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Show 261 with its target market" (p. 8). Marketers were thus at the helm of a newly realized market that would produce a "cultural feeding frenzy" (p. 8). The bubble busted in 1993, and almost for good on the day that is known as "Marlboro Friday," which is when Phillip Morris dropped its prices by 20% to compete with "off-brands" - creating a domino effect where other companies also deflated the prices of their products to a manufacturer's level. Eventually, though, companies learned that overcoming "brand blindness" (p. 13) simply required corporate confidence in the power of the image. Brands could continue to outsell the product so long as companies continued to believe in their branded identities and the principles that stood behind them. Klein comments on this new pledge: "Brands, not products!" became the rallying cry for a marketing renaissance led by a new breed of companies that saw themselves as "meaning brokers" instead of product producers…The old paradigm had it that all marketing was selling a product. In the new model, however, the product always takes a back seat to the real product, the brand, and the selling of the brand acquired an extra component that can only be described as spiritual. Advertising is about hawking product. Branding, in its truest and most advanced incarnations, is about corporate transcendence. (p. 21) Klein's book is useful because it describes how corporations created their own "consciousnesses" through smart, sexy logos carefully crafted by marketers, advertisement agencies, and public relation firms. The strategy is tremendously successful, and brands have transformed some companies from rags to riches. Logos can also become objects of political dissent, especially when visual networks of corporate subjectivity are associated with social, economic, and environmental disasters. This has led Klein to conclude that protestors and anticorporate activists can "talk back" to images through the art of culture jamming, which "baldly rejects the idea that marketing - because it buys its way into our public spaces - must be |
