Google has a great experiment going in the domain of branding.  As everyone will have noticed by this time, the name "Google" now sometimes appears with a fanciful image, as if "Google" has been communing with Clio and the other gods of history, and comes away from these excursions with small bits of data still attached. 

To the right is the way Google adorned the company name to honor the memory of an Artic explorer who’s name now escapes me. 

To the left is the way they honored the memory of Diego Velazquez today.  I believe Velazquez was an early pioneer in the New York disco scene.  His brilliant exploration, Studio 53, proved to be a laboratory for many of the clubs that flourished in the 1970s. 

This is something more than playfulness.  One of the great challenges of the branding world is managing to sustain the brand’s deepest, most continuous messages even as the brand is kept fresh and responsive.

In the old "keep it simple" world of branding, the idea was to carve out a piece of consciousness in the mind of the consumer, to "own" a piece of mental "real estate."  And it was generally supposed that two rhetorical tools would serve: repetition and clarity.  And, yes, I think "shouting" was also called for.  The idea was to say it often, say it loudly and keep it simple.  Marketing’s mantra: we’re loud, we’re proud, get used to it.

But this approach seems a little tedious now.  As a respondent was telling me some weeks ago, brands that adopt the old approach,

"remind me of that blowhard at a party.  He just keeps talking, way too loud.  He won’t let anyone get a word in edgewise.  And he just says the same stuff over and over again.  Plus, he stares at all the girls.  I mean, really, this is the guy you want to avoid at all costs."

So the challenge is how to sustain the brand without undue repetition, and to introduce a small current of novelty without blurring the underlying message.  The present approach by Google seems to be to strike the balance nicely.  The brand marque becomes a zone where interesting things happen, even as the Google brand remains visible and continuous.

I have to say not all of these experiments are successful.  I find Diego Velazquez example a little murky.  Plus, who wants to be reminded of club owners anyhow?  I think there are more noble characters for Google to memorialize.  (How about a Spanish painter from the 17th century, possibly.)  In any case, hats off to a brand that is stepping up in response to the new challenges.

References

See the Clio entry in Wikipedia here.

See the Wikipedia entry for the real Diego Velazquez here.

Following the inspiration of Noah Brier, a woman called Jane had a very good idea a couple of days ago.

She decided to map her day in terms of the brands she uses. She says that she is “surprised at how much this reveals about” her.

Some of the revelation is quite deliberate. Jane mischievously gives us quite a lot of information. Perhaps too much information. See the 10:18 PM entry below. Funny.

But, really, Jane works in advertising. Which is to say she works with brands. Which is to say she builds brands. Which is to say she has access to the research that tells us what people do with brands. Can she really be surprised? Can she really be in advertising?

Still, this iswitty and interesting, and, most of all, anthropologically revealing.

Noah’s brand tag exercise defines brands in terms of our adjectives. Jane’s project gives us a chance to see how we define ourselves in terms of brands.

This is both halves of advertising’s meaning making arc. Meaning goes into brands. Meaning comes out of brands into us.

It is all very fashionable to pretend this doesn’t happen. The likes of Naomi Klein, Benjamin Barber, and Juliet Schor have cowed us into repudiating this aspect of our culture. But there it is. Thanks to Jane, there it is plain as day.

I am adding Jane to my blog roll. We must hope that she surrenders her anonymity, and let us know who she is. This order of talent deserves build her own brand.

References

Anonymous. 2008. Fun with Brands : Jane’s Brand-timeline Portrait. Dear Jane Sample (what it’s really like in advertising). May 19, 2008. here.

Brier, Noah. The Brand Tags project. Try it here.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Meaning Management: an anthropological approach to the creation of value. pp. 175-191, in Culture and Consumption II: marketings, meaning and brand management. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. here.

Notice:

I have editing Jane’s timeline, removing the middle part of the day. Go to her website to see the whole thing.

