BRANDING OVER THE CRACKS
JAMES
HEARTFIELD
INTRODUCTION[st1]
‘One cannot
step twice into the same river, for the water into which you first stepped has
flowed on’. Heraclitus, fragment 21
Market
economies proclaim the advantage of flexibility over command economies, but in
exchange for that advantage, they must surrender their claim upon the security
of certain outcomes. Marketing gurus like Charles Handy and Tom Peters upbraid
their audiences with homilies drawn from the philosopher of flux, Heraclitus: ‘Nothing
certain, but change’ and ‘expect the unexpected’.
The social
division of labour, though, has definite proportions at any one moment. In
London, 145 000 people working in computer and business services stand waiting
to serve the 460 000 strong financial service sector centred on the City of
London.[1] But while
investment and production goes ahead on the assumption that the goods and
services will be paid for, that outcome is not in any way guaranteed – a fact
underlined by the recent disturbances in the financial markets. The point of
sale is episodic. The subdivision of tasks amongst different sections assumes a
successful outcome that only comes at the end of the process, if at all.
Like
Heraclitus’ river, the torrent of fruit-flavoured, sugared water flows on. Each
purchase is discrete, and never literally repeated. But the brand Coca Cola defies the episodic character
of the sale, to endure beyond each purchase, connecting them as if in one
continuous chain. The Brand[st2] is the attempt to
fix the flux of the market society with the appearance of permanence. Once
branded, it seems that you can step
into the same river twice. (The recent collapse in Coca-Cola’s sales in
This
article looks at the contemporary vogue for branding in business theory as
symptomatic, less of success than of failure, of the attempts by businesses to
avoid market failure. It sees the quest for brand added-value as an attempt to
avoid diminishing returns, and looks at the ways in which branding raises the
threshold to market entry at the cost of rivals. It also investigates the
connection between re-branding, and attempts to overcome the barriers to
accumulation at the international level by disciplining labour. The
preoccupation with the value of brands – as opposed to the development of new
production – is a telling insight into contemporary capitalist self-perception.
BRAND FETISHISM
Thomas Gad,
who ‘connected people’ for Nokia, deploys the metaphor of genetic inheritance
to ward off the fear of contingency: ‘The brand code equals business DNA’.[5] The appeal
to an organic metaphor is telling. The purchasers of Gad’s book 4D Branding are worried about how to
replicate the initial sales. Genetic replication stands for the spontaneous
replication of market success. Natural inheritance is a common metaphor for
property relations, one that invests them with the comforting fixity [st4]that they lack in
fact. Many years ago, the conservative Edmund Burke asserted hopefully ‘The
laws of commerce are the laws of Nature, and therefore the laws of God.’ [6] DNA is a
more secular image, but it still holds out the promise of the natural
reproduction of market relations, and the replication of the original sale.
Branding
transforms[st5] the episodic
processes of sale and purchase into a singular object. Branding turns a social
relation into a thing that can be taken hold of, and even bought and sold on
the market itself.[7] The
ubiquitous B[st6]rands seem to us to
be the epitomé of market relations. But the appeal of the brand for the
individual businessman is that it promises to suspend the uncertainty inherent
in the exchange process. Branding is an attempt to overcome the spontaneous and
unplanned character of market exchange – albeit one that remains firmly within
the confines of private property.
