M Danesi, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
! 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
The technique of promoting products by identifying them with the name of the manufacturer or with some invented name, known as the brand name, has be-come a primary marketing strategy since the turn of the 20th century. It was (and continues to be) based on the premise that the appeal of a product, called the
‘brand,’ increases if it can be linked to socially sig-nificant trends and values that the name evokes sub-consciously. Turning a product into a brand thus transforms it into a sign – something that stands for something other than itself – that taps into social meaning systems that govern lifestyle, values, beliefs, and the like. For this reason, the semiotic study of brand creation as a central strategy of consumerist cultures has become widespread. Its origin can be traced to the general study of popular culture as a
‘mythological sign system’ by Roland Barthes (1915–
1980) in 1957. It now constitutes a branch of semiot-ics, generally called marketing semiotics (e.g., Wolfe, 1989; Umiker-Sebeok, 1987; Berger, 2000; Beasley and Danesi, 2002; Danesi, 2002).
Brands and Advertising
The modern history of brands and ‘persuasion’ adver-tising overlap considerably (see Marketing and Semi-otics: From Transaction to Relation). It is impossible to advertise ‘nameless’ products with any degree of persuasion. Brand names imbue products with iden-tities in the same way that names given to human beings give them a distinct identity. It was in the 20th century that advertising evolved into a science of persuasion intended to influence people to perceive objects of consumption as ‘necessary’ accouterments of life, leading to a widespread, insatiable appetite for new objects of consumption in general ‘groupthink.’
Roland Barthes (1957) coined the term ‘neomania’ to characterize this type of groupthink (see Mythologies in Pop Culture).
experienced at home: again it relied on raised Roman letter shapes, though Professor Hau¨y is credited with embossing them on paper for his students.
At this time a former military officer, Charles Barbier, had researched a method for night-communication in battle by a code of dots embossed on cardboard, which he maintained would also benefit blind students. In 1824, however, at the age of 15, Braille adapted the existing ideas into a system whereby as many as 63 letters, abbreviations, and numbers could be embossed, requiring only a 6-dot code.
The code for each symbol or word was embossed from the back of the page using an awl and a perforated ruler, and arranged in a ‘cell’ or domino formation offering six possible dots, with extra guide symbols to multiply their possibilities. The columns were set about 3 mm apart, slightly more widely spaced than in present-day Braille. The inventor published this revolutionary system in 1829, by which time he was a teacher at the Institution. An accomplished musician, he also adapted his system to enable musical notation to be embossed.
Figure 1 is an example of the Standard English Braille dots representing letters and letter groups, together with some of the wide range of contractions, punctuation, and mathematical signs.
The Braille system revolutionized the speed of stu-dents’ reading, and would have opened the way to large-scale embossed printing of books if the support of the authorities and funding had been available. In fact throughout his life Braille faced stubborn resis-tance from sighted teachers who insisted that the Roman letter shapes must be used, and several dec-ades passed before his system was adopted widely in Europe. Its simplicity, compactness, and the speed with which it could be used would finally ensure its adoption. Braille died at 43, however, from tubercu-losis, before his system was in common use even in his native France.
The only viable alternative that does not use encoded print is Moon Type, which was perfected in 1845 by William Moon, a printer from Brighton, UK.
Moon Type uses Roman capital letters, and is valuable for users who have lost their sight late in life.
Bibliography
Braille, Primer (rev. edn.). Peterborough: Royal National Institute for the Blind.
Henri P (1987). (transl.) The life and work of Louis Braille 1809–1852: inventor of the alphabet for the blind. Pre-toria: South African National Council for the Blind.
Brands and Logos
M Danesi, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
! 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
The technique of promoting products by identifying them with the name of the manufacturer or with some invented name, known as the brand name, has be-come a primary marketing strategy since the turn of the 20th century. It was (and continues to be) based on the premise that the appeal of a product, called the
‘brand,’ increases if it can be linked to socially sig-nificant trends and values that the name evokes sub-consciously. Turning a product into a brand thus transforms it into a sign – something that stands for something other than itself – that taps into social meaning systems that govern lifestyle, values, beliefs, and the like. For this reason, the semiotic study of brand creation as a central strategy of consumerist cultures has become widespread. Its origin can be traced to the general study of popular culture as a
‘mythological sign system’ by Roland Barthes (1915–
1980) in 1957. It now constitutes a branch of semiot-ics, generally called marketing semiotics (e.g., Wolfe, 1989; Umiker-Sebeok, 1987; Berger, 2000; Beasley and Danesi, 2002; Danesi, 2002).
