Chapter Five: Branding

How did advertising become the most ubiquitous aspect of our culture? More so than any other form of media or image, we are exposed to thousands of images from advertisement every day in every area of our lives. We see it on our phones and computers, on social media and news websites and episodes of TV shows, we see it emblazoned on everyone’s clothes in the form of logos, we see it on buses and cabs and subway cars and hood ornaments, hidden in plain sight by our favorite influencers and a cultural event of its own during the Superbowl. A massive part of our culture is advertising. It’s unsurprising then that we often form identities around it, valorize it, and even brand ourselves. But to what extent are we controlling it, and how much are these images controlling us?

Meanwhile in America

Around the time the Nazis were gathering power in Germany, a man called Edward Bernays was in New York City, revolutionizing the industry of advertising. Bernays, who is credited with essentially inventing modern advertising as we know it today, was the nephew of the much more famous Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, a theory of human psychology that believes that all of our decisions, feelings, and behaviors are governed by unconscious childlike desires for pleasure and safety. Bernays put Freud’s principles to work by using them to sell products.

Bernays did this by trying to suggest that the product he was advertising would satisfy some of those unconscious desires. There are several famous examples. Believing that cigarettes represented masculine power because of their shape (Freud believes we are obsessed with that shape), Bernays staged a media event that connected female empowerment to smoking. He did this by having the suffragists smoke as they walked – in front of many cameras – through Manhattan on a protest march. He wanted to connect women’s desire for power, representation, and enfranchisement to smoking a cigarette. Cigarette sales among women skyrocketed, though of course that probably had more to do with admiration for the suffragists and less to do with his theory of cigarettes being unconsciously associated with erections.

“Reach for a Lucky” is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Bernays had a lucrative and prolific career in advertising and press relations, describing his work as the “engineering of consent”. It’s a powerful phrase. It tells us that Bernays valued the “consent” of the people he was trying to control, and also that he believed that consent can be tactically “engineered” with unconscious tactics. We might question whether that’s really consent. And Bernays didn’t believe this “consent engineering” was limited to advertising. The engineering of consent could be applied to politics, a set of tactics and strategies for how visual culture and images could be used to control the masses (ring any bells?).

Bernays – and many other powerful people of his time and ours – did not believe that people could adequately govern themselves; they needed to be guided to the right answer by the world around them. The engineering of consent is about engineering the world around people to affect their actions. When you start to notice how we see ads, brands, and logos every place we go, you might begin to think that they have been successful.

Branding Ourselves

Since Bernays’s time brands and logos have only become more prominent and central to our daily lives. We began to wear our brands outwardly: logos began appearing on clothes, and then they got bigger and bigger until some clothes became completely covered in them, a process which Naomi Klein calls “Brand Expansion”. It might seem like the ultimate victory of advertisers that we began to advertise to each other in this way, turning our running clothes into sprinting billboards.

Why did this process take place? How did we end up volunteering to advertise for companies by wearing their chosen images on our clothes? The key to the question of why we consent to branding might be the idea of “value”. We can look to a philosopher-economist for insight: Karl Marx. Marx made a distinction between two kinds of value. When looking at an object, you can think of it as having both a use-value and an exchange-value. The use-value of an object, like a purse, is how useful it is: how good it is at carrying stuff. The exchange-value, on the other hand, is how much that object is sold or traded for. A hammer, in general, is an example of those two kinds of value being very similar. You can generally expect how useful a hammer is to be reflected in its cost. There aren’t many hammers with designer logos on them. A Fendi bag, however, might be as useful as a $20 bag sold on the sidewalk, but its exchange value is totally different.

Why is that the case? One argument might be that the use-value of a Fendi bag is in telling the world something about our taste and finances, so it has to be expensive. In this case, its use-value isn’t different from its exchange-value. But that requires us to believe that the value of what a brand tells the world about you is very high and very useful.

That we value what a brand tells people about us is reflected in both our willingness to wear company logos and our choice to pay to do so. Brands are powerful communicative tools in a social system of signs that we create and participate in. We brand ourselves with logos to identify ourselves with systems of belief, values, ideas, politics, and class positions. Livestock have been branded for centuries to identify ownership. We get to choose our owners, but we also usually pay for the privilege, sometimes exceptional amounts.

Today

Advertising has changed since Bernays’s time and even since Naomi Klein’s book No Logo, a key text for thinking about logos and branding in the early 2000s. The internet and social media have transformed advertising and our image world. Pictures of us in our branded clothing now circulate online. We increasingly take part in advertising to each other through social media, and many “influencers” are paid to do so. And advertising is now “targeted” to us, built on huge datasets gathered from a machine observing our online behavior, rather than randomly received from a billboard. Talk about one’s “personal brand” is also commonplace. It seems, surprisingly, that advertising has only become a bigger part of our lives.

How can we carve out a space for our “consent” in a landscape that is constantly trying to nudge us towards choices that benefit someone else? Yet again, the answer may be “visual literacy”. Visual literacy skills promise to help you limit the amount your consent is being engineered by the world around you by helping you to see the ways that images have been designed to sway your choices so you can make yours more freely. The exercises that follow are designed to explore advertising and how it relies on us not being “visually literate” to be most effective.

Works Cited and Further Reading

“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner, Weiner Bros. Productions, 19 July 2007. Netflix.

Bernays, Edward L. “The Engineering of Consent.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 250, no. 1, Mar. 1947, pp. 113–120.

Curtis, Adam, dir. “The Engineering of Consent”. The Century of the Self. BBC, 30 Apr. 2002.

Martineau, Paris. “What is an Influencer.” Wired. 6 December 2019.