The
advertisers--or now brand consultants--are parasitic upon the anxiety of
businesses, promising to sell them the one thing that they cannot produce
…sales. Similarly, broadcasters and publishers ‘sell’ audiences,[8] and
polling organizations sell ratings to advertisers.[9]
Branding
is, in its essence, a defensive denial of the contingency of market relations,
on the part of companies whose precarious existence is a torment to them, which
must be warded off by the Juju of the brand.[10]
Peter York at SRU Ltd hopes that ‘a brand should ensure a long-term and forgiving relationship with its
audiences’.[11] On the other hand, David Bernstein warns that
‘a logo is
not a magic totem or a philosopher’s stone’, but such caveats belong to a
bygone age[st7].[12]
‘The word
“branding” is like a magical incantation’, says Thomas Gad.[13]
Belief in the magical properties of the brand is today commonplace. In the
first place, brands are mysterious. ‘What are brands made of?’ asks Arthur
Einstein, the New York-based advertising consultant. ‘They’re existential’[st8]. Pettis points out
that Einstein does not mean that brands are a response to the existential angst
of salesmen. He means that “while a product can be touched and felt the brand
itself is not a tangible thing. It is an abstraction”.[14] [st9]Chuck Pettis of the
American Management Association is similarly vague when posing the question
‘What is a brand?’. The answer is: “The sensory, emotive and cultural proprietary
image surrounding a company or product… a significant source of competitive
advantage … an enhancement of perceived value and satisfaction” and “arguably
the company’s most important asset”.[15]
That should cover all bases, and nobody could accuse [st10]brand
consultants of pedantic or mundane thinking – on the contrary, the imagination
takes flight in discussions of branding.
Russell L
Hamlin, CEO of the Sunkist Growers is also impressed by the intangible: “an orange … is an orange … is an orange. Unless
of course that orange happens to be a Sunkist, a name eighty per cent of
consumers knows and trust.”[16] The
relation of trust between the producers and consumers here has been re-directed
on to the object itself. ‘Trust’ is an intention accorded to other people,
ordinarily, but here it is the Sunkist that deserves trust. ‘Men’, observed the
philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, “transpose their own being into things”.[17]
French
explorer Charles de Brosses first characterized the objects worshipped by
native peoples as ‘fetishes’.[18] These
man-made objects were worshipped as if they were rather the creators of men.
So, too are Brands made into fetishes that, though made by us, come to rule
over us. According to United Biscuits’ Sir Hector Laing: “Buildings age and become
dilapidated. Machines wear out. People die. But what live on are brands.”[19] Brands
promise everlasting life to Sir Hector, but to others the brand exemplifies
everything that is wrong with our society.
Selling indulgences: For the Pope’s visit to
Brand and anti-brand
In 1989 the
Vancouver-based Media Foundation started the magazine Adbusters, whose editor
Kalle Lasn perfected the art of subverting the corporate message, or
‘culture-jamming’. Culture-jamming caught the moment: the ubiquity of the big
brands, the Nike ‘swooshtika[st11]’
McDonald’s Golden Arches and Microsoft presented a seamless continuum of
consumerism that was crying out to be ripped apart. After the
anti-globalisation protests attained critical mass in
No Logo’s international success indicated all the
strengths of the newly emerging culture-jamming activism, but also perhaps some
of its weaknesses as well. Unwittingly, the anti-brand activist is paying
homage to the same God, albeit negatively.[23]
Both the brand enthusiast and the anti-brand activist share the same belief in
the superhuman power of brands. As Mark Ritson, professor of Marketing at the
According
to Klein: ‘“Advertising is about hawking a product. Branding, in its truest and
most advanced incarnations, is about corporate transcendence.”[25] If Klein
were describing the capitalists’ tendency to attempt to transcend the business
of social production, it would be convincing, but she goes further in seeing a
literal transcendence of production:
‘even the
classic Marxist division between workers and owners doesn’t quite work in the
[Special Economic] zone, since the brand-name multinationals have divested the
‘means of production,’ to use Marx’s phrase, unwilling to encumber themselves
with the responsibilities of actually owning and managing the factories, and
employing a labour force.’[26]
Further,
Klein emphasises ‘this is not a job-flight story. It is a flight-from-jobs
story.’[27]
But it is
difficult to square that claim with the long climb in the numbers in work.
