Thought: Living up to meaning, a self-fulfilling prohecy.
I just read that Absolut wodka, made a bottle with no name and label, and that Starbucks opened a shop with no branding. (Naomi Klein in the Guardian) My mind made a link to that story and another by Rushkoff on the End of Movements. Rushkoff says: “The best techniques for galvanizing a movement have long been co-opted and surpassed by public relations and advertising firms. Whether a movement is real or Astroturf has become almost impossible for even discerning viewers to figure out.”
Both stories deal with how the marketing and design of brands creates abstract meaning, transcendental hopes and metaphysical ideas. All of those associated with the brand, and the product that needs to be sold. Consequently companies are delivering much more than merely products, they sponsor urban basketball courts, buying coffee is about a creating a community experience. (I always wondered how you can earn money with a shop selling coffee, where people hang around all day, surfing the web, working, buying hardly anything)
The tools of making meaning are not exclusive to products and places, politics are wielding these tools more and more too. The Obama campaign can surely be declared as the most successful marketing campaign ever, not just for him but for the perception America abroad as well.
The point I want to make is that, generating hollow meaning (as Bush did as Klein points out), is not good enough anymore. Brands have to live up to the meaning they put out there, if the meaning is not consistent with the product, the consumer will abandon the brand. Brand consistency is everything. This is how branding will blow up its own bubble. People are becoming literate when it concerns branding, their everyday surroundings are saturated with advertising. Eventually the gap between meaning and the product cannot be closed, so what to do? You escape the brand and you become real again.
I’m just wondering, if the business model of Starbucks would still function without branding, without the marketing machine. It would save on marketing, and would still have the advantage of scale.
What if meaning was subordinated to the real, instead of the other way around?