Brands and Advertising
The modern history of brands and ‘persuasion’ adver-tising overlap considerably (see Marketing and Semi-otics: From Transaction to Relation). It is impossible to advertise ‘nameless’ products with any degree of persuasion. Brand names imbue products with iden-tities in the same way that names given to human beings give them a distinct identity. It was in the 20th century that advertising evolved into a science of persuasion intended to influence people to perceive objects of consumption as ‘necessary’ accouterments of life, leading to a widespread, insatiable appetite for new objects of consumption in general ‘groupthink.’
Roland Barthes (1957) coined the term ‘neomania’ to characterize this type of groupthink (see Mythologies in Pop Culture).
The dawn of advertising as a science of persuasion was signaled by the establishment and rapid growth of ‘advertising agencies’ at the end of the 19th centu-ry. These started composing newspaper ads, posters, and billboards for clients that related the qualities of a product not in themselves, but in relation to specific social and lifestyle trends. By the 1920s, such agencies had become themselves large business enterprises, continuously turning to psychologists to help them develop techniques and methods designed to influ-ence the ‘typical consumer’ of the product. Business and psychology had clearly joined forces, broadening the attempts of their predecessors to build an uncon-scious bridge between a product and the consumer by playing on his or her emotional needs, fears, and expectations. With the entrenchment of electronic media (radio and television) in the 1940s and 1950s as mass communication outlets, advertising became itself a mass communication strategy, imprinting in groupthink the perception that objects of consump-tion were necessarily intertwined with the style and content of everyday life – a perception reinforced today through Internet advertising.
The influence of brand advertising on society is unmistakable. Its language has become the language of virtually everyone – even of those who are critical of it. This is because of its omnipresence in the social landscape. As Twitchell (2000: 1) aptly puts it, ‘‘Lan-guage about products and services has pretty much replaced language about all other subjects.’’ The ob-jective of brand advertising is, in fact, to get people to assimilate and react to advertising discourse unwit-tingly and in ways that parallel how individuals and groups have responded in the past to other kinds of
‘authoritative’ social discourse (such as religious dis-course). Advertising language has become one of the most ubiquitous and persuasive forms of social discourse of the modern era. There are now even websites, such as AdCritic.com, that feature ads for their own sake, so that audiences can view them for their rhetorical and aesthetically pleasing qualities alone.
Creating Brand Identity
The main techniques that go into the creation of brand identity are called ‘positioning,’ ‘image-creation,’ and ‘mythologization.’ Positioning is the placing or targeting of a brand for the right market segment. For example, ads for the Mercedes Benz automobile are aimed typically at socially upscale car buyers, whereas ads for Dodge vans are designed to appeal (make sense) to middle-class individuals.
The language of the ad, the lifestyle characteristics displayed in it, the overall ‘look’ of the personages in
it, and so on are tailored to reflect class and appurte-nant lifestyle distinctions. The register of the language used by the characters in Mercedes Benz ads, for instance, is sociolinguistically higher than that used by characters in Dodge van ads.
Creating an ‘image’ for a brand inheres in fash-ioning a recognizable ‘personality’ for it so that it can be positioned for specific market populations.
Personality in this case refers to the traits and quali-ties that a potential consumer of the brand uncon-sciously possesses or aspires to have. The image is a sign constructed with an amalgam of signifiers (actual forms) – the brand name, design, logo, price, and overall presentation of the product. This amalgam creates is fashioned to appeal to specific consumer types – hence the term personality (as mentioned).
Take alcohol brands as an example. What kinds of people drink beer? And what kinds drink aperitifs? In current American culture, answers to these questions would typically include remarks about the education-al level, class, socieducation-al attitudes, etc., of the consumer.
