Overview on Brands Impact on Turning Society Into Lost Personalities 

Americans are worst when it comes to consumerism; that’s a well known fact. If it would be up to numbers for example, they constitute only %5 of the entire world population but they consume %24 of the energy in the world. They eat 200 billion more calories in a day than needed which makes 850 billion calories at total.

Even though they love the food this much, they throw out 200 tons of food on a daily basis. When an American comes to age of 75, he or she generates 52 tons of garbage. While more than half of the population in the world depends on 25 gallons of water per day, an average American individually consumes 159 gallons of water in a day. They are the biggest ring of the consumption chain. Not only Americans but also the whole world is now also a part of this chain. We work, we earn, and then we buy, just like commended in the advertisements.

It’s known that advertising industry has not always been this effective in our life. There used to be a necessity for a commodity and it would be used until it was no longer doing its job. But with the rapidly growing industry, companies realized that it was taking so long until a customer buy the same product again. There was supply but not demand. People like Edward Bernays who were able to understand the human psyche found the ways to manipulate it in a way that people would ‘buy’ without thinking or needing. Now brands are seriously spending time and money on consumer behaviours and psychology. It has come to a point that brands are not competing about the quality of their products anymore but how to advertise them.

But how the brands make people buy? Obviously they are very well conscious about the human psyche. By understanding the psyche, they don’t offer people what they need; they make a connection between their brand and the costumer’s deepest hopes and fears or dreams. As people, we all have a wish-list in our subconscious minds and with the help of Edward Bernays, companies are now also aware of not we need but what we want. Because Bernays created a perception that we would buy a more modern car not because we needed it but because we wanted to increase our self-esteem.

People don’t choose a pair of shoes for comfort anymore, but the name of the brand brings a sense of notion and knowledge that once you wear those shoes, you are part of a ‘communıty’ and believe that it would bring happiness. As America’s 31st president Herbert Hoover suggested; ‘Our people have been transformed into constantly moving happiness machines.’ And advertising has the biggest role on this situation. We see an add, and even if we had never thought of possessing that product, it makes us believe that we need it for life.

One recent study found that by age 16 the typical American will have seen almost six million ads. It’s not difficult to imagine how much this would add to the consumerism. Clearly, advertisement is the biggest foundation of the economy throughout the world. People are so far away from producing their own goods now because there is a company who already does this for everything and they are a lot more easier to buy than producing. We got so used to buying we don’t even question the quality anymore. According to Khasawneh and Hasouneh ‘Customers recognize the reputation of brand while in their buying decisions and customers demographic features have no significant relation and influence on brand awareness. People favor the branded goods with upper prices because they study that branded goods have more

value than local goods.’ This leads to a wrong understanding now, we even think that an expensive product would be at a better quality as it makes us feel privileged.

Researchers from CalTech and Stanford actually made a study about this fact and they made people taste the same wine saying one is for 5 dollars when the other is for 45 dollars. In fact they were the same wine, people liked the expensive one more because when the person thinks he or she is drinking the more expensive one, the part in the brain that experiences pleasure becomes more active thus making the one believe the more expensive one is at a better quality.

As Laura R. Oswald in her article ‘Marketing Hedonics: Toward a Psychoanalysis of Advertising Response’ suggests, sometimes the brands try to create a perception of being luxury by using art in their advertisements. Brands like Calvin Klein and Dolce & Gabbana tries to break the common heterosexual sense in marketing and not only they embrace different sexualities but also make their brand look more sophisticated with the artistic elements. For the brands all it matters might be selling their product but the notion for the customer is they feel privileged even if the company’s only goal is to make more money not to change the stereotypes. As Laura R. Oswald puts; ‘In postmodernism, male actors can be staged as objects of the look and female actors can be staged as voyeurs.

However, such role switching does not change the underlying structure of gender stereotypes in the dominant culture.’ Whether they give certain messages or not, I do agree with the fact that our subconscious do get affected by some messages that are given. In 1957 Vance Packard wrote a book about how the subliminally exposed messages that were below our perception increased the sales of ice cream, popcorn and Coke. Even Though later on it was proved to be a hoax, it still opened a way to realize how important the subconscious was for the sake of sales.

As Robert Heath puts it, ‘We think that if we can’t recall an advert’s message, we cannot have been influenced by it. However the truth is that emotional influence lodges deep in our subconscious and is almost impossible to recall.’

