Branding and its future

The period between World War 1 and World War 2 is often referred to as “The Machine Age”.  In this industrial period what the consumer valued was simplification, standardization and precision. 

With the coming of the Information age consumer values changed.  What is valued now is differentiation and communication, and this has resulted in what I call “The Brand Age”.

As events tetra-arise and as evolution has taken place, I would venture to say that “The Brand Age” was inevitable.  

Having the latest invention is no longer enough.  The inventions of “The Machine Age” have become “everyday” and what is looked for now are those distinctive features which make your particular product different.

Brands give a product an added symbolic value and allow the consumers to be elevated beyond themselves. That this introduces all sorts of problems for those consumers who cannot afford a particular brand is the negative side of branding and with this negative side comes isolation and the promotion of further struggle.

Branding raises the status of not only people, but also of events and places.

Cities too have egos and consider it “cool” to have superstar architects design a building or structure for them which will add to their global recognition.  In a sense cities these days have to launch branding campaigns in order to attract tourists and investment capital.

My previous blog on Santiago Calatrava looked at the building of The World Trade Centre Transportation Hub.  Is Santiago Calatrava a brand-name architect and was he chosen by New York to enhance its position in the global village?  Is the building of this structure a marketing tool? If this is the case is it necessarily a bad thing?

Brands are recognized on a global scale, and so when one buys a particular brand, one is actually buying into a global culture.

Whereas, on the one side this is positive, in the sense that it promotes global consciousness, the down side is that those things that make people, places or events uniquely different are often lost.

I often look at different sub-cultures and the way they dress.  In their very attempt to be different from everyone else as a group, they as individuals all finish up looking the same!

Standardization and uniformity kick in again.

Unity becomes opposed to diversity instead of encompassing diversity.  Diversity is repressed and dissociation occurs.  Unity transcends but does not include diversity.

I do not think that brands will disappear or that they should disappear. The challenge that lies ahead will be to have “unity in diversity”.

What we will probably see is the promotion of brands adapted to the cultures they find their markets in. 

A brand-name piece of architecture will have a distinct character and offer a range of experiences that will distinguish it from other places which are similar in appearance. 

As far as commodities are concerned, a BMW for instance, would still always be recognizable as such, but those sold in Europe would have a feature not found in Africa for instance and vice versa.

This of course could mean that the next step for the individual would mean accumulating all the variations of a particular brand, but let’s not go that far.  I’m not sure that we are there yet. Or are we?