Death to Branding! Long Live Art!
This is David Bowie’s younger brother, Bob. He’s a mid-level brand manager for a sleazy company, and is a karaoke star at his local bar and grille on Tuesday nights. Is he an example of bad branding, or the kind that makes new, just, and imaginative worlds? You decide.
Death to branding!
We live in a time when everything about our human experience is being harvested and prospected, to be made into a commodity.
Our attention. Our friendships and contacts. Our likes and preferences. Our ideas and creativity ("content") - are all being corralled and monetized to feed the bank accounts of Big Tech. Even our transactions and movements through real-world space are surveilled, captured, and sold as data to someone watching.
This is the inevitable condition of late-stage capitalism, or to be more specific, neoliberalism, which is built to ultimately bring every aspect of human interaction it can identify into the realm of the market.
This story of human-experience-as-product is so pervasive that it feels like normal life: but it's a mass spectacle of "normal" which is entirely manufactured, like our very own Truman Show.
So of course even our protest becomes a commodity. Hosted and mediated by our phones, social and tech platforms, public expressions of resistance and critique become simply more “sticky” content in a mass culture that is here to both perpetuate and conceal the real, tangible, material abuses and movements of power.
Feeding this beast is a perfect distraction for us - from finding concrete, material ways to mount true challenges to the overarching economic system that benefits from all of this activity and is destroying the biosphere.
Cultural work is incredibly important: but all this good cultural production we are doing gets easily neutralized by a system that benefits from our provocation.
Doesn't that suck?
At the center of all this is one of the primary current vehicles for the packaging and delivery of human being, human skills, human experience: the brand.
Branding is the art form and the design strategy for life within the pseudo-real spectacle world of neoliberal culture. It's the art form of the market.
Death to branding already.
Long live art!
But you should definitely still have a stellar brand. Let's unpack.
So here we are, doing our real work with real people and caring about it.
We're in the institution of entrepreneurship, in 2021, in an apocalyptic setting of late capitalism's collapse and neoliberalism gobbling up everything it can.
We oppose the system (to varying degrees), but we also have to work in it to live. For now, it's what facilitates our connections, our communications, our economies.
Our brands facilitate our ability to make our entrepreneurship in this system successful. To extend and communicate our work. They are necessary tools. And they do have a role to play in creating the better worlds we want and imagine.
In every era, forms of protest emerge that are direct responses to the particular conditions of the time. In our time, the conditions are the distracting, concealing, pervasive spectacle of mass culture and the relentless mediation of our economies and relationships through technology.
A brand in this space can be obedient to the power dynamics and oppression that the current status quo demands...or it can be a small act of intervention. A way to use the language and methods of the dominant culture against itself, and in doing so, gain support from others itching for the same kind of change.
When this kind of intervention happens, I think a brand ceases to be just a brand. It also becomes art.
It becomes art in the sense that it disobeys convention and creates unexpected meaning, a pause in the incessant hum of the normal, a crack in the veneer. It interrupts us, brings us into the present, and into the presence of epiphany, however subtle.
On a movement-scale, this happened when Alicia Garza coined the term Black Lives Matter and an existing movement suddenly had a hashtag robust enough to go viral on social media. Through the spread of a crowd-created but still unified branding system based on this statement, the brand supported on-the-ground activism, giving it widespread cultural support while people took to the streets. Same with #landback, with #metoo. These brands/movements have focus on solidarity, collectivity, and a focus on dismantling power structures concretely (Defunding the police. Stopping pipelines and protecting indigenous land. Outing and interrupting sexual abusers. Changing workplace policies).
Acting from solidarity to force concrete structural changes is a strategy enough in opposition to the dominant culture's tactics that it couldn't co-opt these movements right away - and real changes started getting made.
Brand signals normalize ideas for us, and BLM (for example) normalized both the idea that Black people's lives matter, and conversely, the idea that our society behaves otherwise. #landback normalizes the idea that land was stolen, and should be given back.
On much smaller scales, on the level of individual small business owners working to feed their families while trying to make some contribution to the world: brilliant, quiet, creative brands are being built: ones that defy the manipulation, the hustle culture and cult-like tactics that are peddled everywhere in the small business world. They focus instead on honesty, truth, care, slowness, collaboration, transparency, sustainability, and the spread of liberating tools and ideas.
We are suspicious of branding, which is healthy. But I think we should build great brands anyway. Why?
Because I believe we as we are making change from the inside and the outside of this fever dream of a spectacle we are collectively living in.
We can use what we know about the power of the brand to intervene, to delight, to propose new perspectives, and to puncture the thin film of pseudo-reality that pervades our culture. And we can stay flexible, and shapeshift as we need to - which can help slow or prevent the process of our work being appropriated instantly. This is a really interesting task.
It asks us to be artists.
A brand, when you strip away its bigger context, is pictures, words, stories. Art.
Art illuminates nuance, and allows for deeper truths.
We have all this art in us, whether we call ourselves artists or not. We are here to change culture and to be well resourced and rested while we do it. To play while we struggle. Art gives us this.
I want art, movement, play, story, song and craft. Cultural forms that are as intelligently diverse and complex as the reality of the natural and cosmic world - not a depleted, simplified, monoculture which is boxed and branded.
Let us embrace branding as a method, but be artists in our use of it. The world needs it.
Long live art!
p.s. How, you may ask? Start here: what does the artist inside you want? How can you nourish them? What is your work really saying to you? What is your vision of the world you want? How can you get out of your own way?
p.p.s. Is it possible within the position of entrepreneurship to make the kind of change, through a brand, that people in the position of activism do? All art is changed in contact with its context. Does the "professionalization" of our dreams, gifts and skills within capitalism automatically neutralize some of the transformative power they carry on the scale of social and cultural change? This is an itchy question for me. What do you think?