What are you thinking about making a brand for?
When I wrote the OP, I was full of energy from having finished Christine Harold's
Ourspace, and was trying to
articulate an answer to the AdBusters Black Spot campaign. The OP was a little scattered, I think, because I had
a lot of ideas buzzing around.
The AdBusters crowd (and their predecessors, the Situationists) suggest that life could be a lot better if the objects in our mental space didn't have all these commercial associations. I would agree with
Doloras LaPichio that our current market is an "identity industry", and many of the identities you can build in this landscape are inherently confused, conflicted, and controlled.
AdBusters created this line of sneakers called the Black Spot, the idea was to create an
unbranded brand. They wanted to manufacture sneakers that were explicitly devoid of a designer logo, so that the
status you were seeking came from this
outsider coolness, this rebellion against commercial branding.
I'll say in their favor that it was a noble effort. Ultimately, the idea fails because it's like the "Just Say No" campaign... it tells us not do something, but doesn't tell us what to do
instead. The AdBusters position recommends not letting commercial branding get too tied up in your identity (which is a strong point), but has no instructions about how to
stop being consumers. There's no alternative.
Mainly, my hope is that these organic brands which arise organically from culture (as opposed to a marketing team) give us ways of expressing our identity which isn't tied to a product. Because people desperately want to identify and individuate themselves, to customize their position within The Machine
TM. And it would be better (IMO) if stuff like the Guy Fawkes mask, the rageface imagery, and all this great creative stuff we've invented together in the last 10 years were our primary means of self expression.

^
this shit is pathetic
if anybody really thinks like that, I feel bad for them