Nonexistent brand reality

Branding and Gambling

“I haven’t seen anything like this before: dying more than 600 times in 3 hours is something!”, A gamer shares his impressions on one of the forums. The plot, graphics, style of the game - everything goes into the background. New rules of life, new world and another reality - it attracts. In his world, the player feels himself to be nothing more than a god: he is immortal, he commands, he creates reality. It is difficult for him to return to the familiar world on this side of the monitor - the reality created and shared by him is fascinating. Because of this particular computer games, gambling today is recognized as a disease.

Gambling and branding have a lot in common. Analyzing the views and approaches to modern branding technologies, one can come across various interpretations of it and methodologies for creating and promoting a brand. The brand is perceived as something positive and vital for successful sales of goods. But let's try to look at branding differently, not in the scale of technology, but in the scale of the phenomenon of modern reality.
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There are no products

When we go to the supermarket and drive with a cart past the richly filled shelves, we don’t find there milk, corn or chewing candies. We do not wander in the world of products, but in the world of brands. And here we have Parmalat, Bonduelle or Fruitella. There is no product in our brand consciousness. There are only brands.

Condemning the attachment to games, even the most ardent critic of gaming suffers from the same disease of a changed reality as the player, the branding disease. We live in the era of brand reality. Brands give us the opportunity to plunge into our mysterious, fantasy and attractive world. In the same way as the developers of computer games. Having made a purchase, we start the game and at the same time we give up the past reality, we change it. We believe that we have become more attractive for the opposite sex (“Ax”), we believe that we are young and energetic (“Burn”), we believe that we are smart and original (“Apple”). But is it really? For us, those who believe in the acquired reality, all these ideas are real. Other people can live their own, alternate reality, which has nothing to do with ours. They just play other games, they live in other worlds and according to other rules.

Desert Real

The well-known Slovenian philosopher and specialist in mass communications, Slava Zizek, speaking of reality, raises the question of whether the world in which we live is real. Reality is constructed by the media, literature, politicians, advertising. All this is a global add-on to the real present. If we drop it, unexpectedly for ourselves, we will find ourselves in the desert of Real, as the main character of the film of the Wachowski Neo brothers turned out to be, having woken up for the first time in his life from a dream.

What does the present look like?

We have lost the habit of real, we don’t even know what it looks like. Imagine a dispute between a son and a father about what is better: “Pepsi” or “Coca Cola”. Immersed in the brand reality, the debaters do not operate on the real qualities of the products (in fact, these products are identical). The son talks about “choosing a new generation”: “Pepsi” is more modern, more dynamic and more energetic, and the father - about the history, goodness and traditions of the brand it honors. And everyone remains to exist in the world of their reality: the reality of "Pepsi" or the reality of Coca Cola. As in the case of enthusiastic reviews of the gamer about the new game, the plot, or the real essence of the product (sweet carbonated drink) goes into the background. This allows us to assume that father and son are influenced by branding exactly as a gamer is subject to gambling.

Brands are modern gods

In the case of gambling, “immersion in cyberspace can enhance our bodily experience (new sensuality, new body with a large number of organs, new gender ...), but it also opens up the possibility for those who control the machines, who control cyberspace, to literally kidnap our (virtual) the body, depriving us of control over it, so that no one else can treat the body as one’s own ”[1]. Brands, like machines, intelligently control our consciousness: they use our needs, having received the satisfaction of which we perceive the branded reality as a real one, and the brand itself becomes something like a deity to which we offer sacrifices and to whom we give prayers.

Robinson Crusoe - real

Most brands satisfy the needs of higher levels: recognition, self-realization, belonging to a group of like-minded people, etc. Physiological needs are not satisfied brands, and products. When we are asked about ten items that we would take with us to an uninhabited island, we do not call the names of the brands - we call the items or products: matches, blankets, tents, foodstuffs. Following this logic, we can say that brands do not satisfy lower human needs, or at least are not associated with their satisfaction. Therefore, in the conditions of a desert island, branded reality is replaced by a real reality. We feel the world as it really is.

