Wednesday, October 13, 2010

The Brand Expands

I'm typing this response on my Jay-Z endorsed HP notebook. It seems like an irrelevant starting point, but it is the electronically charged evidence of Naomi Klein's chapter, The Brand Expands.

Klein elucidates how much of our everyday life has been taken over by branding. Whether it's the public spaces littered with billboards, posters and flyers or the Nike Air Jordans I wear everyday, branding is swallowing up every inch of our life. However, we are taking our own share back.
The chapter begins with Klein talking about her experiences growing up and how important wearing the right logo was. Furthermore, the logo was not necessarily the focal point of successful conformity, she details the lengths taken by her classmate to ensure the legitimacy of the article of clothing.

Not content with harnessing peer-pressure as a marketing tool, companies began to use celebrity endorsements to shift more units. Klein exemplifies this with the clothing company, the Gap. In their 1993 advertising campaign for selling Khakis, with the permission of his estate, the Gap used the below image of the deceased beat writer, Jack Kerouac.
http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/kerouac-gap.html
It is fair to say that Jack Kerouac never wore a stitch of Gap clothing - he died 3 months before the first store opened -  yet his presence in endorsing a particular style, not product, was enough for Gap to utilise his iconoclastic image. Now to dress like Kerouac you had to have Gap Khakis, an idea that is in direct conflict with the ideology of the beat generation that Kerouac fronted.

The power of the endorser is extremely strong. In an interview with CNN, alt-country singer, Ryan Adams, was asked why he appeared in a Gap commercial with Willie Nelson and offered the following response: 
I did the Gap ad, because who says no to $30,000 an hour? I don't! I'm sorry if that's selling out, so be it. Yes, I sell out. I do Gap ads so that I don't have to work in a factory. Also, I don't mind their clothes. But maybe the No. 1 main reason is because Willie was doing it and I was supposed to do it with him, and you don't say no to Willie Nelson. 
What Adams didn't allude to was the brand synergy between himself, Nelson and Gap. Associating himself with Willie Nelson would help him sell more records to Willie Nelson fans, while Nelson is able to expand his audience reach into Adam's alt-country market. Adams would later go on to work with Willie Nelson in their original professional field, but not before both were used to sell denim to two separate generations in one 30-second tv commercial. Using artists for cross-promotions is Klein's next point in the chapter, but here alcohol and concerts are replaced with tv-spots and denim.





Recently, the Gap have even fell victim to power of their own brand. The company updated its logo to a helvetica based reworking that was met with backlash from its customers. The prestige of the old logo was lost, and with it so was the status of owning Kerouac endorsed Khakis. 

What Klein didn't mention is that the public now take an ownership of the branding. The logo, viewed everyday on Dad's jeans, Mum's cardigan, the kids' t-shirt and the shopping bag had become a public commodity. The saturation had successfully led customers to relate to the logo, so much so that when it changed people became unhappy. When Gap changed the logo, they changed Jack Kerouac, Willie Nelson and Ryan Adams, but more importantly for them, they changed the very reason people buy Gap clothing.

Naomi Klein does an excellent job exploring the power of branding and how embedded it has become in everyday life. She unwraps what happens when endorsers are unhappy (Courtney Love) and when they outgrow the very product they are paid to sell (Michael Jordan). Her next chapter, Alt.Everything, is one that can again be exemplified by the Gap and their marketing of cool, however, it appears they ignored her advice. They were cool, but ironically, trying to be something cooler and jumping on the helvetica bandwagon had  the opposite effect.

Moving back to music, Klein states "for their part, many artists now treat companies like the Gap less as deep-pocketed pariahs trying to feed off their cachet than as just another medium they can exploit in order to promote their own brands." This raises two questions Klein could have explored further, just "exactly who is selling who/what?" and "who actually owns the brand?" These open-ended questions remain unresolved, but with the Gap's recent logo shift and artist cross-promotions, the answer is harder to find than workers rights in a sweatshop. Until then, we'll have to wait for the 20th anniversary edition due in a few years time.