Feeling "brands r us"

Branding is something that I'd never thought much about beyond just reacting to certain brands and being able to say what I liked about them.

Take the Bell Canada brand. The stylized face has a certain female quality to it that has always appealed to me (perhaps also given that my mom was a Bell operator for most of the 60s) and I like the way the circles around the profiled face suggest the world. The brand just worked for me aesthetically.

Others that I've liked over the years are Sesame Street, Apple, Alienware, Turtles, Target, Molson Canadian and Toronto Star. Oh and of course also eBay and Google.

Brands I've disliked have included IBM, Dell, MuchMusic, Sega, Yahoo and CoorsLite.

I've never thought much about these brands themselves, beyond their association to the companies. But branding has become part of what I've found myself paying more attention to of late, especially as it relates to Second Life and to academics. And I'm realizing that what I call a brand, others call a logo, based on those I know who make it their business to know these things (like my pal Greg). A brand is more. It it the entire ensemble of feelings, associations, colours and experiences that are associated with a company, as often expressed and embodied in their brand. While I can't argue that this distinction isn't true, I do hold onto the idea for me that the logo is the brand and the brand is the logo.

In SL, I'm seeing a whole spate of new brands emerging and old ones converging. And perhaps what is interesting is what is being branded. If, as this article suggests, branding is about tying us emotionally to the companies who provide us our things, so that we have a feeling of easy familiarity and liking for that company, then what happens when emotions themselves (vis-a-vis avatar customizations and mods) get branded? Do you start to say "Look, my ability to smile is brought to you by Acme Grins Inc."?

And for academics, what happens when their brand changes? A friend of mine is splitting up with her husband. When they married, she took his name. Now that they're apart, she's got to decide if she is going to keep his name, given she's started doing presentations and the like under that name and so is starting to get known. Or does she go back to her maiden name?

Certainly suggests that people's names act as brands too and that for academics, it is perhaps their more crucial brand, more important even than the university institutional brand that they associate themselves with while at a given institution.

And with the sheer number of brands out there, identity has become not so much a case of subtly defining who we are vis-a-vis internal and external ideas "comme tel", but rather choosing a polyglot melange of brands that seem to speak to us and about us, to ourselves and to others.

This is the deepening of consumer mass culture that had so started to frighten the Frankfurt School theorists in the 30s and it is inescapable. The question remains then whether we need to rethink our concepts of authentic identity and core self in light of the way branding is now, simply, us. Period.