10 Branding

Dr. Saradindu Bhattacharya

Section 1: Brands – Defintion and History

The word “brand” is derived from the Old Norse “brandr”, which means “to burn”. Historically, this refers to the old practice of using hot branding irons to burn the owner’s mark or symbol onto the hide of his cattle in order to differentiate between livestock belonging to farmers living in close proximity. The emergence of brands can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution that took place in Europe in the 19th century. During this period, the mode of economic production underwent a massive transformation, as technological advancements facilitated mass production and distribution of goods in contrast to the limited, localized production and consumption of goods that characterized pre- industrial societies. This expansion in the scale of economic production, distribution and consumption necessitated a means of differentiating between products of a similar nature that were flooding the markets. The “brand” emerged as a means of marketing products to customers hitherto familiar with only locally produced goods. One o f the earliest categories of goods to be thus “branded” during the Industrial Revolution were soaps, which were literally stamped with the insignia of the manufacturers before being shipped off to wider markets. In a sense, this new marketing device was akin to that of “branding” livestock, as it was based on the same old principle of marking products of a similar nature in order to distinguish one from the other and simultaneously also establish ownership over individual categories of products.

In contemporary marketing and cultural theory, a “brand” refers to a category of goods or services belonging to a single business firm or conglomerate. For instance, a variety of popular carbonated soft-drinks and fruit juices in India like Thums Up, Limca, Fanta, Maaza, Sprite and Minute Maid are manufactured by and identifiable as belonging to the parent brand “Coca Cola”. Similarly, the Mumbai-based Tata Group is a popular brand in India that is recognizable through a wide array of commodities, ranging from salt and tea, watches, spectacles and jewellery, automobiles, to cellular phone servies and life insurance. Brands are not restricted only to goods but also include services in contemporary material culture. For instance, the Taj group of hotels in India represents a brand of luxury living and dining that is popularly associated with economic affluence and high social status. From these examples, it is evident that a “brand” functions as a recognizable marker of value across a range of products and services that, in spite of their diversity, are perceived as sharing the “unique” qualities of the brand whose name they assume. While producers seek to establish and publicly declare their commercial and legal rights over these commodities by “branding” them, consumers define their own position within a capitalist society by exercising their agency in choosing one brand over another. The “value” that a particular brand is taken to represent thus derives not only from the actual, physical attributes of the product itself (which could indeed differ only marginally from those of similar products belonging to other brands) but also from the social traits its consumers desire to identify with in choosing it over others. A “brand” is, therefore, representative of both economic and cultural value as it perceived not only to embody a certain set of physical qualities but also to signify particular notions of social identity for its consumers.

Section 2: Mechanisms of Branding – Icons, Trade marks and Slogans

Since the object of branding is to mark commodities in a way that they appear to be distinct from others, it becomes necessary for producers to employ marketing devices that make their products readily identifiable to their customers. Such devices include a variety of icons like logos, slogans, mascots and musical pieces. The most common of these icons are logos, which are visual symbols that come to be associated with a particular brand through their repeated and continuous circulation through advertisements in print, electronic and digital media. For instance, Nike’s swoosh or Puma’s eponymous symbol have attained such a degree of visibility and popularity that any piece of garment or pair of shoes that bears these insignia is immediately recognizable as belonging to its parent brand even if the particular brand name is not spelt out or is distinctly visible. In fact, the owners of these companies rely on visual identifiability to such an extent that they have trademarked their respective logos and often give greater promine nce to them in advertising hoardings and shop windows than the name of the brand itself. The concept of the trademark has, in fact, emerged and evolved in response to the proliferation of brands in modern capitalist market economies, as it defines the producers’ legal rights over the use of particular icons as their unique logos and functions as a preventive against their duplication by other companies or brands. In this context, it is important to observe that in some cases the visual appearance of the product takes on a significance over and above its inherent qualities in the process of projecting a “brand” image. Thus, Coca Cola has trademarked the particular shape of the bottles in which its signature soft-drink is sold, though arguably the shape of the former does not have a bearing on the taste of the latter. In addition to visual symbols, several brands also rely on auditory devices as logos to establish and popularize their distinct identity in the market. Thus, for instance, the theme music of Airte l or Titan has been rendered so familiar to Indian customers that the brand name of the company is instantly evoked in the mind of the (potential) customer when s/he hears it on television, radio or even as a mobile phone ring-tone. Brands also employ catchphrases as advertising slogans which sometimes become so popular that they come to be associated almost automatically with the products they represent and thereby function as icons. For example, Nike’s slogan “Just do it” has become so iconic that the owners of the company have trademarked it; similarly, Pepsi’s (India) popular soft- drink enjoys instant recognizability through its popular slogan “Yeh dil mange more” (“the heart craves for more”). In some cases, even sensory experiences of smell and taste become a means of branding. For instance, KFC has trademarked its recipe involving eleven herbs and spices for its famous fried chicken; similarly, Chanel No.5 has trademarked its distinctive rose-jasmine- musk perfume. Branding is not limited only to goods but is also a common feature in the service sector, where employees of a particular company are often required to project a certain image in dealing with customers. Thus, airline operators have prescribed uniforms for their staff and some, like Air India, even have a mascot, to set themselves apart from others.

