Branding and Its Influences

1. Branding and Its Influences Chapter 4 (aka “Running It Up a Flagpole and See If Anyone Salutes”)

2. Chapter 4 Keys • Brands we use everyday– the “Lisa Greatgal” example • “Lisa Greatgal” and “Johnny Q. Public’s” Daily Media Diet • The contention that “media dominate our lives” based on hours per year spent using various media (p. 63) • That we may spend close to twice the amount of hours per year consuming media (3649 hours) than we do if we work 40 hours a week for 50 weeks (2000 hours) • The price we pay for “free” television is being exposed to countless commercials

3. Advertising Pressures? • Exposure to so many commercials (and advertising in general)– does it put pressure on us to purchase things? • Researchers contend that advertising has a much more profound impact than we imagine on our consciousness, our identities, our belief systems, our private lives, and our societies and culture in general • What are the cultural consequences of the commercial and of the advertising industry in general?

4. Unconscious Influences • Psychologists such as Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud believed that things can be in our minds without our being aware of them • That the unconscious determines many of our actions, even though we are unaware that it is doing so • We have repressed much of the material in our unconscious and thus find ourselves doing things at the “command,” so to speak, of forces in our unconscious • Advertising agencies, some contend, use subliminal means- means that we are not conscious of- to persuade us to buy the products and services they are peddling • Such theories have never been proven- food for thought • See examples of ads with perceived subliminal messages

5. Branding- buying the “right” stuff • Ad agencies stress the importance of “branding”- which involves developing an emotional tie between some product or service and individuals (brand loyalty) • More precisely, it involves an emotional tie between individuals and images they have of the product • It can be said that branding- the process of differentiation- is at the core of advertising (Cortese, p. 73)- that what distinguishes similar products is not ingredients but packaging and brand names • Would it surprise you to know that most major shampoos are made by two or three manufacturers? • The major thrust of advertising is to remind shoppers to seek out and purchase a particular brand • Branding seeks to nullify or compensate for the fact that products are otherwise fundamentally interchangeable

6. Which car is better? • Tests have shown that consumers cannot distinguish between their own brand of soap, beer, cigarette, water, cola, shampoo, gasoline from others • In a sense, advertising is like holding up two identical photographs and persuading you that they are different- in fact, that one is better than the other • Becoming attached to certain brands help us form an identity • We use brands to differentiate ourselves from other people and to generate images of ourselves to others that we think are positive • We become, so to speak, the sum of our brands– it is the symbolic value of brands, not the functions of the products, that become most important

7. Selling/Masking Ourselves • In a marketing society like the U.S., we learn to market ourselves, and using brand names gives anxiety-ridden people a sense of security that they believe will enhance the job of selling themselves that they feel they must do • You could say personality is the product– the term “personality” has its root in the Latin word “persona” which means “mask” • So our personalities are “masks” we wear to sell ourselves to others- to become popular, to market ourselves, to find a job or a mate • Our personalities- and the products we purchase to shape them- help us fit in, get along and advance in the world • But the products we use keep changing, which means our personas, to the extent that they are intimately connected to the products we use, keep changing also • And, sadly perhaps, our sense of ourselves- whether we are successes or failures- is tied, we are taught by advertising, to what we can afford • Our personalities, then, are to a considerable degree, products based on the material culture that we make part of our lives • And so we are doomed to constant change as we sample different styles and identities to suit our whims • The problem is that identity suggests some kind of coherence, and a constantly changing identity is a contradiction in terms