The following is the second of four guest posts by Prof. Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, writing about her new book, Political Brands.
Professor Hasen offered me the opportunity to excerpt my new book Political Brands on ELB. My publisher Edward Elgar Publishing gave me permission to excerpt the books introductory chapter “Branding Itself.” These excerpts have been edited for continuity.
What do survivors of a mass shooting in Florida, Russian intelligence officers, Coca-Cola and the president of the United States all have in common? They all try to influence public opinion using branding, even if what is getting branded is the truth, a lie, a myth or a conspiracy.
“Branding” is the process of purposefully repeating a word, concept or logo until it gets stuck in the minds of the public. Commercial branding is ubiquitous. Brands are so omnipresent in our lives that they sometimes slip into genericide. Linguists Julie Sedivy and Greg Carlson in Sold on Language, note how brands have become shorthand for objects in our daily lives:
If you stroll across your linoleum floor over to your formica countertop, check on the stew in the crock-pot, pick up the spilled kitty litter in the corner with a kleenex, pour a bowl of granola, and open your freezer to take out a popsicle before proposing a game of after-dinner ping pong, you are contributing to the genericide of these brand names.
Even as brands seep into our language, they are vulnerable to picking up negative associations and generating revulsion. As Professor Tamara Piety notes in Brandishing the First Amendment:
It is possible to create a brand out of whole cloth. However, because brand value is so dependent on imagery built by communication efforts, it is, to some extent, always susceptible to sudden shifts in public perceptions. Such shifts may include total collapse of all brand value.
Or as David D’Alessandro, president of John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance, once quipped: “It can take 100 years to build up a good brand and 30 days to knock it down.” In the Twitter age, death of a brand can happen even quicker.
The word “brand” comes from the Old English word “brond,” meaning “fire.” Branding’s historical roots derive from farmers using a red-hot iron to sear an image, like the initials of the owner or a family crest, into the flesh of livestock. This type of “branding” was a way of telling Farmer Joe’s cows from Farmer Steve’s cows. According to the Smithsonian, branding dates back to at least 2700 BC, where there is evidence of livestock branding depicted in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The meaning of “branding” has certainly evolved beyond marking livestock with hot irons. According to Mustafa Kurtuldu, “[t]he transition from ‘This belongs to me, so leave it. . . ’ to ‘This was made by me, so buy it’ started to evolve in the 1800’s.” Commercial branding as Americans know the practice today took off as corporations tried to market what had been previously undistinguishable dry goods, like fungible piles of oats or beans. The need for branding is most acute when the market is flooded with nearly indistinguishable and fungible goods. As Forbes once explained of Coke:
In the late 1880s… [b]efore Coca-Cola could get a customer to reach for a Coke, it needed to be sure the customer could distinguish a Coke from all the other fizzy caramel-colored beverages out there. . . A Coke is a fizzy caramel-colored soda concocted by those folks in Atlanta.
Coca-Cola was started as patent medicine that was advertised as “an ideal nerve tonic,” which contained wine and cocaine. After a local temperance law passed, later formulations of Coke changed to sugar and cocaine. Then finally Coca-Cola went with its modern formula of just sugar and caffeine. In the 1800s, patent medicines were heavily advertised, including strange tinctures which claimed to be miracle cures for exhaustion and headaches. Often the main active ingredient was cocaine, just like the original Coca-Cola. But the corporations making the patent medicines wanted consumers to buy their cocaine, not the other guy’s cocaine.