The one who drinks beer is portrayed in ads as a down-to-earth character who simply wants to ‘hang out’ with friends; the one who drinks an aperitif is portrayed instead as a smooth, sophisticated type. The idea behind creating an image for the brand is, clearly, to speak directly to particular types of individuals, not to everyone, so that these individuals can see their own personalities mirrored in the lifestyle images created by the appurtenant advertising.
Brand identity is often also created by the tech-nique of mythologization. This is the strategy of im-buing a brand with some mythic meaning, such as the quest for eternal beauty, the conquest of death, and so on. This is an especially widespread in the case of cosmetic and beauty products. The eternal beauty myth can be seen in the images that advertisers create for such products. The characters in the relevant ads are, typically, attractive people with a deified, mythic quality about them. They are not unlike the statues of ancient Greek gods like Apollo and Aphrodite.
In effect, through positioning, image-creation, and mythologization, the modern advertiser stresses not the brand’s qualities as a product or service, but rather the personality image that can be associated with it.
Brand Names
Creating an identity for a product is tantamount to creating a ‘signification system’ for it – a system of meanings that are relevant to specific kinds of indi-viduals. This is achieved, first and foremost, by giving it a ‘brand name.’ The product, like a person, can then be easily differentiated from other products.
The legal term for brand name is ‘trademark.’ It is little wonder that trademarks are so fiercely protected by corporations and manufacturers. So powerful are they as identifiers that some have gained widespread currency, becoming general terms for the product type in common discourse. Examples include ‘aspi-rin,’ ‘scotch tape,’ ‘cellophane,’ and ‘escalator.’ Most brand names appear on the product, on its container, and in advertisements for the product. These provide, in effect, an easy way to determine who makes a certain product, helping consumers easily identify what they like about it so that they can purchase it again. A brand represents not only a certain social meaning, but also the manufacturer’s reputation and good will.
A so-called ‘strong brand’ is a product name that has no recognizable meaning, such as Kodak. Strong brands receive broad protection from being used by other companies who might play on the name in order to cause confusion among consumers. ‘Weak brands,’ on the other hand, are product names creat-ed with common words, such as Premier, some of which refer to a characteristic of the product (e.g., Wet ‘n Wash). These receive less protection, unless the public identifies them with a certain manufacturer as a result of extensive advertising and long, continuous use.
A brand was, originally, a recognizable mark made on the flesh of animals with a hot iron so as to identify ownership and qualities of the animals. The ancient Egyptians branded livestock as early as 2000B.C.E. In the late medieval period, tradespeople and guild members posted characteristic visual ‘marks’ outside their shops for the same basic reasons – to identify the owner and quality of the product or service. Visual signs were used because most people were not literate at the time. Such signs became, a little later, the
‘marks of the trade’ or ‘trademarks.’ Shops selling medieval swords and ancient Chinese pottery, for instance, bore visual signs that buyers could identify and use, when put on the products themselves, to ascertain their origin and determine their quality.
Among the best-known trademarks surviving from that era are the striped pole of the barbershop and the three-ball sign of the pawnbroker shop.
Names for common products, such as household ones, were first used towards the end of the 19th century. Previously, everyday household products were sold in neighborhood stores from large bulk containers. Around 1880, soap manufacturers started naming their products so that they could be identified and differentiated for their qualities. The first of these were Ivory, Pears’, Sapolio, and Colgate. The concept of the brand name thus came into being, spreading rapidly because, as Naomi Klein (2000: 6) aptly
observes, the market was starting to be flooded by uniform mass-produced and, thus, indistinguishable products: ‘‘Competitive branding became a necessity of the machine age.’’ By the early 1950s, it became obvious that branding was not just a simple strategy for product differentiation but the very semiotic fuel that propelled corporate identity and product recog-nizability. Even the advent of no-name products, designed to cut down the cost of purchase, have had little counter-effects on the power that branding has had on the consciousness of people. Names such as Nike, Apple, Body Shop, Calvin Klein, Levi’s, Coke, Pepsi, among many others, have become
‘culture-wide signs’ recognized by virtually anyone living in a modern consumerist society. As Klein (2000: 16) goes on to remark, for such brands, the name constitutes ‘‘the very fabric of their companies.’’
