The death of the brand? Challenges facing international brands in the 21st century - an analysis with examples and recommendations

Trinity and All Saints College
Faculty of Media

MEDIA DISSERTATION

The death of the brand? 
Challenges facing international brands in the 21st century - 
an analysis with examples and recommendations.

by Florian Mayer

April 2003

Content

Introduction

The critique of the anti-branding movement
The cases of Coca-Cola and McDonald′s
The importance of brands
The importance of culture
The future of branding and marketing - who will survive?

Conclusion

Appendix

Introduction

For better or for worse, we live in what has been called a brandscape - a branded world - today. We are at a time in history when brands go beyond being business platforms to becoming symbols of our times. An increasing proportion of our lives is mediated by brands like McDonald′s, Sony and Budweiser, which often reflect the changing values of our society. Brands are more than just advertising, they are part of our culture. Think of Andy Warhol and Campbell′s Soup and Norman Rockwell and Coca-Cola. Products, people, countries - Britain, for example, tried to become a brand with its "Cool Britannia" slogan - and companies are all racing to turn themselves into brands - to make their image more likeable and understandable. Furthermore, brands dominate our working lives, and corporate logos are now in every civic space, from schools, universities and playgrounds to hospitals and art galleries. And this brandscape can be considered to be global: walk down a street in any city in the world and there will be enough brands to make you feel at home.

In the 1990s as corporations started to spent money saved from outsourcing production on their own image, branding achieved greater importance. Klein has argued in her book No Logo that as production was exported to low-wage economies, so the link between the consumers of a product and its makers was sundered. The brand was elevated in compensation, floating free of mere products, to become an allegorical character, a reliable embodiment of particular combinations of virtues or admirable vices. Sometimes, as with Ronald McDonald (or Uncle McDonald as he is known in Asian countries), it solidified into an animated figure.
Branding, marketing and advertising have also been named to be important parts of popular culture and of political importance, as McGuigan makes clear:

Branding culture, it seems, is first and foremost about meaning: That′s culture. It is of immense political significance. Therefore, it follows that branding culture represents, among other things, an issue of culture and politics.
(McGuigan, 2001: 215)

The introduction and subsequent success of "Mecca-Cola" in Europe and the Middle East, for example, has galvanised that brands in today′s environment are of great cultural and political relevance, too. They ′have rightly become a political battleground′, as Bunting (2001) states, as they ′represent huge power′. Thereby, to discuss the role and future of brands has even become more important.

This dissertation is structured around the notion that adverts and branding are more than a communication tool to sell products. Although there is certainly some truth in Williamson´s hypothesis (1978) of advertising being another way of perpetuating capitalist ideology, this point of view does not fall within the scope of this study. Instead, the assumption here is that advertisements can be regarded as one of the most important cultural factors moulding and reflecting our life.

Also, the critical attention in cultural studies and beyond, which has shifted from production to consumption and the consumer over the last two decades has put emphasis on the study of everyday branded goods by suggesting that consumption is a much more complex and multi-layered process than just manufacturing, advertising and selling a product . Meaning, it is argued, is ′not only created by what we buy, but also where and how and what happens to the product once it is in our possession′ (Grunenberg, 2002: 17, his emphasis). Twitchell (1999), for instance, has described consumption as active, creative and cultural. David Harvey (1989: 287) writes: ′Advertising and media images have come to play a very much more integrative role in cultural practices and assume a much greater importance in the growth dynamics of capitalism′. In the following pages, therefore, emphasis will be on the suggestion that popular culture audiences as well as consumers in general cannot be cast in the role of passive recipients but are actively involved in the construction of meaning (see, for example, Ang, 1996; De Certeau, 1984; Featherstone, 1991; Fiske, 1989a, 1989b; Willis, 1978, 1990).

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism, which was seen by some as ′the end of history′ (Fukuyama, 1992), marked by the end of the clash of ideologies, capitalism was thought to be the only way of organising a successful economy. But by the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the new millennium, capitalism finds itself surrounded by a host of increasingly voluble new critics, which mainly focus on cases of abuse which result from the actions of global corporations: the abuse of the environment, the treatment and low pay of workers in third world countries, child labour, the exploitation of women, the degradation of cultures and the imposition of lifestyles through brands. Marketers of branded goods increasingly note that a critical mass of media interest (e.g. the BBC Panorama programme about child labour in a factory in Cambodia producing garments for Nike and the GAP; BBC, 2000) has led to an ongoing education of consumers and organisations alike. Moreover, there is the improved availability of information through media such as the Internet ′which has spawned a plethora of organisations and information sites such as Sweatshop Watch′ (Winstanley et. al, 2002: 222; for a detailed list of activist sites please see Appendix 1). Also, there has been the development of a burgeoning infrastructure of NGOs and civil society organisations at the local, national and international level, which reflects a more general desire by society, consumers and producers to tackle, for example, the bottom line of exploitation of workers in factories in the third world.

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