Rip. Mix. Brand
There is something weird happening in the world of brands. Under the radar, outside the sometimes sterile corporate conversations about market positioning, brand valuation and corporate identity, a cultural revolution is under way. Like an atom smasher, our accelerating postmodern culture is hurtling people and brands together at a higher and higher rate of speed, and the results of their collision are stranger - and more compelling - than we could possibly have imagined.
For starters, to many people, brands aren’t simply in the culture, they are the culture. Marketers traditionally thought of brands as making promises about products and services, and have measured brands by how well they delivered on those promises. But today, brands are increasingly serving another function: they have become the tools with which people construct their personal and social identities. Survey the brandscape and you’ll find dating Web sites that match singles by their brand preferences - “Single Coke Male seeks Sony Female for hot times.” You’ll find a Starbucks that just opened in the lobby of a Midwestern megachurch and you’ll find people being buried out back in Harley-Davidson-branded caskets. Brands have gone from being the glue that ties companies and consumers together to being the glue that holds our very souls together.
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This is part of a much larger cultural and economic story. The marketplace has become the central meaning-making institution in many people’s lives, augmenting, and in some cases replacing, everything from political to religious affiliation. Ask an average citizen to name their congressional or city council representative and you’ll likely get a blank stare, but everybody, it seems, has a passionate opinion about Wal-Mart, Starbucks or Microsoft.
America has always had a mercantile society, but the intimacy between people, brands and culture began to intensify in the early 1980s when state and federal governments started to deregulate markets and curb public sector spending. With this rollback of government, corporate involvement in daily life began to increase dramatically, and brands reached into the public sphere as never before.
Depending on your perspective, this led to either a virtuous or vicious cycle: As government retreated, the role of private institutions expanded, justifying even more government withdrawal. As a result, museums and cultural institutions today must seek out corporate underwriting and accept corporate branding to fulfill their mission - there are no government budgets to support them. One-quarter of California public school students now eat branded fast food in their cafeterias. School principals are forced to cut deals with the likes of McDonald’s and Taco Bell to fund extracurricular arts and sports programs because sufficient funds are no longer provided by the state. (”We’re forced to choose between well-rounded kids and well-rounded kids,” joked one principal I spoke with.) Government Acquisitions Inc., a North Carolina-based company, recently started offering small-town police squads free police cruisers covered, NASCAR-style, in corporate advertising, because state governments are no longer able to pick up the tab for their vehicles. These, and countless other examples have erased the boundaries of “the market,” and made the brandscape virtually inescapable.