in training, wrong
deadken posted:you've got rat poison meth and paracetamol
that's my "saturday night special"
fuck your petty self-important identity
fuck your shitty proto-fascist community
fuck your parents.
wasted posted:fuck your parents.
done. see my e/n and ask/tell threads about growing up in a family which commonly practiced incest
deadken posted:thanks 4 da analysis naomi
post your tattoos in this thread bro
AmericanNazbro posted:ost your tattoos in this thread br
no reason, everybody in lf knows i have the best tattoos
plus, there is really no better place to post your tattoos than a thread about self branding in the effort to create an identity for one's self
babyfinland posted:why a brand over a king
The king has an absolutist, arbitrary authority and presence, whereas I can incorporate brands into my identity based on my own values and tastes.
Ironicwarcriminal posted:babyfinland posted:why a brand over a king
The king has an absolutist, arbitrary authority and presence, whereas I can incorporate brands into my identity based on my own values and tastes.
yeah that's the problem