Between 1950 and 1995 the world workforce increased from 1183m to 2742m.[28]
Influenced by the New International Division of Labour theory[29] and the
anti-NAFTA campaign, Klein emphasises the migration of jobs to the
Furthermore
it is a mistake to take the statistical growth of service sector employment in
the West as evidence of a ‘post-material’ economy. Much of the change is
nominal, as activities undertaken in-house by industrial firms, such as
cleaning or servicing machines, are reclassified from productive jobs to service
jobs if they are out-sourced.[32] It would
be a mistake to reduce productive labour to a physiological category directly
related to material transformation.[33]
The
prejudice that the realm of production has been transcended, or relocated
elsewhere serves to justify the restriction of the politics of protest and
contestation to the realm of exchange. In this way the culture-jammers only
hold up a mirror to brand theory, rejecting its conclusions while sharing its
underlying belief in the priority of consumption over production. The tendency
is for culture-jamming to reduce to an arch commentary on consumer goods, part
of the language of taste by which the educated mark themselves off as more
discerning consumers than the hoi polloi.
It is hard to tell whether the Biotic Baking Brigade’s Subcomandante Tofutti
and his Global Pastry Uprising is parodying capitalism or parodying opposition
to capitalism.[34]
Not only
does culture-jamming tend to end up paying homage to brands as much as it
critiques them, it also grants undue authority to the power of the brand. Where
Klein’s account portrays the brand as the culmination of the power of the
market, the contemporary explosion of branding is not evidence of health, but
decline. Hypnotised by the power of brands, the anti-brand activists fail to
recognise that these are indications of capitalism’s running up against its
inner limits. In particular, branding indicates the attempt – ultimately futile
– on the part of businesses, to suspend the judgement of the market. As Marx
indicates, once capital “begins to sense itself and become conscious of itself
as a barrier to development, its seeks refuge in forms, which by restricting
free competition seem to make the rule of capital more perfect, but are at the
same time heralds of its dissolution…”[35]
It might seem strange that branding could be seen as a restriction of free
competition, but as we shall see, that is precisely the motivation: locking
consumers in and competitors out. The ubiquity of the brand demonstrates not
‘the astronomical growth in the wealth and cultural influence of multinational
corporations’,[36] but a
desperate attempt to avoid capital’s own inner limitations.
AHISTORICAL BRANDS
As fetish
objects b[st12]rands
appear to have no history. So according to one b[st13]rand
theorist “Branding goes back to the beginning of history … from Ancient
Egyptian bricks to trade guilds in Medieval Europe” craftsmen have always
marked their wares.[37] Actually,
branding came into its own around the 1890s, just as merger-mania was transforming
the family firm into the modern corporation.[38]
Leading brands of the 1890s:
American Express Travellers’ Cheques; Avon
Cosmetics; Cadbury’s Chocolate; Coca-Cola; Colgate; FT; Gillette; Heineken;
Ivory Soap; Kodak; Lipton Tea; McVities Biscuits; Pears Soap; Phillips
Electronics; Quakers’ Oats; Steinway Pianos; Van Houton’s Cocoa; Wedgwood
Pottery.[39]
The next
wave of branding activity was 1926 – again as straitened circumstances forced
the pace of mergers, creating corporations like the BBC, M&S, and ICI. The
post-war boom fostered the growth of the consumer market, but it was the
downturn of the 1970s that facilitated the creation of [st14]Microsoft,
Virgin, and the Body Shop. In the 1980s the British government flooded the
market with newly privatized companies: BT, British Gas and BA. Today the big
brands of the eighties marketing boom are mostly in trouble: British Telecom’s
funds were depleted by speculative investment in East Asian markets, leading to
pressure on Chairman Iain Vallance, the Thatcherite Golden Boy; Marks and
Spencers’ consistent losses during the past decade [st15]and
reputation for the drab have led to a retreat from the global market, as
indicated by the closing down of their French operation. The privatized rail
companies, like Virgin and Connex, have become a by-word for disaster.
‘Brands’ –
stylistic marks that subsume discrete commodities under one brand name,
associated with a company – are integral to mass production. They substitute
for the personal relations of trust associated with craft production. But branding theory is a contemporary
phenomenon, as are its correlate goods [st16]whose
value appears to inhere principally from the brand, rather than the material
qualities of the good. The valuation of brands on company balance sheets is a
relatively recent occurrence[st17],
signalling Capital’s inner tendency to attempt to overreach simple market
exchange. If brands are rediscovered throughout history, we can lose sight of
what is new in the attempt by business to avoid the capricious nature of
exchange.
