Branding and the Abstraction of Social Life: I am not a Žižek Tote Bag

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I am not a Žižek Tote Bag: Branding and the Abstraction of Social Life

by Alice Bell

We need to talk about the existence of Žižek tote bags. And Melanie Phillips umbrellas. And New Scientist dating. And the names on Coca-Cola bottles. And those wifi-enabled Microsoft park benches popping up in London and Birmingham. But first, we should talk about soap. Because it is by talking about soap that we can start to unlock what all these things mean about the branding of our social lives.

As Anne McClintock tells us in her 1995 book Imperial Leather, the first wrapped soap was sold under a brand name in 1884. From then on, soap was no longer simply soap, and items once indistinguishable from each other would be distinctly marketed through their corporate signature.[1]This single event signaled a major social transformation, heralding an abstraction of social relationships which has continued to grow in depth and complexity ever since. Previously, the shopkeeper acted as an advocate for their products. You might talk to them about your dry skin, and they might know that your sister had a reaction to a particular product, or what suited the chemistry of the local water best. Mass-produced branded packaging cut through all that. Today, you're maybe more likely to stand in the shop Googling a product than ask a member of staff for information.

The Victorian context is significant; a time when companies became larger, and everyday social lives noticeably more complex and transitory. The shortcuts of marketing a brand were attractive to both customers and industry. The role of the advertiser was not only to inject some glamour to the product, but act as an every-man replacement for the shopkeeper: a symbolic advocate for merchandise.

Sociologists of consumption often stress the way brands act as badges of trust in amongst such transitory (late) modern lives. Fair Trade or Soil Association logos are good examples too, reflecting the ways symbols have emerged to deal with our ever-increasing distance from the production of the goods we use. As Celia Lury puts it, they are a sort of "guarantee of a consistency or quality or sameness" across the space and time of complex contemporary society, "a platform for the patterning of activity".[2]

Such patterning means brands are also are inherently repetitive, this repetition can be comforting and allow us to make social connections over large distances, but it can also be limiting and constraining too.

Part of the social transformations wrapped up in those first branded soaps was the way they shifted the personality of the flesh and blood salesperson to the surfaces of the packaging. You lose something in this shift, and it can be alienating just as it connects us to something larger. Humans are often more engaging than paper, so advertising works hard to produce charismatic symbolic references to social lives and ties we might recognise or aspire to. But they are abstracted and generalised, largely addressing you as a (stero)type, even if they may be increasingly personalised. You also see growing attempts to plug into the power of personal connections to sell products, from brand ambassadors at universities, or use of social media, to astroturfing.

A recent example of an attempt to deal with this loss of personal relationship between tradesperson and customer can be seen in Starbucks' venture to write customers' first names on their coffee mugs. The problem being that Starbucks isn't your friend. Moreover, the communication of a name often takes more than the sorts of speedy transactions surrounding a Starbucks purchase can offer. Mispronouncing, mishearing and misspelling abound, as Starbucks' attempt to condense being on first name terms into the purchasing of branded coffee just looks a bit asinine, an uncomfortably false and not very successful pastiche of a real relationship, even a slightly creepy invasion of privacy.

Coke have taken another approach, one that takes the abstracted, repetitive patterning of branding a step further, with their recent introduction of names on bottles. It's the top 150 names in the UK (yes, this includes non-Western names, though a limit of 150 will never allow much diversity) and apparently those who are unable to find their names will be able to create their own virtual personalised Coke cans to share with friends via their Facebook app. The campaign was previously successful in Australia and the UK is the first to apply it in Europe. To quote Coca-Cola GB's managing director: "It is a brave move. It will drive huge buzz and drive engagement. No other brand has gone to this scale of personalisation"(source). Brave indeed. I'm not sure I want to think of a bottle of Coke as my friend: twist the heads off my brother, best mate, ex-boyfriend or colleague and drink their insides. It's a bit creepy.

Creepier still, perhaps, but less overtly so, Microsoft have recently started placing wifi-hotspot benches in parks across London and Birmingham. Bright red and boasting green credentials, at least in terms of their materials, the idea is that after such a cold winter, Microsoft will entice people away from their desks and take their work outdoors. Because "out of the office" doesn't have to mean out of the loop, apparently (source). There is something unnerving about the blandness of this "patterning of activity", to repeat Lury's phrase. The dedications on park benches reflect the anonymity of modernity, in a way, as you've often never met the person whose memorial you're seated on. But you can read the dedication and can be touched by it. Behind them was, once, an intense personal relationship. Yet there is none of this intensity in the Microsoft benches. The one pictured below is in Red Lion Square. With an ebullient statue of Fenner Brockway on one side and the entrance to Conway Hall on the other, this space contains benches with dedications like "Bruno Vogal: Writer, Humanist and Friend of the Oppressed". Microsoft's statement that "while sitting here Kevin made notes for the meeting, Jane emailed the office and Pete had a stare off with a squirrel"; may have an everyman element to it, but is just bland in comparison, even if it comes in revolutionary red rather than mossy, weathered wood. Vogal, if you've never heard of him, was a veteran of WW1 who founded a gay rights group in Leipzig in the early 1920s, later becoming active in pacifist and the anti-apartheid movements in Berlin, Cape Town and, finally, London. He probably stared at squirrels too though.

