Branding is a force.

A massively pervasive force that has found it's way from the top tables of advertisers' offices and from marketing devisions heads to nearly every part of our modern life. There was a shift in the way companies used advertising in the second half of the nineteenth century. Before, advertising was used primarily to inform consumers of a products existence and to convince them to use that product, for example to join up to an electric grid or buy a car. Then there were different companies all manufacturing the same good and they all wanted to gain a greater share of their market. So they began to name their products to enable consumers to ask for them by name (instead of rice, Uncle Ben's was asked for, instead of oats, you asked for Quaker Oats). This was the start of competitive branding. By the end of the 1940s, ad men and corporations began to realise that brand concepts were sometimes so strong, consumers bought the brand they were loyal to even if a rival product was technically better. They realised the brand was now their identity and people would buy into it. They manufactured merchandise, but sold a brand. This realisation didn't take a strong hold until the eighties really, when branding and corporate identity really took off. There was a slump in brand power in the early 90's that was due to a recession but when serious money started to be made again, brands were quick to recover. Branding has created a global consumer vocabulary. We rarely ask for a cola, but for a coke or pepsi, we don't just have a laptop, we have a Dell, we drink Starbucks and listen to Apple Ipods. This language has bound the globe together due to the skill of marketing experts and the massive advertising budgets of global firms. Swatch, the watch company, tried as part of a global branding exercise, to change the very way we tell time, attempting to introduce a decimal time system called internet time. They released watches, a few websites (including cnn.com) adopted it for a whole and Ericsson released a phone with the time enabled and several other small scale adoptions. After 2000 it pretty much died but is still available on the swatch website. Swatch Beat time can be used to illustrate how far branding can be taken. Imagine changing the way we mark time because of a whim a watch company had, even if we never had any intention of using their products.

Of course not all branding exercises are bad. Former shoe manufacturers from Oregon now Sports Company Nike, have branched out in their 45 years of business to include not only shoe manufacturing, but involvement in a multitude of other sports and related activities. Nike advertising and sponsorship help many athletes reach the peaks of their disciplines when they wouldn't have been able to without them. They sponsor athletic programs in schools and adult individual sports to help people long out of sport get back in. So what if this is all done to help their own image, it helps others as well. Nike is just one of many examples of a company who's brand is now more important to them than their products, whose products are there to prop up their brand. There are many more familiar brand names that mean more than their products, Starbucks, Apple, Abercrombie and Fitch, more recently American Apparel. All are selling much more than a product, they are selling a manufactured life philosophy. Abercrombie and Fitch and their Hollister subsidiary sell a casual luxury lifestyle that has absolutely exploded in recent years in Ireland. On any college campus in the country, much like in the U.S., you would be very very unfortunate indeed to miss seeing anybody dressed in the A&F signature style. Irish people like it so much, a dopelganger brand set up shop in Dublin in 2008 and turned a good profit for a while. The shop has however, very recently closed it's Dublin branch and moved all stock to it's Cork branch. Indicative of the lack of spending power of their target market (16-22yr olds) but also that their brand, despite emulating nearly perfectly the A&F brand, didn't gain a loyal following enough to sustain it. John Gerzema is a marketing expert who has spent his career working with brands such as McDonalds, Coca-Cola and BMW, helping them to expand their brands and corporations. He currenty works with a marketing firm with a massive database of brands and their performance which has enabled him to write a book called The Brand Bubble that puts forward his and his coauthor's theories about the future of corporate brands based on past trends. He notices four shifts in how global consumers are responding to brands in light of the global recession and shift in attitudes of consumption. 1. Movement from defining success from having things, to having liquidity. The less stuff you have, the more able you are to respond to life e.g. Not having emergency cash tied up in stock markets. There is a trend emerging that spending money frivolously is seen as unfashionable. People who still have the means to buy expensive items are sometimes choosing to carry their products in anonymous packaging, as opposed to a few years, or even months ago, where a bag from an expensive shop was a status symbol.

2. There is a more visible movement towards ethics and fair play, which includes companies and businesses doing things not for money or profit but for social good. Microsoft announced they are going to retrain 2 million americans in IT training. In a show of solidarity with their workers, Gore Tex, the textiles company are posting their executives expense accounts on the internet for all to see. There is an increase in volunteering as well. I was talking to my cousin who is on the board of the VDP here in the college and she told me that this year they have more volunteers for the night time soup runs than there are homeless people to feed. This value has shown itself before in times of recession, in the late eighties/early nineties, the ethics and values driven cosmetics brand and store The Body Shop managed to open between forty and fifty american stores a year. 3. Making things last. People are holding on to cars for longer than before, getting them repaired and serviced rather than trading them in for newer models. Re-using and repairing clothes and even altering them themselves to update the items style. Global brands are aware of this shift in consumer behaviour and are acting accordingly, they are shifting in some cases away from short term profitability models to long term loyalty projects. 4. A return to the fold. This means a return to community and our own social networks. Brands and companies have to be conscious now more than ever of the value they are offering the consumers for their brands. A recent example illustrating this I saw on Jamie Oliver's show Jamie's America. There is a movement gathering momentum where people who are tired of paying too much for mediocre food and lacklustre service in New York's restaurants have started supper clubs where one or two people host an evening to replicate the restaurant experience for a fraction of the cost of dining out at a named establishment. This shows people coming together and servicing their own needs outside of the business world, outside of branding. In Ireland, there have been drives to shift to local small producers and away from big brands like Tesco own brands or Dunnes own brand as these companies often treat their, often foreign, producers unfairly. With a shift to local producers it gives a livelihood to a member of the community and keeps the money in the local economy. There have been examples worldwide of communities adopting a local currency, used to keep money in the community. These are examples of consumers through their actions, giving big companies and brands incentives to change their models and to adapt to how the consumer wants them to act.

These four points mean a change in global corporate culture. There is more transparency with big corporations with some CEOs such as Ford's Alan Mulally joining twitter and with the Gore Tex example of transparency in expenses. He reaches the conclusion that there is a new brand era beginning with consumers driving global brands rather than the other way round; that value driven spending will force capitalism to be better; it will drive innovation; will create longer lasting, more robust products; will give better, more intuitive customer service; will give the companies and consumers an opportunity to connect on a value level rather than on a seller/buyer level. All of this change of transglobal brands and corporations because of a shift in global consumer culture.