Brand Chronology
1893 Sears
and Roebuck Co founded in Chicago, Coca-Cola registered as a trademark
1926
Marks & Spencer Limited becomes a public
company.
December 7, Imperial Chemical Industries
founded in a merger
December 31 The British Broadcasting
Corporation
1945, ‘Coke’ registered as
a trademark
‘Let's be frank about it; most of our people
have never had it so good,’ Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told Britons,
1965 McDonald's went
public
November 1965 ‘
March 1976 Anita Roddick founds the Body Shop in
November 1984 two million people buy shares in the newly floated British Telecom (£4 billion),
followed by British Gas in December 1986 (£5.4 billion) and British Airways in
February 1987 (£900 million).
DEFENSIVE BRANDING
While
branding consultants talk up the creative aspect of branding, it is rarely
noticed that branding strategies are often a defensive reaction to market
conditions. In the 1970s Levi Strauss ‘made the mistake of expanding beyond the
core product lines’, reports Robert Holloway, VP Global Marketing, an
‘expansion’ which ‘diluted the
Nick
Hodges, Chief Executive of the London International Group, owners of the Durex
brand (‘Durability, Reliability, Excellence’, registered in 1929), explains that the declining sales
of condoms in the seventies tempted the company into chinaware and photo
processing – ‘diversification was an eighties vogue’ – but profits were
stretched and debts mounted up to 1993.[41]
But for the health crisis of Aids, the Durex brand would in all probability
have disappeared, rather than becoming what it is today, a world-beating brand.
British
Airways’ chief executive Bob Ayling explains that the effect of the company’s
first re-launch, post-privatisation, was beginning to pall (‘our research
confirmed that we needed to change again’[42]).
The issue of branding arises where, in Ayling’s words, there is ‘the need to
re-launch’. In each instance the response of these companies was to dire
straits was to ‘re-brand’. Branding strategy is a counter-crisis measure for
companies that perceive their markets to be slipping away from them.
Iain
Ellwood makes a case for ‘the added value of advertising’ that is positively
downbeat. It can “revitalize a brand that may be losing market share; protect a
brand against a competitors advertising effort; … reinforce a brand’s appeal in
the market.”[43] The
unavoidable conclusion is that rebranding [st18]is a
defensive strategy, designed to shore up a product that is proving to be
uncompetitive. The question remains whether the real point of intervention
ought to be the brand image or the product itself.
ANTI-COMPETITIVE BRANDING
In keeping
with the defensive character of branding, it is pointed that the brand
consultants seek to play upon the anxieties of companies about the competition.
David A Aaker warns that “as industries turn increasingly hostile, it is clear
that strong brand-building skills are needed to survive and prosper.”[44]
Intriguingly, the appeal of a branding strategy is that it will give the
additional push that gets your product ahead. Patrick McGovern, chairman of the
board of the International Data Group says that ‘Branding has become much more
important recently because of the proliferation of choice that’s available to
customers’.[45] The
unspoken assumption is that apart from the brand, there is not much to choose
between the different products.
In
Neo-classical
economic theory teaches that the market rewards labour-saving and innovative
products. Competition differentiates between products on two scales, cost and
quality. This was an economic theory that corresponded to a period of
innovation in which products were actually differentiated. The role of
competition is simply to realize the already existing advantages of the
superior commodity. But with branding theory the priority is reversed. The
superiority of the product is subordinate to the reception and durability of
the brand. Branding theory corresponds to a moment in which the rate of
innovation is relatively low, and the differentiation of products, therefore,
must take place through marketing and advertising.
