"You now have to decide what 'image' you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the market place."
—David Ogilvy "The Father of Advertising"
We—average, Middle Class Americans—now live in an age of what has been dubbed the “Pretty Good Problem.” When we enter the Consumer Marketplace, we now find a vast equalization in intrinsic quality of the products that we encounter there—apart from increasingly minute differences in basic functionality—which makes it more and more frustrating to choose which Company actually offers us the most for our money and makes it more and more difficult for any one product to stand out. Unless money is no object, then the range of different features a car, a stove, a razor, a cell phone, etc can really have are limited to few truly unique aspects, and therefore, as a consumer of these products, it has become increasingly hard to rationally choose which product will allow you to maximize your purchasing power.
For the first half of the 20th Century, the Consumer used to navigate a world of shoddy, unsafe products, but now, thanks to a range of Consumer Watchdog Groups and the maturation of Industrial Capitalism, this no longer seems to be a concern. And this, of course, is a very good thing as far as health and safety and value and “bang for your buck” is concerned, but it has created a two-fold problem: 1) as a Consumer, it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate the dizzying array of almost meaningless options; and 2) as a Company, it becomes harder and harder to differentiate oneself from the competition. Most products become invisible, thus necessitating a different type of approach to Marketing—one that no longer dabbles in necessary Innovation but, instead, in Novelty; that can engage people in a way that transcends the now meaningless Materialism and can capture their allegiance on a deeper, emotional level.
This act is called Branding. It is a way to add a distinct, unique value to a product, but it is a value that has no tangible quality to it. It is an Idea that is being sold that seeks to differentiate itself, not by what concrete benefits it confers to Consumers, but, instead, by how it makes Consumers feel about a product and about them-Selves. When all products become relatively the same, there is little to no actual value that can be added to a product, so, by necessity, Marketing has been forced to become more and more ambitious and elaborate in its approach to engaging Consumers.
Companies now sell Life-styles: outward expressions of inner commitments. They sell products that help us to express our-Selves and differentiate our Self from the Others. If a Brand can position their Self—see Corporate Personhood—in the minds of Consumers as expressing certain Values and these Values can be tailored to coincide with the same ones that the Consumer values, then you can create Customer Loyalty. But these Values have to be very carefully shaped, so as to create a consistent Story or Image that people can easily recognize and relate to. And these companies now spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Consumer Research, even to the point of hiring cognitive scientists to discover how their Brand Message will affect Consumers on the unconscious level of the brain.
And its not like most Consumers don’t know this or are unaware that Marketing is complete BS, it’s just that Marketing has become so omnipresent, we have given up on trying to fight it and now—embrace it. We use this knowledge to create our own Personal Brands—a culmination of our Values that are expressed through our Life-styles—that allow us to consciously shape our Image and the way Others “position” us in their minds. It makes us feel like we are in control and have power over our identities and the Free Will to create our-Selves however we see fit. We now market our-Selves through our Facebooks and Myspaces, on our college and job applications, and on dating and hook-up websites. We have become intimately familiar with the language of Branding and far from having any moral repugnance to it, we use it to our advantage every opportunity that we get. ( See the The 48 Laws of Power) We try to create clear and consistent Brand Messages that express who we are and want we want because “knowing what makes you unique and being able to communicate that in sound bites is vital.”
In 1831, an Aristocratic Frenchmen named Alexis de Tocqueville was sent by the French government to the United States to study the prison system of our young “enlightened” Republic. His exploration lasted for two years, during which time he took some notes for a project of his own as well and in 1835 and in 1840 published a two volume series of an outsider’s look at our emerging nation, called Democracy in America. It was an in depth look—about 700 pages worth—at our Political and Social institutions that celebrated and, at the same time, warned against certain trends that he saw endemic to the American Experience. Despite his well-to-do upbringing, he ultimately sided with the “Democratic Revolution” he saw as inevitably sweeping over the Western World, not just because he saw it as inevitable, but because he knew that it was the most Just. Overall, he was most hopeful for our nation and supported this, as yet, unprecedented experiment in human governance.
One of his main concerns, however, was the loss of a certain type of Aristocratic Sentiment that could disappear in the midst of Radical Equality and Material Status-Seeking. It wasn’t the Aristocratic “Class” that he feared losing, but the taste for “Greatness” that accompanied it and helped to train and refine the aims and goals of the Citizenry. Thomas Jefferson seemed to hold this same view when he expressed that, “there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.” For a sample of some of Tocqueville’s fears, one need look no further then the titles of a few of his chapters: Why One Finds so Many Ambitious Men in the United States and so Few Great Ambitions; On the Industry of Place-Hunting in Certain Democratic Nations; How the Excessive Love of Well-Being Can Be Harmful to Well-Being.
He predicted that what may result from these new Political and Social Institutions was the “Pretty Good Problem,” only not just with Products but, even worse, with Personality. He called it a “Middling Mediocrity”—”There are no Americans who do not show that they are devoured by the desire to rise, but one sees almost none of them who appear to nourish vast hopes or to aim very high. All want constantly to acquire goods, reputation, power; few envision all these things on a grand scale…They [goods, reputation, power] compel the soul to employ all its strength in doing mediocre things—which cannot fail soon to limit its view and circumscribe its power. They could be much poorer and still be greater.”
