Dissecting Brands

In No Logo, Naomi Klein states the following: "successful corporations must primarily produce brands, as opposed to products."  The passage prompted me to meditate on the word "brand."  Encarta dictionary states that it is "a name, usually a trademark, of a product or manufacturer, or the product identified by this name."  This is the technical definition; the more interesting one for me, however, is the second: "recognizable type of something."  I parsed this phrase in order to better understand it: "recognizable" makes sense to me - the consumer uses brands as a symbol in order to make judgements about the product at hand.  He or she would not be able to do this unless the brand was able to be recognized.  "Type of something" is harder to grasp; I know from this definition that brands are something recognizable.  Still, I felt that the definition remained vague and inconclusive.  What type, exactly, of something is a brand?

To help me answer this question, I went back to Klein's quote.  She places brands in opposition to products.  To me, products are the tangible objects that we buy and sell.  They have no intrinsic value, for they are just bundles of wood or stone or plastic or paper.  If brands are the opposite, then they must be an intangible something.  So now I had narrowed down my options considerably in my quest to figure out the nature of the brand; it was not a concrete object - the threaded LaCoste logo on a polo shirt itself is not the brand, it is the product - but a figurative and metaphorical entity.

These types of "somethings" abound in everyday life - romance, for example, has been immortalized in countless works of literature and the arts.  War is a complicated force of unity and disunity.  Pride can never be described satisfactorily but can definitely be pinpointed when it fuels conflict, emotional pain and solidarity.  They are the silent concepts whose role in our lives are unmistakably significant but whose exact nature we can only grasp ephemerally.

So these concepts are all of the same type, but - as demonstrated by the diversity of concepts above - each concept has a unique nature.  What is the concept of the brand about?  I think that the definition is two-fold: one from the perspective of the consumer and the other from that of the vendor.  For the consumer, it connotes all that the product promises to deliver; these promises span the spectrum from that of a clean shave to that of a heightened sense of fitness, ecstasy, sexiness, intellect, etc. etc. etc.  For the vendor, it is the vehicle through which these promises and ideas are delivered to the consumer.  The executive directors at LaCoste know that a green alligator with a curved tail promises the consumer a feeling of well-off and trendy athleticism - the epitome of preppy.  And the consumers who buy Harley-Davidson motorcycles are promised a feeling of rough-edged manliness.  

In this way, I think that brands are a new abstract entity introduced by modern industrial society.  They are visual cues that convey a certain lifestyle and image - the option to be tough or cute or smart.  They are a unique phenomenon.