Simplexities

The rise of brands has helped to structure the market as well as to deploy a market culture that is based on five principles: A logic of semanticization consubstantial to the consumer society, which consists of enhancing market goods with an imagined dimension for staging them to make them desirable and therefore consumable. The strength of Marlboro lies in symbolically assimilating the cowboy smoking in America’s wide open prairies by endowing him with the values of adventure, freedom and virility through a story, that of the Wild West, which is both a founding myth in American culture and a metaphor for the chance offered to the consumer to surpass his own limits. It is mainly through the use of symbolic code or logic of signs that goods acquire meaning. Hence the importance of brands which, by attaching values to products beyond their functional value, represent a key feature in the development of this code through an ongoing process of attributing meaning and re-attributing meaning. Smoking to become masculine or adventuresome, smearing oneself with cosmetics to dress up the faces of womanhood or using perfume to enhance one’s romantic potential — these are all myths of an essentially symbolic economy of brands. Consumer society is thus based on the perpetual questioning of the concept of needs, even if it means the difference between real and artificial needs becomes impossible to discern due to the logic of social construction of needs. By substituting signs for goods, capitalism inexorably placed consumption in relation to attributing meaning more than to use and production. A logic of differentiation: the brand is primarily a matter of deviation and variance — in fine, displacement. One may especially consider two types of displacement at work in any brand: the first refers to a type of ‘transportation’ relationship linking the signifier to the signified; as Peninou said (1972), the brand ensures the passage of realism of the matter (the common name) to the symbolism of the name (ownership). The second displacement is the gap that the meaning of each brand must produce compared to the discursive productions of so-called competing brands. This is what we may call the brand’s style as far as we are able to define style as a deviation from a standard. A logic of premiumization: the semanticization ability of a good for sale offers brands the opportunity to create goodwill and generate a premium, otherwise known as a brand premium, that is to say, a price differential the brand is likely to add compared to competing brands. The economy of brands is therefore essentially based on logic of premiumization of selling a product at a higher price than the reference retail price by casting it in an imagined dimension. The coupling of the symbolic function and premiumization function leads directly to the brand’s ultimate function: to defunctionalize a commercial product by focusing attention on dimensions other than the product’s functionality, doing so in order to make people forget the price and, paradoxically, also the product itself. This is the price where we are desensitized to the cost to increase awareness of the brand. It is what we call de-commoditization. In this way, Swatch does not sell watches, but “fashion accessories that incidentally tell the time.” The same goes for Nike having literally transformed the sports shoe into a must-have accessory for trendy everyday wear. A logic of market segmentation and benefits: How indeed can brands claim a “premium effect” if not via positioning based on a clear, differentiated and specific benefit? Marketing’s answer to this economic issue is the segmentation of benefits, from which is derived the famous dogma of the well-known USP (unique selling proposition), consisting of a brand claiming only one type of benefit in highly competitive markets. In other words, marketing ideology has long recommended that brands specialize in just one type of benefit: oral hygiene for brands like Elmex or Fluocaryl, sold in pharmacies; an active social life for Email Diamant or Ultra Brite; good taste for children’s brands or a good price for most store brands (SB). In this way, the value-creation mechanism is historically linked to a segmentation of expectations logic and, therefore, a typology of consumer values. A logic of rhetoric based on the principle of non-contradiction: the brand’s ability to defend a singular position is not sustainable in a Western cultural context unless from the moment the brand claims clear choices that rely on consistent principles. The very idea of an underlying conflict or contradiction that would decrease the brand’s benefit is dismissed out of hand, hence the recurring difficulty of brands simultaneously to claim enjoyment and low calories, comfort, low price, and so forth. The rhetoric of Western brands is built on a series of oppositions based on the a priori exclusion of antagonistic principles. A logic of expansion that allows brands to benefit from their reputation, expertise and image to broaden their range of products (Diet Coke, Coca Cola Zero, Coca Cola Lemon, etc.) and enter into a new world of products. Thus the Bonne Maman brand, the brand of reference for jam, very successfully expanded into categories such as cookies, chilled desserts and ice cream. Another prime example is the Bic brand that we know has successfully conquered the pen market, razors, lighters, surfboards and cell phones. This expansion strategy proved less fruitful when Bic was inspired to enter the fragrance market or underwear market. These examples show that a brand extension is likely to work if three conditions are met: (a) Customers must perceive a link (in expertise or image) between the parent brand and the product emerging from the expansion; (b) the brand must have enough legitimacy to launch in this new market; and (c) the product must make a real contribution to the market and not be an existing product on which we are content to affix a logo (badging logic). Weight Watchers, for example, is much more legitimate in the healthy options market than is Colgate; Lego has failed to make a real contribution with its range of clothing for children.