If you could put ‘Brandness’ itself under the microscope, this is what you would see: a crossroads with a pussy playing a banjo, hovering just off the ground.

There would be a signpost which says ‘Capitalism That Way’ and ‘Faith That way’. The signpost would be spinning round, too fast to read though.

It’s probably fair to say that, though we can all name a brand or fifty, we cannot point at one, pin point where it happens, where it has taken place, or what it is made out of. We may be trying with brand analysis tools to understand better and better how to pick up signs of how a brand works on the web – how the internet makes and breaks a brand - but you ain’t gonna pick up the brand itself: it’s not made of any material.

The product is different: we know where and what the product is, the Lexus and the Stella Artois that surfs on the reputation of the brand – we can point at and hold and drink it, and we can count the number of times it is mentioned, and who is talking about it. But to track the brand itself? Trickier.

The task is to come up with a better understanding of how the brand-strength - its power - is influenced by topics and issues, ideas and aspirations: how a topic like the environment attracts or repels, for good or ill, a brand, and what is sold in the name of this brand.

While I drink my Coke or Peroni, drive the Jag and the Land Rover, even take Ritalin, the brand is happening behind the eyes, or somewhere in the air. It will be made of all the advertising campaigns which have made it the material representative of ideas like vitality, comfort, security, sex, community, freedom, brightness, the idea of zing and zest, hope and happiness (I try to associate Coca-Cola with negative states and it’s weirdly pretty difficult for me to do it).

Anyway, all this happens in the brand, the immaterial, cloudy cube that hovers about 2 metres up in the air just above the thing itself, and playing a song. The brand is the article of faith at the heart of capitalism, a marching banner might state. It is what I want to buy but can’t buy because it’s not for sale when I buy the thing I can buy – the can of Coke, or the Range Rover.

All this is just to say that the promised land of brand analysis, the place to work toward, is probably the non-place of the the strange intersection between the brand and the product, the belief system and the material object.

The brand analysis tool needs to get better at finding and making sense of the relationships between the brand and it’s products on the one hand, and current issues, and topics – political, moral, ethical, environmental – on the other.

If I look at the blogs today, right before my eyes I see certain products turning into icons and idols. The ‘Lexus’ car is almost there, but is close to being pulled negatively into the environmental debate (many blogs have spread word of Paul McCartney’s shipped car); in pharmaceuticals, the ADHD combatant drugs are swaying in status between the miraculous and the fake; in the huge discussion going on right now about bio-fuels on blogs and forums a massive knee-jerk distrust is the default setting for this one: bio-fuels will eat up land needed for food production, breaking all our hearts.

But out of this ‘default negative’ is a new love of ALGAE. Without exception everyone loves the harvesting of earth’s algae and for it to be THE bio-fuel of the future. Some strange correlation between the blogosphere and algae?

Filed under: Brand Matching by Phil Newman trackback