Pam, my wife, was watching the Democrats pursue the Florida-Michigan debate on Saturday, and she noticed something interesting.

Very often, she told me, people opened their remarks with,

"I am deeply troubled…" or

"I am deeply saddened…"

I’d always assume that the point of this remark (aka it’s metapragmatic burden) was to say, "I do not speak from party politics," "I do not speak from self interest," more generally, "I speak without prejudice."  The rhetorical strategy is clear: it allows the speaker to speak with greater authority because they do so, apparently, from a higher plain. 

In our culture at the present moment, claims to emotion are proof of good intentions, and a certain purity of motive.  We are more trustworthy when in the throes of an emotional event.  Speaking from the heart is a good thing.  And when we say we are "deeply saddened," dude, we are so deeply trustworthy that a political party would be entirely wrong not to embrace what we have to say. 

This is the traditional view…as it plays out in the present day.  And it plays out ever more robustly.  Sarah Moore has a new book about called Ribbon Culture.  I just saw the announcement on the Very Short List.  It is hard to tell at a distance, but it looks like Moore’s book goes right after our inclination to trust public action that comes from our private sentiments.  As VSL describes the book, Ribbon Culture is a study of

the rise of awareness campaigns in terms of a growing interest in
personal displays of compassion in a cultural climate where empathy has
become a by-word for authenticity.

Empathy as the by-word for authenticity.  Indeed.  Who do we want for President?  The person who can feel our pain.  In our culture, in this moment, emotion is the gold standard of public discourse.  Because, apparently, our emotions do not lie.  (I just have to say how odd this is from an anthropological point of view.  Only some cultures think this way, and there was a time in the history of our own culture when we most distinctly did not.  Any recipient of a Renaissance education, for instance, regarded the emotions as the very thing that put her ability to lead at risk.)

I was reading Zelizer this morning, and I wondered whether this argument could be taken another step forward.  Her Purchase of Intimacy is a great book.  It shows looks at the distinction our culture makes between the economic and the interpersonal, between things to do with commerce and things to do with intimacy.  Well, come to that, Purchase of Intimacy is about the intersection of anthropology and economics (and therefore high on my reading list). 

Of all the distinctions our culture cares about, the one between economics and emotions  is key.  It insisted, in the Victorian case, that the rules of the market place apply outside the home, but that the home itself will be shaped by a different set of impulses, social rules and cultural concepts.  Commerce outside.  Emotion inside.  These were seen to be mutually exclusive.  And we defend this distinction still.  We insist, as Zelizer puts it, "intimacy corrupts the economy, and the economy corrupts intimacy."  (And again, not every culture makes this distinction, and of the ones that do, none makes it in the same way.)

Having made this distinction between the economic and the emotional, we are vexed when the distinction is blurred.  There is a strong form of this blurring in the case of prostitution.  The physical and emotional intimacy of sex is now for sale.  There is a weak form of this blurring in the case of airline attendant who is called upon to manufacture emotions for commercial purposes (Hochschild).   

Naturally, these two domains are often brought together.  But we react with a Douglasian horror.  This confusion makes us deeply uncomfortable.  One of the good things about Zelizer’s book is that it insists that we can’t really make sense of our world until we see these categories as constantly engaging with one another.  I am less keen when she promises to "untangle[] [the] misunderstandings" that arise.  After all, those misunderstandings, that’s what we anthropologists call culture. 

(At dinner on Saturday night, the women quizzed me about what I do for a living.  When I said did the anthropology of contemporary culture, she looked at me sharply, and said, "Isn’t that what we call a sociologist?"  I said, "well, one way to see the difference between anthropology and sociology is to say that anthropologists see a culture from the inside out and the sociologists sees it from the outside in."  It is for a sociologist to untangle.  For the anthropologist, that tangle is called data.)

