The End of the 20th Century Brand
In a way, social media and the virtual marketplace are returning us to a time before the advent of the brand itself.
Before the industrial revolution, products and services were associated with people rather than with organizations. The qualities and values brought to the marketplace by individuals — tradesmen, shopkeepers, builders, tavern owners – were as much personal attributes as they were professional ones. Indeed, businesses were commonly co-located with residences, with the shop on the street and the home above or in back. The geographical separation from work life was a distinctly modern idea, brought on by the arrival of the factory, and by the growth of business districts that were the habitat of men; women and children were sequestered uptown or in the suburbs. Even the concept of an employee was rooted in the notion of apprenticeship, which implied not the formation of a group identity, but a combination of service and education leading to a single proprietorship. In modern parlance: The individual was the brand.
The industrial revolution altered what had for thousands of years been the human construct for the transaction of business, and what set the foundation for what is now being upended by the social media revolution (it’s no wonder that steampunk culture is so popular with the digital gamechangers). In the late 19th century marketplace, identity became increasingly associated with an idea rather than with a person. At first, this idea was represented by a label, a corporate identity, a recognizable symbol of quality and consistency — the paramount attributes of mass production. Then, with the advent of mass, one-way media, this “label” evolved into a much more comprehensive set of ideas and associations — functional, emotional, and self-expressive. This 20th century notion of The Brand reached its zenith in the 1990s, with reams of books and consulting firms advising businesses on the vast and sometimes esoteric aspects of brand strategy.
Ironically, the promise of today’s social media revolution, with its multidimensional forms of broadcast and connectivity, was already in place in the 1990s (albeit in somewhat rudimentary form) on “solid state” services such as CompuServe and America Online. Similar to today’s social networking platforms, these were closed systems. As such, they could offer many of the collaborative features that the initially flat, open-source environment of the Web could not. The transition to the Web was exciting from the standpoint of access and reach, but it took another decade before the confluence of technology and adoption actually delivered on the early implications.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the digital media revolution is the way in which the empowerment of the individual is changing the very concept of brand as defined so exhaustively at the end of the millennium. In a business context, the access and proximity to individuals facilitated by virtual connectivity is effectively placing people in a position at least commensurate with the once-lauded brand idea. This represents a clear challenge to many of the established principles of branding, particularly and especially around the rigid adherence to representational consistency, one of the earliest and deeply-rooted tenets of brand strategy. There is no better symbolic illustration of this evolution than the vast array of icon permutations for the social networking brands themselves.
And then, of course, there is one other brand that not only embraces the individuation of its identity, but instigates and celebrates it.
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Digital denizen, rabid creative, a channel originator, I head the Internet practice of Gigante Vaz Partners Advertising in New York. Former strategy consultant for IBM Global Services, and creative director at Multimedia Solutions.
