New product DISplacement techniques

[Lies]

Marketers sure are getting evilly clever in their marketing techniques...
Get this, they create brand awareness by... not putting the brand in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIvCfNKg8qM&feature=relmfu

[Cramulus]

that was fascinating


This non-branding method of branding is using a technique called the Zeigarnik effect. The idea is basically to create a form of tension, maintain it, and then the tension is resolved by the brand entering into your consciousness.

I really liked the bit at the end where they talk about the Starbucks that's experimenting with removing all references to it being a starbucks. It just looks like a regular local coffee store.

Can you imagine a world without brands? I doubt this technique is going to catch on, but it's an interesting evolution in marketing. Just imagine a world where people marketed products without ever referencing what they were. Your tastes as a consumer would have to be oriented onto high quality products, not high quality brands. People wouldn't carry an expensive handbag because of the famous label, they'd actually have to make an aesthetic judgment about the bag itself.

A lot of what I object to about commercial branding is that many people use brands to define themselves, and I think this leads to a really shallow form of identity. You go shopping for clothes at the mall, you've got to make a lot of choices about how you want to depict yourself in the empire of signs and signals. Do you want to signal that you're rich? street? young and connected? mature and refined? And the more attention you pay to these things, the more you treat them as real, the more you just see brands when you look at another human being. You'll be more likely to look at somebody who's dressed a certain way and think of them as a caricature.

I've also always been curious -- Kalle Lasn (of Adbusters fame) tried to create an "unbrand" brand, the black spot sneakers. He tried to make it "cool" to not wear branded clothes and not pay attention to brands. He thought the best way to do this was to try and put brands next to anti-brands and see who wins in the market. Spoiler alert: he lost. But if anybody DOES actually make unbranding cool, and that becomes mainstream, what will the new cool be?

[Doktor Howl]

As a "bleachy", I have no opinion.

[Suu]

Take off the Cs and the creed, and I can STILL tell you the difference between a Coach bag and a knockoff.

I shop a lot for quality when it comes to material goods. I've pulled apart shirt seams in Abercrombie and Fitch to prove a point. Name means very little to me in the end if the quality isn't there.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

As a "bleachy", I have no opinion.

Quiet bleachy!

[LMNO]

A lot of what I object to about commercial branding is that many people use brands to define themselves, and I think this leads to a really shallow form of identity.

But how is this anything new?  Tribal politics have long established that pack status is signaled through decorative clothing.  Wear clothing type "X", and you are associated with tribe "X".  While it's true that marketing departments have become more blatant in saying, "if you wear this, you'll be part of the cool tribe", all they are doing is highlighting an underlying behavior that has existed ever since the first caveman stuck a feather in his hair.  There's a reason cliches like "don't dress for the job you have, dress for the job you want" exist.  It's the reason the line "A nice tie opens many doors" made it into Chapter 27 of the CTC.

The problem, as I see it, isn't that marketers have tied a tribe to a brand and to a price tag.  It's that most humans aren't self-aware enough to choose what tribe they want to be in.

[Doktor Howl]

I wasn't.  Lies had to tell me what I was.   

[LMNO]

I wasn't.  Lies had to tell me what I was.   

THE BLEACHY SPEAKS ONLY WHEN SPOKEN TO, OR IT GETS THE HOSE AGAIN.

[Doktor Howl]

I wasn't.  Lies had to tell me what I was.   

THE BLEACHY SPEAKS ONLY WHEN SPOKEN TO, OR IT GETS THE HOSE AGAIN.

yassuh

[Cramulus]

A lot of what I object to about commercial branding is that many people use brands to define themselves, and I think this leads to a really shallow form of identity.

But how is this anything new?  Tribal politics have long established that pack status is signaled through decorative clothing.

Mm, my grammar could have been better there. The problem IMO is the shallow form of identity / engagement with culture that it leads to. Our obsession with images and signifiers is a distraction from actual substance.

The problem, as I see it, isn't that marketers have tied a tribe to a brand and to a price tag.  It's that most humans aren't self-aware enough to choose what tribe they want to be in.

'zactly.





from Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs

More recent is the notion that the public mind is being colonized by corporate phantasms---wraithlike images of power and desire that haunt our dreams. Consider the observations of Neal Gabler and Marshall Blonsky:

Everywhere the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical have gradually driven out the natural, the genuine and the spontaneous until there is no distinction between real life and stagecraft. In fact, one could argue that the theatricalization of American life is the major cultural transformation of this century.


We can no longer do anything without wanting to see it immediately on video...There is never any longer an event or a person who acts for himself, in himself. The direction of events and of people is to be reproduced into image, to be doubled in the image of television. [T]oday the referent disappears. In circulation are images. Only images.

