Branded

On navigating personal hypocrisy

Something about brands captured my young imagination. I recall wanting — needing — Levi’s rather than Wranglers. Polo and Generra, Haro and Hutch. Powell-Peralta decks with Independent trucks and Bones wheels. Oakley Blades for sport and Frogskins for apres. Cannondale and Specialized were cool; Trek was not. Adidas boots and trainers. Jordans. Those brands and what they represented were completely foreign to my parents, but they meant something profound to me. 

The thing is, I’m not sure what.

Perhaps they meant status or distinctiveness or some aspect of an emergent self-concept that I was trying to grasp and express.

During high school I started rambling in the hills more frequently. Patagonia seized my attention and soon became an obsession. I remember anticipating the catalog and all the stories and photos. It transported me to wild places and sharpened my resolve to get there myself. I didn’t read much back then, but any writing on adventures in the mountains grabbed me.

My buddies and I couldn’t afford Patagonia, but we could afford to read the catalog. We started mailing in pictures from our own adventures, hoping that our humble stories could break through. They never did, but we kept trying, burning through a ton of Kodak disposable cameras. 

Through college and work I learned about brand strategy and how a strong brand can be a powerful tool of influence. By then I was in touch with how this influence affected me, in spite of my growing understanding of how it all works. I was willing to pay a premium for brands knowing that substitutes were commonly available at much lower prices. Rationalizing this irrationality came easy.

As an MBA student, my favorite class was Brand Strategy, taught by Mark Forehand, my eventual PhD advisor, mentor and friend. That class set my life in the direction that it still heads — business professoring — albeit with some degree of waver. 

The academic study of brands interests me because brands are a mechanism for translating complex concepts into simple symbols, color and words. They are a distillation and when done well, art. The whole “picture being worth 1,000 words” thing is a cliche for good reason. Beyond communicating ideas, brands are also non-entities we form relationships with. Brands penetrate our self-concept and drive our sense of identity and how we express it. That’s amazingly powerful…and fucked up. Fucked up because brands aren’t people yet we relate to them as if they were — with expectation, trust, loyalty, support and regard for well being.

But brands don’t care about our well-being; they care about harvesting margin. They widen the gap between the cost of producing a good and the price you can charge for it. In other words, brands enable the extraction of dollars from customers over and above the base value of the product. They often signal quality and help guide customers to more efficient choices and post-purchase peace of mind, but they can feed the frenzy for status and contribute to our already alarming rates of consumer debt. 

Brands are thus both additive and extractive. They add value and convey information but they also deceive and steal from us some rather precious things.

But I like brands because they tell stories, and I like good stories. Unfortunately, I now more clearly grasp the role brands and consumption play in a larger story, the one that has us changing our climate and landscape and pushing human civilization to the brink. 

I’m not sure what to do with this sense of personal and professional unease. Whatever it is, this space is a good place to think out loud about what comes next. I’d love for it to be a dialogue, so please let me know how you all navigate these waters.