The
original ad-buster Vance Packard first noticed the way that advertising
increased in importance in inverse proportion to product differentiation, when
he listened in on ‘an annual conference of advertising agency men’ who ‘heard
an appeal for more ‘gifted artists’ in persuasion to cope with this problem of
the “rapidly diminishing product differences”’.[49]
Packard highlighted the challenge made by Chicago Tribune research director
Pierre Martineau to advertisers: ‘What is the advertising direction going to be
when the differences [between rival products] become trivial or non-existent’.
The answer, according to one agency president David Ogilvy, was that ‘the
greater the similarity between products, the less part reason really plays in
brand selection.’
A RESPONSE TO FALLING PROFIT MARGINS
According
to Brian Sharples, president of Intelliquest, ‘developing a price advantage is
the single biggest lever that a company can employ to boost margins and
profits’.[50] The
promise of branding is that it can sustain price advantage – even where the
normal course of cost-reduction seems to lead inexorably to reductions in
price. Branding theory bucks the trend described in neo-classical theory for
the advantages of labour-saving technique to be passed on to the consumer.
Iain
Ellwood explains that ‘some [companies] often price their products too low and
the resulting effect is to devalue the brand … trying to reduce the prices too
much, leading to an unnecessary cut in profit margins’.[51]
Unfortunately, falling prices is a normal effect of competitive reduction of
costs. Michael Cox and Richard Alm illustrate the trend.[52]
They show how long one must work in each decade since the 1920s to purchase
some typical commodities. (* latest in
1999)
|
Year |
1920 |
30 |
40 |
50 |
60 |
70 |
80 |
99 |
Latest* |
|
Half
gallon of Milk |
37mins |
31 |
21 |
16 |
13 |
10 |
8.7 |
8 |
7 |
|
Three-pound
chicken |
2hrs 27mins |
|
|
|
33 |
22 |
18 |
14 |
14 |
|
100
kilowatt hrs electricity |
13hrs 36mins |
|
|
2hrs |
|
39mins |
45 |
43 |
38 |
|
3min
coast-to-coast call |
30hrs
3mins |
|
|
|
1hr |
24mins |
11 |
4 |
2 |
For
consumers, the effect of competition has pushed down the cost of milk and
chickens to a fraction of its cost to our grandparents. But to keep in the game
farmers and retailers are chasing minute profit margins on a gallon of milk or
a chicken. Avoiding these falling profit margins increasingly engages the
creativity of the firm.
A brand
solution to falling profit margins is illustrated by the clothing
manufacturers, Levi Strauss. Levi’s Robert Holloway describes how the initial
failure of diversification only reproduced the trend of falling prices over a
wider – and less admired – range of
commodities[st19]. As he
experienced it, the challenge that Levi faced was ‘putting Levi Strauss back
into the Jeans market’.[53] But this
is not quite the back-to-basics story that it appears. The ‘jeans market’ was
no longer simply about selling stitched cotton. As Holloway notes, in 1996
Forbes announced that ‘Levi Jeans are not so much a product as an Icon’.
Holloway describes how ‘the decision was taken to focus on image not volume.
The high image flagship product of
What in
fact Levi Strauss did was to supplement the depleted value of the cotton
trousers by realizing the price of the icon. They were no longer selling
clothes, but kitsch, thanks to the unrewarded efforts of Marlon Brando, James
Dean, John Travolta and Mickey Rourke amongst many who had invested the
clothing with its new premium. The ‘brand-added value’ of nostalgia for the 1950s
shows up on Cox and Alm’s chart as a reversal of the trend for commodities to
fall in value relative to wages:
|
Year |
1920 |
30 |
40 |
50 |
60 |
70 |
80 |
90 |
latest |
|
Pair of |
10 hrs 36
mins |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Iain
Ellwood explains that with price cutting ‘the damage to the brand in the long
term is difficult to repair, especially as shrinking profits reduce investment
and quality’[55] Clearly
this was a lesson that Levi learned the hard way in the 1970s. For Levi Strauss
& Co. the value of the brand was something worth defending in the courts.