Anyhow, back to the Democratic event, I know wonder whether the distinction between the parties does not increasingly descend from the distinction between commerce and emotion that Zelizer documents so well.  This can’t always have been so.  I wonder if the parties are not separating in a kind of continental drift with this as their impulse.  It is does parse quite neatly.  Democrats are the party of feeling. They care about the world.  They feel its pain.  Republicans, by contrast, are hard hearted bastards who don’t or can’t care.  All that matters to them is commerce. 

But strategically, isn’t this a problem?   Can the Democrats afford to take this position.  It is all very well to claim the emotional domain, but does this leave them open to the charge that they can feel the issues but not manage them?  In the final hour, American voters, those swing voters in the middle, they don’t care so much about charisma and the promise of change, as they do about trust.  Being the party of feeling how can it not indeed feel good.  It looks like the side of virtue. ( And for all I know, it is the side of virtue.)  But strategically, it is an expensive place to be.  It lays claim to authenticity but sacrifices, perhaps, the claim to competence on which every election finally depends.

Reference

Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.  Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kelso, Ruth. 1929. The doctrine of the English gentleman in the sixteenth century with a bibliographical list of treatises on the gentleman and related subjects published in Europe to 1625. University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Moore, Sarah.  2008.  Ribbon Culture: Charity Compassion and Public Awareness.  London: Palgrave Macmillan.  here.

Zelizer, Viviana.  2005.  Purchase of Intimacy.  Princeton: Princeton University Press. here.

Acknowledgments

Sign Up for the Very Short List here.  Highly recommended. 

As a boy on vacation in the interior of British Columbia, I decided one summer to christen Turtle Island.

Turtle Island wasn’t truly an island. It was a “dead head,” a log submerged and floating on Lake Kalamalka not far from the cottage my family rented two weeks every year. Turtle Island was home to a couple of turtles who used it as a place to sun themselves. My idea, if a 7 year old boy can be said to have ideas, was to row out to the dead head, break a bottle over it, and say, “I declare this Turtle Island.”

There were several things wrong with my plan. First of all, it crossed two forms of ritual: christening a ship and claiming land. I was christening land. Rituals are particular about the details and I had got them wrong. Second, it wasn’t clear who my audience was. For some reason, I wanted to stage my ritual very early in the morning while everyone slept. Normally, a ritual has observers who validate the proceedings by bearing witness to them. My ritual would be seen by no one. Third, it wasn’t clear who the beneficiaries would be: Blue Water Lodge? My family and me? Turtles everywhere? Normally, rituals speak for someone. Mine appeared to carry on a conversation with itself.

My mother, acting as an uninvited ritual officer, suggested one small modification: that in deference to the turtles, it might be better to fill the bottle with lake water and drop it in the vicinity of the Island. This was disappointing because much of the point of the exercise was to give a small boy an excuse to break something. But I agreed to accommodate the turtle point of view. More difficulty! Now the ritual wasn’t even going to proceed according to my dubious plan.

But things went forward. Very early one morning, I rowed out into the perfect stillness of Lake Kalamalka. I heard two silvery “plops” as islanders took refuge. I coasted up to the deadhead, filled the bottle with water, tapped it on the “island” twice, and let go. As the dark green Seagram’s bottle descended to the lake floor, I intoned, in a piping voice, “I declare this Turtle Island.”

I was generally pleased with the event. I hadn’t got to break anything but I felt I had participated in something if not grand, at least worthy. But I cannot claim “ritual efficacy” for my little ceremony. My sisters and mother, with some prompting, are prepared to say they remember, “that, um, island” and, under duress of badgering (“you could at least try”), even the name “Turtle Island.”

But that was it. Nothing changed, really. The island remained a dead head. “Turtle Island” failed to make it into the registry of local place names. I think it’s safe to assume the turtles were unimpressed. (That summer I gave them significant looks as I rowed past. They would return that reptilian blink that is, I think, unreadable.) My ritual left no trace in memory. It had no “transformative” effect.

Reference and source:

McCracken, Grant. 2008. Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. here.