Totes, the umbrella company, developed a celebrity tie-in to market said umbrellas. The campaign was beneficial to Totes (moved product) and the celebrity (allowed her to establish herself as a brand). The celebrity was Rihanna, a teenage singer from Barbados.
She was launched to brandom with:
(1) A song: “You can stand under my umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh.” (perky!)
(2) A photo spread (eminently fuckable, see entry for 21 may)
(3) Customized Rihanna branded umbrellas featuring sparkly fabrics and glittery charms on the handles, made somewhere in the Third World. (Thinnngssszzz...see entry for 9 apr)
Reported in the NY Times: “We’ve worked hard to build me and my name up as a brand,” Rihanna says. “We always want to bring an authentic connection to whatever we do. It must be sincere and people have to feel that.”
How or why do people wish to shed the surly bonds of humanity and touch the face of brandiosity, to paraphrase the prototype of the modern brand, Ronald Reagan? Obviously money, but the back story is more interesting. Let's examine traditional brands and their modern perversions.
This brand is well known to guitarists. It represents the 170+ year efforts of a single family and their associates to build excellent guitars, mandolins, and ukuleles. (1) The brand is not associated with the actual product, although the brand label (logo) is applied to every instrument. Rather, it is associated with the abstract concept of consistently high quality through a long time period and multi-century utility. (2) Nor is the brand associated with the current head of the family and business owner, who is viewed as merely the custodian of the quality of production associated with the brand. (3) Nor was the association of the brand with the concept of desirability established in the minds of consumers by overwhelming, hyper-repetitive, neo-Pavlovian, electronic injection of stimulus-response operands into an electronically networked, uncritically receptive commercial pseudo-culture, which simultaneously acts as an operand delivery system and a ubiquitous popular-culture.
It is point (3) that highlights the difference between the "Rihanna" brand and the "CF Martin" brand. Marketing experts may say "Times have changed. Your descriptor "pseudo-culture" is inaccurate. These are meta- or neo-cultures! (drumroll...) AS ABE "sincere" HONEST, "authentic connection" LINCOLN SAID, We must think anew and act anew! That's Marketing 101!"
Yep. George Orwell showed us what was in Room 101.
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