The British supermarket chain Tesco’s bought 501s at cost, and, instead of
charging the premium price of between £32-£49 gave some of that back to
customers by selling them at £30, and then £25. According to reports, Levi
Strauss ‘fears that its reputation will be damaged if its jeans are sold in
supermarkets’.[56] On
In the
European Court of Justice case, Tesco’s were at pains to distinguish their
strategy of buying up 501s in East Europe at cost to sell in West Europe at a
reduced price, from the growing market in imitation designer-wear. But the
market in fake labels is a response to the same market distortion that Tesco’s
exploited – the difference between the intangible value added by branding, and
the costs of production of the goods themselves. In prosecuting designer
rip-offs, top label companies insist that they are protecting quality, but by
their own admission, the quality no longer inheres in the material object, but
in the associations of the label.
The dispute
between Tesco’s and Levi’s over the mark-up on 501s has little to do with
creating new value. Rather it is a dispute over the distribution of additional
value already created. By exacting a premium price, are attracting more of the surplus
value created elsewhere in the economy – like any monopoly. Western consumer
goods markets, buoyed by the expansion in personal credit, set shop prices
adrift from factory costs of production. By importing goods, Tesco’s took
advantage of price differences that arose from the dampened spending power of
East European consumers, but also, presumably, from the reduced costs of
production there. Neither company’s strategy represents a substantial
transformation of production relations for capital as a whole, only a struggle
over dwindling profit margin.
The Limits of the ‘Brand –Added-Value’ theory
Between mid-1988 and the end of 1991, IT firm
Compaq was falling out of its target customers’ consideration and boosted its
advertising, but sales failed to respond.
Market Research firm Techtel were drafted in to explain the problem:
‘opinion of the brand was falling because of the price’, said Techtel’s
president Michael Kelly. Compaq’s high-value products were losing out against
newer and cheaper rivals. They fired the president, the advertising agency and
laid off 1400 employees. To reposition the brand as more competitive Compaq had
to spend another $16M in advertising to demonstrate that they had recognized
the problem and dealt with it. They had ‘broadened from a technology-driven
image to a customer-driven’ one, according to Kelly. (Pettis, Technobrands,
p98) The theory of ‘brand added-value’ did not prevent Compaq from having to
restore profitability by the more traditional means of cheapening the goods by
reducing labour costs to get a wider share of the market – but the branding
specialists demanded their slice anyway. Instead of adding something new,
Techtel only put a gloss on the ordinary dynamics of class struggle.
LO-TECH LOGO
Brand strategies
generally emphasise novelty and innovation. Branding plunders the image-bank of
the new technologies, from laboratoire Garnier to ‘liquid engineering’ and the
‘appliance of science’. The dominant brand strategy is ‘brand-new!’ – the
promise of cutting edge technologies (carefully moderated with new age values,
of course). But all too often branding and technological innovation are pulling
in opposite directions. Amongst themselves the brand strategists take a dim
view of technology. Patrick J McGovern of the International Data Group
patronises the pointy-headed techno-geeks: ‘Technologists tend to think
technology alone will sell their products – that superior technology is the
only thing that differentiates them from their competitors’.[58] How very
silly of them, to think that building a better mousetrap was the path to
success.
According
to Chris Pettis:
‘High
technology customers face a Hegelian dialectic in that their high-tech
marketing and product managers, who understand well the technicalities of their
products, are not equipped with the overall brand expertise and experience that
their companies need but find it hard to define.’[59]
What Pettis
is describing is not an Hegelian but a Marxist dialectic in which the dynamic
forces of production, represented here by the technologists, are constrained by
the conservative relations of capital accumulation. The philistine marketing
men personify the priority of circulation over production, which are
increasingly at odds.[60]
In fact, as
technological innovation slows down, the importance of branding increases.