The eutopic (literally, "no-place") territory demarcated by Gabler and Blonsky, lush with fictions yet strangely barren, has been mapped in detail by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In his landmark 1975 essay, "The Precession of Simulacra," Baudrillard put forth the notion that we inhabit a "hyperreality," a hall of media mirrors in which reality has been lost in an infinity of reflections. We "experience" events, first and foremost, as electronic reproductions of rumored phenomena many times removed, he maintains; originals, invariably compared to their digitally-enhanced representations, inevitably fall short. In the "desert of the real," asserts Baudrillard, mirages outnumber oases and are more alluring to the thirsty eye.

Moreover, he argues, signs that once pointed toward distant realities now refer only to themselves. Disneyland's Main Street, U.S.A, which depicts the sort of idyllic, turn-of-the-century burg that exists only in Norman Rockwell paintings and MGM backlots, is a textbook example of self-referential simulation, a painstaking replica of something that never was. "These would be the successive phases of the image," writes Baudrillard, betraying an almost necrophiliac relish as he contemplates the decomposition of culturally-defined reality. "[The image] is the reflection of a basic reality; it masks and perverts a basic reality; it masks the absence of a basic reality; it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum."

Reality isn't what it used to be. In America, factory capitalism has been superseded by an information economy characterized by the reduction of labor to the manipulation, on computers, of symbols that stand in for the manufacturing process. The engines of industrial production have slowed, yielding to a phantasmagoric capitalism that produces intangible commodities--- Hollywood blockbusters, television sit-coms, catchphrases, jingles, buzzwords, images, one-minute megatrends, financial transactions flickering through fiberoptic bundles. Our wars are Nintendo wars, fought with camera-equipped smart bombs that marry cinema and weaponry in a television that kills. Futurologists predict that the flagship technology of the coming century will be "virtual reality," a computer-based system that immerses users wearing headsets wired for sight and sound in computer-animated worlds. In virtual reality, the television swallows the viewer, headfirst.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Marketers sure are getting evilly clever in their marketing techniques...
Get this, they create brand awareness by... not putting the brand in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIvCfNKg8qM&feature=relmfu

In the early 90's several companies tried to introduce new products without brands in an attempt to generate mystique... they all failed, but at the same time, there was a rash of high-end companies which based their entire cachet on product, rather than brand, recognition. While brand mystique didn't work for the new products, it did for the established high-end products. As "branding" took over as a keyword in marketing, the mystique approach faded. I'd be pleased to see it return, though.

[Cramulus]

This is kind of a tangent, but the emotion which this topic brings to the forefront is the sense of uncertainty and bewilderment that I think we're all riding these days.

the first thing that comes to mind as an exemplar is the conflict between anonymous and lulzsec

and it might be a real conflict
or it might have been engineered by the ringmasters who have snuck into their ranks

Even if it's a real conflict, I have no doubt that its engineering was discussed by the private security firms which seek to discredit and rebrand anon, wikileaks, and all the other "hacktivist" groups who are getting all grabass cowboy about data. It's really easy to make vague decentralized groups look like they're fighting. And making it LOOK like they're fighting will inevitably lead to them fighting.

So how seriously am I supposed to take this conflict? Am I supposed to treat it like it's real? Am I supposed to dismiss it like a bad photoshop job? I just don't know. So many groups are signaling things, who the fuck knows whats really going on. anywhere.

[LMNO]

A lot of what I object to about commercial branding is that many people use brands to define themselves, and I think this leads to a really shallow form of identity.

But how is this anything new?  Tribal politics have long established that pack status is signaled through decorative clothing.

Mm, my grammar could have been better there. The problem IMO is the shallow form of identity / engagement with culture that it leads to. Our obsession with images and signifiers is a distraction from actual substance.

The problem, as I see it, isn't that marketers have tied a tribe to a brand and to a price tag.  It's that most humans aren't self-aware enough to choose what tribe they want to be in.

'zactly.

BUt this means you're getting upset at the symptom, not the cause.  Getting mad at marketers for leveraging the masses' lack of introspection is missing the point, in my opinion.  

[Cramulus]

I don't agree I shouldn't be mad at marketers whose techniques facilitate behavior I think is disgusting.


I mean, I guess the root cause is that people are easily distracted and manipulated, but I feel like complaining about human nature is a large waste of breath.


By drawing attention to manipulative marketing techniques, you can help people resist them.

[Lies]

I wasn't.  Lies had to tell me what I was.   

THE BLEACHY SPEAKS ONLY WHEN SPOKEN TO, OR IT GETS THE HOSE AGAIN.

beat me to pretty much exactly what I was thinking of replying with.