Section 3: Mechanisms of Branding – Rhetoric and Narrative

Over and above icons of various kinds that brands use in order to establish a popular image, they also employ a range of rhetorical and narrative devices to create a unique “persona” for the products they sell. Quite often, brands tell us “stories” about their own evolution by means of packaging and advertising, which gives them the semblance of a character that goes beyond the immediate context of consumption. For instance, Levi’s declares its history through the leather label attached to each pair of its jeans, which bears the year (1873) and the location (San Francisco) of the production of its first batch of merchandise. In addition, Levi’s stores typically put up on their walls sepia-toned framed photographs of American mid-western miners and ranchers at work dressed in jeans. Thus, the manufacturers chart the history of the product, in spatial and temporal terms, alongside the history of the American nation and thereby ascribe to the brand a greater cultural significance than it would merit only in terms of its utility as a piece of clothing. The implied rhetoric here is that of national identity and progress – America as a country of hardworking, self- made citizens – which is conflated with the evolution of the brand. The process of creating “stories” around a brand plays an important role in rendering it familiar to customers. In fact, in some cases, the official narrative about a brand includes the customer’s own experiences of consuming the product. For example, Maggi invites customers to share their “stories” of eating its noodles and includes a select few in their advertisements. The brand thus appropriates the experiences of its customers into the narrative it builds for itself and thereby aligns the product’s popular image with the lives of its consumers. The ability of a brand to integrate itself into the lives of its customers arises from this process of narrative invention of a “persona” wherein the product itself is perceived to embody and share certain qualities with the consumer. For example, Raymond’s advertisement campaign, bearing the slogan “The Complete Man”, typically features men in situations where they treat their parents, spouses or children with utmost care and sensitivity and thereby projects an urbane picture of masculinity. By associating values of familial concern and responsibility with the subject of sartorial taste, the brand thus combines the traditional Indian ethos of gender with a new age understanding of masculinity as permitting and even demanding an expression of the gentler instincts of nurturing in men. The rhetoric of these advertisements, encapsulated in its slogan, focuses on a well rounded image of the modern Indian man who is confident enough in his skin (and his clothes) to freely express his emotions. In bringing together the discourses of tradition and modernity, the brand thus accrues cultural values that go beyond the basic functionality of the product as apparel. One of the ads, for instance, features a formally attired old teacher attending the wedding reception of his former student, looking tentative as he arrives at the venue but immediately recognized and cordially welcomed by the latte r, who distinctly remembers his teacher from his impeccable clothing and seeks his blessings. Here, the brand not only functions as a marker of the identity of the wearer but also becomes an aspect of the educational values (of respecting elders) passed on from teacher to student. The creation of an identifiable “persona” for a particular brand thus results from the rhetorical conflation of specific cultural values associated with the product and the customer.