From the 1970s onwards, we saw a shift from promoting stand-alone products to brands extended across sometimes quite diverse product ranges and services. The relationships which had been constructed to sell one product became useful to market further ones, and there was a growing sense that customers should develop brand loyalty across multiple parts of their lives. This has grown into larger experiences such as M&M World or Niketown, where you are invited to hang with the brand beyond simply purchasing a product; the logo becomes almost an end in its own right. The extreme brandscaping of public space during last summer's Olympics may be gradually fading, but the ever-greater excursions of brands into previously public events and spaces continues apace. Even government public information campaigns may carry branding of corporate partners, we learnt last week. That many major media brands seem to have dating services connected to them is perhaps the greatest expression‎ of the way we are invited to pattern even the most personal aspects of our personal lives under the shine of a brand. A dig around the about section of New Scientist dating ("find chemistry here") unearths a firm supplying several media brands. Maybe we should monetise an extension of the relationships people have with our content too: New Left Project dating anyone? (Make your own "hard left" pun)

The broadening of brands stretches further back than just the 1970s though. In the 1950s, you could buy Shell guides to Nature and their travel guide series started in the 1930s as customers were invited to purchase not only branded petrol, but the whole experience of the journey it might take you on, including the relationships with fellow travellers, space, history and nature that such trips might involve. There is a history of revolt against this too. As Naomi Klein mentions in her highly influential book No Logo, Depression-era frustration led people to, for example, add moustaches to make up adverts.[3]

Such culture jamming not only refuses to take the message of the brand but turns it against itself in a way, insisting that such messages placed in public spaces must become part of public debate, enforcing a form of interactivity on a message which was previously imagined to be largely one-way. Klein also argues those who want to fighter particular brands have benefited from the same lo-"glo" (a term she takes from Neil Stevenson) relied upon by marketers.[4] A nice recent example of this can be seen in the way Reclaim the Bard activists - against oil sponsorship of the Royal Shakespeare Company - fashioned Elizabethan ruffs from the sun-like BP logo. Or there was last summer's Arctic Ready campaign from the Yes Men. Contemporary environmental protest may have shifted from save the whale to beat the brand, and this is in part because industry becomes vulnerable, as well as powerful, when it starts to rely on the lo-glo.

The brand extension is also where the Melanie Philips umbrella comes in. Or Bad Science anti-quackery underpants. Or there's the Žižek tote bag, offered free with every Verso purchase at the London Radical Bookfair. These are examples of the ways which people have become extended brands, then spread across other people, or at least their clothing, in yet another oddly packaging-based approach to expressing human connections. Verso aren't the first to offer Žižek bags (have a Google), Café Press et al make merchandising at the smaller ends of the long tail of late-modern online media consumption so very easy, the monetising of ever-more more niche fandoms a simple tap of the touchpad.

The niche element opens up the important issue of the ways people express difference even within the abstraction of brands, and how important that is for consumer capitalism. No Logo explored in some detail the way established brands would attempt to appear alternative by hiding behind new ones, as well as the capturing of particular types of anti-establishment culture (e.g. Che Guevara or CND symbols used to market carbonated drinks). Before Klein, Mike Featherstone's 1986 essay Towards a Sociology of Postmodern Culture discusses the emergence of new forms of middle classes which adopt a self-conscious "learning mode towards life", one which is both flexible and involves critique of each other. Fascinated by identity, presentation and an endless quest for new experiences "their awareness of the range of experience open to them, the frequent lack of anchoring in terms of a specific locale or community, coupled with the self-consciousness of the autodidact, who always wishes to become more than he/she is". [5] So far so contemporary Dalston, except Featherstone is talking about a group he sees developing from the 1970s onwards, with roots going back to the Romantics (hipster sociology in more ways than one).

Crucially, if you are in a constant state of development you may be continually sold new items to express your distinction. The Žižek tote bags are largely offered ironically. As, I suspect, are Goldacre's anti-quackery underpants and a cavalcade of other similarly niche products. There is something beautiful in their existence as weird objects of sub-self-referencial-cultures. But if we all agree Žižek tote bags are cool, the market remains the same. If we call bullshit and produce "I am not a Žižek tote bag", complete with pomo nod to an equally critique-able "I am not a plastic bag", we open up the opportunity for a new product. Another money-making possibility for New Left Projects fundraising wing? Or we could just call bullshit, rather than find ever-more intricate ways to buy into an expression‎ of our place in society through consumerables. 

I am not a Žižek tote bag. I am not a Melanie Phillips umbrella. You are not my friends: You are bottles of fizzy pop. You are not a park bench: You are a pseudo-interactive advert which is making me feel guilty for not working on my day off. We are not on first-name terms: I'm buying coffee from you because I don't want to talk to anyone for an hour. There are forms of sociality offered by all of these consumptive encounters, sometimes embedded within their absence of or pseudo-sociality. But I can and choose what and whom to make relationships with. So, I'll select my park bench carefully and take a moment there, switched off from the web - both out of the office and out of host of branded loops - and consider the ways modernity remains an alienating, as well as enabling, place.  Because there are attempts to break power, and there's merely surfing it.

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[1] McClintock, Anne (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest(London: Routledge). pp.210.

[2] Lury, Celia (2004) Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy (Abington and New York, Routledge) pp.3, 1.

[3] Klein, Naomi (2000) No Logo (London, Flamingo), pp. 278. Whole chapter relevant to this issue though.

[4] Ibid, pp. 349-50. Again, the whole chapter is relevant.

[5] Featherstone, Mike (1986) 'Towards a Sociology of Postmodern Culture'; in Haferkamp, Hans (ed) Social Structure and Culture (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter) p.163.

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