Corporate Branding and Mind Control

One popular misconception is that a brand is a logo or trademark. A brand is really the sum of thoughts and feelings evoked when interacting with a product or company. A brand only exists inside the minds of consumers. Brand-building is influencing these thoughts and feelings by managing consumer interactions, or what the industry calls "consumer touchpoints".

Now why does this work? Decision making can be a thought-intensive, time-expensive process. Once we'vee made a decision, our minds tend to make short-cuts so we don't have to spend all that time again thinking about a similar decision.

The tendency to summarize these thoughts is an evolutionary adaptation. Imagine if our ancestors had to process all the thoughts needed to calculate whether a predator was bad every time a leopard jumped out of the bushes. No, you want your mind to say "run!" as soon as you see it. So this process has become very automatic. The goal behind branding is that when you're in a store and faced with a purchasing decision you've subconsciously already made the decision and just think "buy!".

Now we get to the human condition. Generally, human behavior is an algorithm of gender, age, nationality, race, societal pressures, role models, myths, religion, culture, a bunch of other stuff and sensory inputs: touch, taste, sight, hearing, smell.

Companies with a lot of money to spend on their brands attempt to make a brand pervasive by integrating senses and culture into their marketing strategy, and then execute this strategy in as many places as they can. The idea behind this is: if you control the inputs, you influence the behavior. It's very hard to make an individual do anything, but with a group of similar individuals (a demographic) your chances of influence go up. Someone will likely do what you want, which will lead to others in the group doing the same thing.

Brands also borrow cultural myths to extend those deep-rooted archetypes to their brands. The hope is that the brand will become a permanent part of the culture and therefore very hard to get rid of.

Why are we such a brand-obsessive culture? This is a controversial question. It comes down to society's value-system. What are our (USA) values? Watch at the news, listen to politicians: the economy, stock market, jobs, outsourcing, globalization, oil, oil, oil. What is our basic philosophy on economics? Capitalism, which is a dog-eat-dog system, where self-serving interests are rewarded.

Success in our culture is commonly seen as being "top dog" and having accumulated a lot of wealth. Like every society, there are status symbols. But sometimes it's hard to know the value of something just by looking at it. Say you were an alien. How would you know the difference in value between a Honda and Bentley? A Rolex and a Casio? This is why brands have been used (because we can't tell the difference either) to fill in as status symbols.

A brand then is the sum of thoughts and feelings you have about a product or company. The tendency to summarize these thoughts (heuristics) is an evolutionary adaptation. Companies with a lot of money attempt to make a brand pervasive to consumers by integrating senses, cultural myths, songs, etc. into their brand strategy so, at some level, you think about it all the time.

Our culture is brand-obessed because we live in a shallow society where personal Identity is formed by the brands we own.