Section 4: The Cultural Contexts of Branding

Though the process of branding is associated with the rise and evolution of modern capitalist economies, it is important to remember that brands also play a significant cultural role in the production and consumption of goods and services. In fact, contemporary material culture, which provides the immediate context for the study of brands, is not only about the economic currency of commodities but also concerns questions of cultural values associated with them. The values we assign to brands are not merely the function of their physical features but also the result of specific notions of class, location, gender, age, beauty and lifestyle that are popularly associated with their consumption. For instance, the television commercial for Hero Honda “Pleasure”, a two-wheeler for women manufactured by the well known automobile company in India, features popular Bollywood actor Priyanka Chopra as a young, (presumably) single woman who, in spite of her mother’s apparent disapproval and inquisitiveness, takes a ride around the city on her scooty and declares, in a gleeful aside to the audience, “Why should boys have all the fun?”. The advertisement thus brings into play discourses of both femininity and youth, setting up an opposition between the young, free- spirited protagonist and her older, prudish parent. The brand seamlessly combines notions of individual freedom and physical mobility by representing the vehicle as an instrument of youthful, feminist rebellion against restrictive, patriarchal norms of gender. In fact, this kind of “branding” suggests that the vehicle is more than just a means of private transport; rather, it is meant to be perceived as a means of expression for the young, urban, Indian woman of her right to seek the “pleasure” of finding her own way – both literally and figuratively – on par with a man. In an obverse instance, the popular Indian soap manufacturer Lux, which has traditionally targetted female customers by employing leading Bollywood heroines as its models, came up with a 75th anniversary “special” advertisement featuring Shah Rukh Khan in a bathtub filled with rose petals. The obvious and deliberate inversion of gender roles here – since Lux ads typically feature a beautiful woman in a bathtub – does not actually break away from the already established “brand” identity, as the protagonist’s desirable masculinity is emphasized through the doting presence of four famous heroines (Hema Malini, Sridevi, Juhi Chawla, Kareena Kapoor) around him. Thus, though the brand expands the notion of “beauty” by including men’s grooming within its purview, it leaves the traditional binaries of gender and sexuality unchallenged and thereby reinforces its identity for its target audience. In fact, the creation of such a recognizable “identity” is crucial to the process of branding. It is important to note here how the brand combines an element of surprise (a man as the object of desire) with that of familiarity (the predictable format of the advertisement) to maintain a continuity of its image even as it gestures towards a re- invention of the cultural values of gender and beauty. In many cases, the brand is not a single product owned by a particular business enterprise but a category of commodities which together represent a set of characteristics that constitute a collective identity. For example, though the term Bollywood encompasses a wide variety of films, differing in terms of content and style, it has acquired the status of a brand in several Western nations where audiences identify it with an overdose of glamour, music and dance. “Bollywood dancing”, itself a hybrid of various classical, folk and contemporary dance forms, has in fact become a standard feature in many talent hunt shows in the West. Thus, though Bollywood is not a unitary entity in terms of either ownership or output, it functions as a brand within the cultural context of its reception.

