ABSTRACT
Brand logos are now so ubiquitous in Western society that it is difficult to imagine our visual landscape and our lives without them. From the Golden Arches to the Ford logo on the front of a car to an apple on the outside of a laptop to Ralph Lauren’s Polo insignia on each piece of clothing they make-corporate brands are everywhere you look. Brands do not show up only on the outside of a product though. They appear in television commercials. They are found on billboards that dot our highways. They are plastered all over race cars. They can even be a “character” in movies that have conspicuous product placements shown on the screen. Some people view the brand saturation of our public spaces as an annoying, even immoral, intrusion, some barely notice brands at all anymore, and some gladly use brands to help them express themselves or to direct them on what to buy. Corporate brands are unique cultural expressions. Unlike some forms of music,
movies, television shows or professional sports to name a few, brands rarely enter the realm of pop culture haphazardly, organically or reluctantly. Brands are signs, logos, symbols, etc., that serve as the identity of a product or service. Hence brands are carefully constructed by companies and their marketing/advertising apparatus to generate the kind of meaning that will garner consumer loyalty. This is not to say that music bands and sports teams don’t use brands to sell their wares-they often do. But with music and sports, a brand is usually not the principal medium through which these cultural forms are sold-it is the music or performance of a team itself that makes them popular. With major brands like Coca-Cola, the taste of the drink and the look of the bottle matters but they matter less than the meaning of the brand, which encourages consumers to think of the relationship between themselves and the product in a deeper way. Deep, yes, but “religious deep”? James Twitchell says yes:
Brand stories act like religion not just by holding people together but also by holding individual experiences together … We cluster around them [brands] as we used to cluster around sacred relics; we are loyal to them the way we are loyal to symbols such as the flag; we live through, around, and against them. Brands have become members of the new and improved family of man.
