Branding How relationships between brands and people are changing — and why it matters

A spread from the book What is post-branding? How to Counter Fundamentalist Marketplace Semiotics. The book is based on the premise "that there must be more than one way to design communication relevant to processes of developing collective identities. There must be a different way to promote identification that isn’t predatory and exploitative."

Regular readers, colleagues and friends know that my interest in branding is not in selling people things that they don't need, but ideas that they do. So I noticed when two related articles recently found their way to my screen. The first is by Umair Haque, a writer I usually associate with watchdog warnings about the fragility of democracy and civilization. His observations about the maturing role of branding in our culture are welcomely thoughtful.  "Organizations — most of them — are here to last. Not that many are just in it to sell out tomorrow, though some, of course are. But the good ones? They’re trying to build foundations that last, in a world that’s turning into quicksand. The answer to this is to remember that tomorrow’s customers — young people and even younger people — want a better future. Desperately and powerfully. They want a better future more than they want the old stuff, in fact, which is why they’re barely interested in the orthodox messages of brands, or even entire categories of the economy, like luxury — they eschew climbing the old consumerist ladder of status as the only point of life. It’s for those hearts that tomorrow’s brands must aim, with the arrows of purpose, truth, and meaning." - Umair Haque Article: What Is a Brand in the 21st Century, Anyways? The second is an interview by Steven Heller with Jason Grant of Inkahoots Design Studio and Oliver Vodeb from RMIT School of Design. They are the authors of What is Post-Branding?, an exposition of the ideological underbelly and real-world impact of branding as traditionally practiced, and a framework for a critical alternative to it. "We define the essence of post-branding as designing 'collective identity that can create relations which include the interdependencies, needs and desires of a broad constituency, rather than the exclusive priorities of a minority corrupting power.' And we lay out a framework with three main dimensions and corresponding principles as a strategic counter to branding’s totalizing, predatory ideology. These dimensions are: 1) transparency and open-source principles; 2) participatory design approaches, and; 3) diversity and commoning. The ideas themselves aren’t new, but using them to replace branding’s exploitative principles can be radical." - Jason Grant and Oliver Vodeb  Article: The Daily Heller: Is Post-Branding a Thing?