Section 5: The Global Economy of Brands

A significant feature of modern capitalist economies is that the activities of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services are not localized or restricted to the region in which the manufacturer is based. In fact, giant multinational corporations of our times owe their success to their ability to market their products across the world in ways that maintain a consistency of the brand’s image for different groups of consumers. Though the actual process of economic production might be dispersed and decentralized, the product that is marketed to the customer is expected to bear the same set of standardized qualities that the brand promises irrespective of where it is being sold. It is fairly common practice with First World companies now to outsource the actual task of manufacturing goods to business firms in developing countries where labour is cheap a nd abundant and then market the product to various parts of the world under their brand names. For instance, United Colors of Benetton, an American brand specializing in clothes and footwear, outsources the actual work of manufacturing to Alpine Shoes Pvt. Ltd. in Solan (Himachal Pradesh) and assigns the tasks of packaging, marketing and customer care to its office in Gurgaon (Haryana). Thus, though an Indian customer purchasing a pair of UCB shoes from a shopping mall in Bangalore technically pays for an American brand, the product s/he uses is really of domestic origin and made available to them through a process of specialization of labour. It is the brand name under which the product is sold that functions as a unifying mechanism to suggest to the consumer that the product, in spite of the decentralized nature of its manufacture and distribution, bears the same qualities and values as anywhere else it is sold. Though the brand represents a certain uniformity of quality across diverse groups of consumers, it also makes room for variations according to religious, ethnic or cultural differences between them. For instance, Subway offers local varieties of sandwiches and burgers in India like chicken tikka, seekh and tandoori to appeal to the taste buds of customers used to these traditional Mughlai recipes. Yet, in combining these local culinary styles with its standard recipe for a “sub”, the brand appropriates – literally, since these local favourites are packaged just like the other standard burgers – the cultural values and experiences specific to Indian customers into its own “unique” identity. Similarly, Domino’s offers variants like “peppy paneer” and “keema do pyaaza” to cater to the taste of its Indian customers, thereby incorporating local flavours into what is originally an Italian recipe packaged and marketed in several countries by an American brand. Thus, though the actual product sold by the company is an admixture of elements drawn from various cultural and national contexts, it projects a recognizable, uniform brand identity by maintaining a certain level of consistency in terms of taste (the standard ingredients used in their food) and appearance (the standard packaging of their products and even their outlets) irrespective of geographical location. This conscious and deliberate process of adaptation of the brand by its owners to suit the local cultural milieu while maintaining its unique identity is an aspect of what is popularly known as “glocalization”. In a sense, a brand represents a distinct ive locus of product identity in a global economy where mass production and distribution of goods and services necessitates the decentralization and localization of these activities. The glocalization of brands is not always an officially approved process. In many cases, brand names and logos are appropriated by local manufacturers to sell their own products without the purchase of legal rights to do so. For instance, any number of caps and t-shirts that bear the logos of popular brands like Nike or Adidas (sometimes with slight variations from the original spelling) can be found on the pavement markets of Hyderabad, India. What such “fake” products essentially do is mimic the “look” of a particular brand and thereby address a section of customers who identify and aspire for the cultural values associated with it but cannot afford to purchase the “original” product. This does not imply a dilution of the brand value of the original product but suggests how brands, in becoming hyper- visible across media and public spaces, permeate the collective consciousness of customers beyond the groups that are targetted by their owners.

