The following is the third 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.
The largest publicly traded companies are sometimes richer than nations. They are big, global and imposing, but they have two Achilles’ heels related to their brands: rejection by their investors and shunning by their customers. If the brand is damaged, the company is likely to suffer. Corporations typically want to add to the value of their brands, not detract from it. The goodwill associated with a brand may well be a company’s greatest asset.
Indeed, intellectual property litigation is often launched by firms to ensure that no one is using a copyrighted brand logo, trade dress or trademark in a way that would tarnish or harm a brand. As Justice Frankfurter once held: “The protection of trade-marks is the law’s recognition of the psychological function of symbols.” And the value of these symbols can reach the billions. Forbes estimated the value of Nike’s swoosh at $26 billion; though that pales in comparison to Apple’s “apple with a missing bite” brand, which Forbes valued at $170 billion.
Typically, building up positive connotations for a brand is done through advertising using standard puffery. Old standbys for advertisers are the assertion (true or not) that if the customer buys this product, she will be more powerful, rich, intelligent, sexy, envied or successful. But the lies to sell products can get out of hand, as Vance Packard complained in his book The Waste Makers: “Millions of consumers are manipulated, razzle-dazzled, indoctrinated, mood-conditioned, and flimflammed.”
Jingles to sell products are often “earworms” that get stuck in viewers’ heads. They can be so insidious that even if viewers hate the product or the company behind it, the ad copy is stuck in their minds. As Drew Westen notes, “[w]hen even people who don’t like your product are humming your jingle, you know you’ve got them where it counts: in their [neural] networks.” Likewise, ad man Nigel Hollis once wrote:
engaging and memorable ads slip ideas past our defenses and seed memories that influence our behavior. You may not think advertising influences you. But marketers do. And in addition to millions of dollars, they have something else most people don’t have: Access to data that proves their point.
As the data crunchers over at Nielsen have found, “[p]ractice (repetition) indeed makes perfect—and can help create durable memories.” One of the oddities of advertising brands is that some customers associate repetitive ads with higher-quality products. Objectively, this is somewhat absurd, since a heavily advertised item could be poorly constructed, carcinogenic or addictive. But nonetheless, this is a measurable phenomenon:
Repetition of an ad may signal to consumers that the brand or product is a good buy, or a quality product. This is sometimes referred to as signaling theory. In 1975, University of Wyoming researchers Anthony McGann and Raymond Marquardt found that ads with high rates of repetition tended to also be rated as high quality in Consumer Reports.
And even more disturbingly, the more an ad is repeated, the more viewers will believe it (even if the claim that is being repeated is not true). “Studies suggest that repeated statements are perceived as more truthful than statements made less frequently, ‘presumably because repetition imbues the statement with familiarity.’ In simple terms: frequency breeds familiarity, and familiarity breed trust.”
These commercial branding techniques can be used in political ads as well.