Brian Sharples, President of Intelliquest, Inc., says “technology executives in
mature markets have fully embraced the concept of branding, although companies
in new and emerging markets tend to focus more on technology-based competition”[61] – get
with the programme, guys! Innovation is so yesterday. Chuck Pettis explains
cryptically, that ‘as markets mature, creative technology solutions give way to
standards as the market begins to define and demand a compatible and
standardized approach’[62] But what
can Pettis mean by these ‘standards’ which creative technology solutions must
give way to. On closer inspection Pettis simply means the image of high
standards, as a promise that substitutes for the state of the art (now a
hopelessly passé formula).
The
Director of Corporate Communications for Hewlett-Packard Co guiltily admits
that ‘we have not as a company,
historically, been conscious of the importance of managing the overall HP
brand.’[63] But then
when Hewlett-Packard looked after the printers, the reputation of the brand
looked after itself. New technology companies that survived on innovation in
the eighties became increasingly image-conscious in the nineties. The terms
‘new technology’, ‘IT’, and ‘dot.com’ no longer referred to specific
technologies, but themselves became a brand, and one directed primarily at
investors at that. By the bursting of the Internet bubble, an echo resounded in
the hollow space where the new technology should be. Most so-called Internet
firms proved to be either marketing ventures or potty enthusiasms. Branding got
the better of the Nasdaq, and investors were duped.
Anti-competitive
branding is an attempt to secure the continuation of profit margins at the
level of relations between companies. At its most extreme it represents the
divergence between capital’s existence as a source of new value, and as
technological progress. In the IT bubble, speculation substituted real
investment; investment in brands diverted resources from investment in new
means of production.
At another
level, branding is associated with more than redistributed [st20]profits
between companies. The role of the brand in the reorganisation of global
markets and labour discipline indicates attempts to restructure production in
capital’s favour.
Intel Inside
In May 1991 a court ruled that ‘386’, the
trademark previously exclusive property of Intel was from then on common
nomenclature for a microprocessor of those specifications. ‘Out of this
“crisis”’ writes Chuck Pettis, came the decision to trademark the Intel Inside
logo’ (Technobrands, p70). The Intel Inside campaign was launched at a cost of
$250M in the second half of 1991 and 1992, ‘the most expensive ad campaign ever
launched by a semi-conductor company’ (Ibid.). Intel’s original appeal was due
to its having cornered the market for microprocessors at the top of the range.
With more competitors muscling in, the company tried to hang onto the term
‘386’, through legal means. But as William James said, the word ‘Dog’ does not
bite, and Intel failed to lay claim to a number. Instead they diverted vast
resources into a branding exercise that targeted not just their Original
Equipment Manufacturer customers, but also end-users.
GLOBALISATION: AVOIDING PROBLEMS AT HOME
Globalisation was the buzzword for the nineties, and a core
theme of branding strategies. Just as George Bush Senior was promising a New
World Order, McDonalds was opening up in
According
to David Bernstein, “deliberately setting out to become international by
assuming an international origin is wrong-headed … Brands are born somewhere.
Companies are born somewhere.”[64] For all
the talk of globalisation, brands remain stubbornly national in their character.
‘International brands are creations of their homelands. MacDonalds, Coke,
Levi’s … are as American as apple pie’, says Bernstein.[65]
In brands, we can see both capitalism’s inner striving to conquer a world
market, but also its inability to let go of national particularity.
It was the
challenge of falling returns and saturated home markets that persuaded many
large companies to resolve their problems on the world market. Nick Hodges at
Durex explains that ‘during 1993 we put together a plan to globalise the Durex
brand, cutting costs by closing smaller factories, moving production to the
East and automating production in the West.’[66]
For Durex, then, globalisation was more of a desperate counter-crisis strategy
than a positive expansion.
Globalisation
put new emphasis upon the brand, as competition in foreign markets heightened
the challenge of product definition. Bob Ayling expresses the ambiguity of
British Airways’ new identity, which is ‘aimed at presenting British Airways as
an airline of the world, born and based in
At L’Oréal, Alain Everard explains that the company read the emerging Asian markets as a new outlet: ‘The markets of developing countries tend to follow a certain pattern. First a thin layer of buyers of luxury goods such as Lancôme’… then ‘as income starts to move