Why are metro tours so popular in megalopolises? Why is the phenomenon of downshifting more and more spreading in the modern world? One of the answers is the desire to escape from the brand reality and to feel the real reality. Another example is the “cutter phenomenon” (mainly women who have an overwhelming desire to cut themselves with razors or injure themselves in some other way), fully corresponding to the virtualization of what surrounds us: it symbolizes a desperate strategy of returning to the reality of the body . Cutting cuts is not at all tied to any suicidal desires, it’s just a radical attempt to find solid support in reality, or (another aspect of the same phenomenon) an attempt to achieve a solid foundation of our ego in bodily reality, as opposed to an unbearable fear of perceiving oneself as non-existent. Usually cutters say that, looking at the red warm blood flowing from the wound inflicted on themselves, they feel themselves revived, firmly rooted in reality ”[2].

When do brands lose confidence?

Brands form their reality, but are not able to create real reality. Sooner or later we begin to perceive brand reality as a hoax or farce. This is clearly seen in situations of economic crisis, warriors or natural disaster. The global financial crisis of the beginning of the XXI century confirmed the fall of confidence in brands. “Lehman Brothers”, “Crysler”, “Enron” - brands that have been worshiped as deities for many decades, turned out to be “soap bubbles”. This really shocked the US population and made him wake up. This happens throughout the world during the crisis years.

At the peak of the crisis, one of my friends said that he no longer sees the difference between the white Armani shirt and the no-name shirt of domestic production: no-name is cheaper, and the quality is comparable. Quality, the essence of the product comes out on top. We are revising our attitude to the satisfaction of virtual, higher needs and wake up in the reality of the present, on a desert island, where, first of all, the assessment is given not to the shell, but to the essence.

Brand killer

The main anti-branding weapon is to teach people to meet the needs of the higher steps of Maslow’s pyramid in alternative, anti-brand ways. For example, it is not necessary to buy a branded product in order to be perceived as a person who is keen on sports — you can do sports. Accordingly, life in the present reality requires much greater efforts and purposefulness; it is more complicated and more dangerous. Therefore, it is much easier and more joyful to perceive a branded reality than a real reality.

If utopian thinking

Drawing a picture of an idealistic future, we will have to abandon branding - a disease of a changed reality - a reality that enslaves a person and kills the essence of things. Attempts to abandon branding were in the Soviet Union and socialist countries. So milk was called milk and it was milk. Products were sold, despite the lack of market competition, which is designed to support branding. The man did not know the brand reality and was who he really was. But advertising is only one of the factors shaping reality, therefore, it is impossible to say that people lived in the present reality in the USSR.

A more idealistic, but even more utopian model of building a society outside the brand reality - “The Venus Project” - was developed by Jacques Fresco in the 1960s [3]. The model paints a society without crimes, politics, marketing and advertising, a society that does not know money, a society, the unit of account in which is not a dollar, but human knowledge. Today, this utopian picture is probably a rare scenario of the sensation of the real present, fencing us off not only from branding, but from politics, the influence of money and the mass media. But its utopianism, caused by modern stereotypes of the worldview, still forces one to treat it skeptically, not perceiving it as a real alternative to the existing system of perception of reality.

Be smart - brands have nothing to do with it

On the other hand, without brands, our life would probably not be so interesting. We would have far fewer topics for conversation, and someone’s reality would have lost all meaning. Today you can even talk with brands as with a real person. Brands offer us their views and fantasies, discover new unseen worlds. Like music or books. The trouble is that clever people are helped by smart books, and stupid by stupid ones. Therefore, standing in front of the shelf in the supermarket, just ask yourself what book you want to read.

Dmitry Chigirin

Related Links
1. Glorious Zizek. The Matrix: The Truth Of Exaggerations
2. Glory Zizek. Welcome to the Real Desert
3. The Venus Project
4. Photo: Timmy Gremxul