To continue to be effective, however, brands must keep in step with the times. In early 2000, some car-makers, for instance, started looking at naming trends that were designed to appeal to a new genera-tion of customers accustomed to an Internet style of communication and representation. Cadillac, for in-stance, announced a new model with the monogram name CTS in 2001 and STS in 2005. Acura also transformed its line of models with names such as TL, RL, MDX, RSX. Such ‘alphabetic names’ evoke images of accuracy, technology, and sleekness in an analogy with similar abbreviating tendencies in sci-ence at large – e.g., ‘laser’ for ‘l(ight) a(mplification) by s(timulated) e(mission of) r(adiation).’ They are also consistent with ‘Internet style,’ a telegraphic form of language that spawns monogrammatic and alphanumeric signifiers on a daily basis. Hyundai’s XG300 model, for instance, sounds perfect for Inter-net times. On the other side of the naming equation, such abbreviations are hard to remember, especially for older customers who have not yet tapped into Internetese.
As the above examples show, brand names are devised intentionally to create a signification system for products. At a practical informational level, nam-ing a product has, of course, a denotative function;
that is, it allows consumers to identify what product they desire to purchase (or not). But at a connotative level, the product’s name generates images that go well beyond this simple identifier function (see Deno-tation versus ConnoDeno-tation). In the world of fashion, for instance, designer names such as Gucci, Armani, and Calvin Klein evoke connotations of the clothes as objets d’art rather than images of mere clothing items, shoes, or jewelry; so too do names such as Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Maserati in the domain of auto-mobiles. The manufacturer’s name, in such cases, extends the meaning of the product considerably.
When people buy an Armani or a Gucci product, they feel that they are buying a work of art to be displayed on the body; when they buy Poison, by Christian Dior, they sense instead that they are buying a dangerous, but alluring, love potion; when they buy Moondrops, Natural Wonder, Rainflower, Sunsilk, or Skin Dew cosmetics they feel that they are acquiring some of nature’s beauty resources; when they buy Eterna 27, Clinique, Endocil, or Equalia beauty products they sense that they are getting products made with scien-tific precision; and so on.
Another common brand naming strategy involves iconicity – the strategy of creating names that resem-ble or assign some sensory property or social meaning to a product (see Iconicity: Theory). Iconicity is an effective strategy, because it renders the products highly memorable. A name such as Ritz Crackers, for example, assigns sonority to the product that is simulative of sounds that crackers make as they are being eaten. Another example of an iconic brand name is Drakkar Noir, chosen by Guy Laroche for a cologne product. Together with the dark bottle, the name conveys images of ‘fear,’ the ‘forbidden,’ and the ‘unknown.’ Forbidden things take place under the cloak of the night; hence the name noir (French for ‘black’). The sepulchral name Drakkar Noir is clearly iconic with the bottle’s design at a connotative level, reinforcing the idea that something desirous in the ‘dark’ will happen by splashing on the co-logne. The word Drakkar is obviously suggestive of Dracula, the deadly vampire who came out at night to mesmerize his sexual prey with a mere glance.
The name of the Acura automobile, to give another example of the use of iconicity, was likely designed to be imitative of both Italian and Japanese words.
Italian feminine nouns end in -a and certain Japanese words end in the suffix -ura (e.g., tempura). The brand name is thus linked iconically to Italian and Japanese words and, by extension, the perceived qua-lities of the respective cultures at once. Carmakers have used the same strategy of creating car names ending in the vowel -a which, given the inbuilt melo-dious quality of such a word, makes it not only easier to remember but also suggestive of specific qualities.
Here are a few examples:
Achieva Altima Asuna Aurora Corsica Elantra Festiva Integra Lumina
Maxima Precidia Samara Sentra Serenia Sonata
Brand names are clearly powerful signs, because they are suggestive of various qualities or attributes,
Brand names are clearly powerful signs, because they are suggestive of various qualities or attributes,