He also asserted that all Americans were Cartesians—although none of them had ever read, the philosopher, Descartes. By this, he meant that Americans were all Rationalists—they all relied on the power of their own mind to judge for themselves what was right and wrong, hence America’s strong disdain for “Elites” across the Political Spectrum that persists to this day. Americans never read Descartes, or philosophy in general, because they are too pre-occupied with making money; they are too “restive”—always distracted by some mad pursuit to better their life, but only on the Material level. Another consequence he saw of this now Socially accepted Individual Reason is a distaste for inherited wisdom or tradition/convention. But, the only problem is that since everyone is so distracted by the pursuit of money, they do not have the time or education to really think about the issues and decide for themselves and in the end just end up following Public Opinion. And this would eventually substantiate itself as a monotony of thought and become what he called “The Tyranny of the Majority.”
It seems that “when people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other” because that is how, essentially, Democracy works: competing Ideas enter the Marketplace and the ones that are chosen by the Majority become the ruling Ideology. Rousseau saw this in his own time as well when he noted that the same Men who were Liberals in his day, 100 years before hand would have been Absolutists. It wasn’t so much that they had become “enlightened,” but rather that they were just Conformists. It is not even necessary in Democratic Society to coerce or force people to accept Public Opinion; by its very nature, it breaks the inner Will to resist because there is no alternative source of non-conforming principles and no sense of Individual superior right when everyone is viewed as Equal.
And now, just as we have the “Pretty Good Problem” with our Consumer Products, we seem to be having the same problem with our Selves, and the response to the problem has been about the same—we paint over a seemingly bland uniformity with Personal Life-style Brands. But, just as a Corporation’s Brand Image is a facade to mask the lack of Individual distinction, so too are the carefully crafted Images we create to mask the Middling Mediocrity that has taken over our citizenry. There are now countless books and websites and blogs to help you decide “what type of Personal Brand you would like to develop” that can aid us in our attempt to “acquire goods, reputation, [and] power” but, just as Tocqueville pointed out in his day, we “are [all still] devoured by the desire to rise, but one sees almost none of [us] who appear to nourish vast hopes or to aim very high.”
The whole goal of the Sixties attack on American Bourgeois Society was to try and move beyond the overly Rational, Materialistic, “One-Dimensional” conformity that they saw inherent to our system since its founding, which became solidified in Eisenhower’s stultifying, Pleasantville Fifties. The means of this revolution was through a negation of the past, which to them was inherently flawed, replaced by the free play of Creativity that would create the utopian future of brotherly love and diversity (I know it was more complicated than that, but I’m just distilling it down to what I see as its essence). But the only problem is that they didn’t do their homework—and why would they if they saw the past as completely flawed—and didn’t realize that they were playing with fire. Once one begins a free-fall into the Abyss, there’s no guarantee that there will ever be a ground upon which to land.
There is now no legitimate reason to resist Public Opinion and no reason not to simply pursue Material wealth and fame—through our greatly watered down “Will to Power.” All the things Tocqueville tried to warn us about have come to fruition, and far from creating the utopia that the Radicals hoped for, we have descended farther down into the circles of Hell from which they were trying to extricate us. We now must attempt to deliberately create our-Selves in near isolation, apart from Tradition, Community, Society, History or even Nature and can find no greater goal than childish Self-Satisfaction and fleeting Material fulfillment that so many great Philosophers warned us against.
And this, of course, plays right into the hands of the Marketers that even the most radical of us fails to resist. Instead of our Individualities being informed by the greatest Ideas that have been thought and written down for the benefit of posterity, we simply go to the Mall and purchase our identities from the limitless buffet of Consumer Goods and Services that America is so well known for. But being an Individual is more than just make-up and clothing, piercings, tattoos and Brand Logos; it is an inner conviction in one’s own beliefs which must be supplemented by tradition, teaching, and—God forbid—imitation or else one will inevitably become a slave to Public Opinion—which is necessarily formed around the lowest common denominator. This teaching should come from our parents and grandparents; from people in our neighborhoods and communities; from our primary-schools and universities; from high culture and from high-quality pop culture. And above all, it must come with rules and duties, not just smiley faces and boundless—thus groundless—freedom.
Just as Branding for a product is simply superficial cover-up for a lack of any real differentiating quality, so too is our Personal Branding. We now exist in a vacuum. We are discontent with the present, but lack the awareness of any real Alternative to it. The old writers may not have been perfect, but right now we could use a diversity of opinions more than ever. We have lost our sense of perspective, and, in this post-Nietzschean world, we no longer have the comforting thought that history is naturally progressing to some sort of rational "end." The future now looks bleak and indefinite. It is still ours to "create" but, without some sort of guiding principles, I can promise you that it will look no better than the past that we all, apparently, have such contempt for.
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