Section 6: Brands and Celebrities

A significant component of the cultural currency of brands is their association with celebrities. Brands often employ celebrities for endorsements and thereby draw upon their popularity and recognizability to market their products as possessing qualities perceived to be common between the two. For instance, Sachin Tendulkar endorsing the health drink “Boost” or Aishwarya Rai modeling for L’Oreal cosmetics associates qualities of physical strength and beauty with these brands and appeals to the customer’s desire to possess these attributes by purchasing the products. When Tendulkar reveals, “Boost is the secret of our energy” or Rai declares, “Because you’re worth it” (emphasis added), they essentially establish a link between themselves and the target customer through the brand. Though it must be evident that Tendulkar’s skill as a sportsman and Rai’s attractiveness as a model and film star cannot be ascribed entirely to the use of the respective products they endorse, the brand’s appeal arises from its capacity to promise to the (potential) customer at least a part of the strength or beauty these celebrities embody. In a sense, the brand uses the celebrity as a face to project an image of itself that is both identifiable and aspirational. Theorists of popular culture have pointed out that the modern celebrity represents to an audience qualities that are desirable and yet never fully achievable; they are, in other words, both familiar to and distant from their audience. In this context, the brand functions as a material device to bridge this gap between the two (though never completely) by offering to the customer the chance to partake of some of the glamour associated with the celebrity. It is not the brand alone that accrues value from its association with a celebrity: celebrities also enhance their popularity through their association with brands. For instance, when Aishwarya Rai became the first Indian woman to feature in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in 2004, it was an addition to her public image and recognition, especially in the West, as one of the world’s most beautiful and powerful women. Rai’s nomination in magazines like Forbes and Time as one of the world’s most influential people had already cemented her position as a globally recognized celebrity beyond the immediate context of her work as an Indian model and movie star. The famous museum and the widely cited magazines function as brands, since they are perceived as representing indices of success in various spheres of public life that the people featured in them have achieved. Conversely, these brands add to the prestige and popularity of the people they feature and thereby participate in the process of their celebritization. Thus, the brand functions as a measure of the celebrity’s achievements even as it itself derives its cultural currency from a continual process of re-citation of public figures as part of its own popular image. The brand and the celebrity thus share a symbiotic relationship and constitute a mutually reflexive and self-perpetuating system of meaning. In other cases, a celebrity may herself attain a degree of fame and power that enables her to become a brand, in the sense of being able to market her life and work as meeting a specific set of popular expectations. Paris Hilton would be an apt case in point, since she is the proverbial celebrity who is famous for being famous and has managed to translate her fame as an heiress into more wealth by launching her own designer label of accessories and perfumes. Similarly, J.K. Rowling has become, through the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter series, a brand name whose subsequent literary productions have been received in the cultural context of their antecedent’s popularity. Thus, when news of Rowling’s first suspense thriller, The Cuckoo’s Calling, which she had published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, leaked, the sale figures of the book spiked overnight. The effect of the “branding” of an individual celebrity is manifest here in the way her public performance (in this case, Rowling’s literary output) is interpreted and consumed in terms of already established cultural expectations of her. The exchange of economic and cultural value between celebrities and brands sometimes takes place even without the active collusion of the former in the popularization of the latter. For instance, a brief piece from Mozart’s famous Symphony 25 has been used as the theme music for Titan watches for decades now and has become an immediately recognizable means of associating enduring values of taste and heritage with the brand. In this case, the work of a famous musician is appropriated for the commercial purpose of selling a consumer good through a process of branding that draws from the former’s “high” art and simultaneously also renders it “popular” to a wider audience of potential customers.

Story boarding

Module 1: Brands – etymology and definition; historical context – the Industrial Revolution, significance in contemporary culture

Module 2: Icons. Logos, Slogans – visual, aural and verbal symbols; role in making the brand popular and easily recognizable

Module 3: Rhetoric and Narrative – story-telling as a means of creating a unique, familiar brand “persona”; intersection of the stories of the product and the consumer; rhetorical devices of aligning brand image with customer identity

Module 4: Cultural Contexts – cultural currency of brands as informing their marketing and consumption; notions of gender, youth, beauty, location and lifetsyle associated through discourse with customers of specific brands

Module 5: Global Economy – decentralization of the production, distribution and consumption of brands; uniformity of brand image; inclusion of local cultural specificities as part of brand identity – “glocalization”; unofficial appropriation of brand images

Module 6: Brands and Celebrities – exchange of cultural value and meaning between brands and celebrities; the “branding” of celebrities

Audio-visual Quadrant

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2.

Figures 1 & 2: Brand names and logos and their appropriation

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Figures 3 & 4: The role of rhetoric in branding

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Figures 5, 6 & 7: Glocalization of brands

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Figure 8: The branding of celebrity

BBC Three: Secrets of the Superbrands (2011)

(a)Technology: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdkeMpN8hOI>

(b)Food: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgQPZV31cAU>

(c)Fashion: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd7lfcnlb9c>

Branded: A Phil Knight/Nike Documentary (1996) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv4- YeqDnWU> No Logo: Brands, Globalization and Resistance (2003) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8859syeumXw>

REFERENCES:

• Arvidsson, Adam. Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture. New York: Routledge, 2006.
• Frow, John. “Signature and Brand”. High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment. Ed.
• Jim Collins. Malden: Blackwell, 2002. 56-74.
• Holt, Doughlas B. How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.
• Lury, Celia. Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy. London: Routledge, 2004.
• Schroeder, Jonathan E. and Miriam Salzer-Morling, eds. Brand Culture. New York: Routledge, 2006.