This brings the question, how much of the products that consumers buy are under their free will. Do we actually get to choose or is it already determined? ‘The human brain is always looking for a way to take a shortcut to avoid deep, deliberate thinking, so brands provide attractive options for making product decisions when faced with a choice.’5 says Gemma Mullin. So once understanding how the brain works, brands don’t hesitate to use this information against us.

So when we purchase a product, we think that it is our free will whereas it is actually our emotional inclination. Advertising has an ability to do this. It’s all about the emotional value that a brand makes the customers feel like. But to be able to this a brand has to have a strong foundation on people’s mind. A recent incident proved this best in a highly watched tv series ‘Game of Thrones’ by showing a coffee cup in one of its fınal season episodes. Barış Özcan in his Youtube video explains this as ‘anachronism’.

Cambridge dictionary definition for anachronism is ‘a person, thing, or idea that exists out of its time in history, especially one that happened or existed late than the period being shown, discussed, etc.’ So this chronologic mistake disturbs our brain and helps us notice the oddity. It was a regular coffee cup but it was called as a ‘Starbucks cup’ all over the internet even though it was from a local coffee shop in an area where Starbucks didn't exist. Conspiracy theories came up with it as soon as it was seen on screen and people thought that it was a secret Starbucks advertisement.

With only this theory, even if it was actually meant to be there or not, it still helped the brand in a massive amount because according to social media analytics more than 193,000 mentions showed up within the first 48 hours on Twitter, blogs, news cites or other social forums. Hollywood Branded marketing company’s CEO Stacy Jones suggested the estimated value of all these mentions was around 2.3 billion dollars according to Cnbc. She said ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime collision of opportunity for Starbucks, but really, this is just the tip of the iceberg, because what isn’t being monitored or estimated is the word of mouth and social media on top of this.’ Later on it was deleted from the scene and said that it was a mistake but from this example it can be understood how effective can a brand’s image be. This example shows the power of the brand. Starbucks created such a powerful brand image that not only when talking about coffee, but even seeing a regular coffee cup brings into minds its name.

Branding and logo is this effective for the companies. Demolishing of the branding culture might be the only cure. Award winning journalist and the best selling author Naomi Klein is one of the most known anti-corporate movement. She published her book ‘No Logo’ in 2002 and it made a great impact on understanding corporate marketing and capitalism. She points out in her book to capitalism which is age of globalization is actually age of brand and logo. They are everywhere, in our daily lives and in our most private times of our life. As Waldon Bello puts it “We live in a ‘branded world’ where taste, cultural standards, and ultimately even values are increasingly defined by mega brands like Nike, whose swoosh has come to represent the ultimate in athletic style and whose slogan, “Just Do It,” identified Nike with the assertion of individuality.”9

Even if the brands and their slogans seem like they encourage people to ‘be free’ or ‘feel privileged’ there is a hypocrisy with the fact that those products are made by ‘not free and privileged’ at all workers and communities in the poorest parts of the world. Brands don’t really care about these people at all so there is a dishonesty and cynicism just to get wealthy. They represent values like ‘freedom’ or ‘youthfulness’ whereas they are sharply contradicted as they are produced by a worker 16 years old behind the fences or closed doors. Phil Knight, the former CEO of Nike: “For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool”.

Laura R. Oswald’s opinions in her article matches with this notion too and I strongly agree the fact that companies went through an evolution in terms of marketing. This made us the customers feel more free on deciding and purchasing items in fact we are trapped in and endless loop of earning money to buy things and then working more to earn money so we could spend it again. As Laura R. Oswald cites, “Consumers internalize the force and meaning in advertising by means of the psychic drives of projection and internalization, projecting themselves into the brand world of the ad and also personalizing that world as their own.” We as the customers are defenseless against the fully aware of companies and their marketing techniques.

Сertainly they are always one step ahead of us and they always know what we would want to buy and they service it to us in the most appealing way so we can’t resist. But it is not fair to blame it only on the companies as the customers we demand more than just a product, too. Having a cup of coffee is not only for drinking purposes now. We want all the other benefits that come with that cup. We let them choose for us and lead us which supports the idea of the ‘herd instinct’. No matter our races, sexual tendencies, backgrounds or personal preferences ‘possessing’ brings a short term joy to our life until we see a better one. We lose our originalities and become a member of the herd. The hypocrisy here is the fact that brands try to convince us that we are ‘special’ even if they want us ‘all’ to buy the same product which would make us not special at all. One of the biggest problems of our age, lost personalities emerge; lost personalities. Eventually we find ourselves searching for our original selves.

As Charles Wesley Orton cites in his book “Now we spend our time in pursuit of “self-help” while searching for our “true selves.”