Mike just lost it. He's been going around his house, pasting sticky squares of paper (he wouldn't call them Post-it® Notes) over every logo in his house. Away goes Sony. Intel. Safeway. Peets. Dole. Del Monte. Morton. I am the ANTI-BRAND, he writes.
His mission -- to thwart all commercial claims on his consciousness -- is also a treasure hunt for unlabeled yet fully functional tools.
Deep down, buried in the same drawer, treasure: some plain red scissors, and some cheap razors - no sign of a brand. You cherish them for a while. You do a little indian dance of victory and triumph, then put them away.
Mike doesn't need to put a sticky on his business card. MontaVista laid him off last week. He was a programmer. Still is. But he's also a musician, a composer, a surfer, a writer and a fine human being.
He is who he is, and he knows who he isn't, which is a "target" for brand messages. Or worse, a "consumer" -- a gullet a the end of a marketing sluice, a crap-fed creature forced to live in the corporate egosystem we call a market economy but which bears little resemblance to a real-world marketplace.
Mike is Neo without Morpheus. He doesn't need a Red Pill. He's awake and alive in the Real World, yanking the plugs out of his head, disconnecting from the Branding Matrix. He's nobody's battery, this guy.
You open the Economist and end up counting the pages of advertising vs information: 36 out of 72 and - wow - 8 pages of advertisements for HP. 8 pages about how great HP is - yea, the same company that put 17,000+ people on the street then buys months and months of 8 page ads in the Economist. I have two busted printers from the same HP sitting in my garage, unfixed, unfixable. That HP. I can't possibly be alone in remembering these facts simultaneously. Is one thought supposed to drive out the other in normal people? You always weigh the text, and commentary, higher than the ad.
You sit, and read the Economist, and question the text, too. If it wasn't for the web archive you wouldn't recognize that this pub has been running a decade-long infomercial for fuel cells. The delivery date: Real Soon Now. Jerry Pournelle just abbreviates this: RSN. Too bad RSN's not a TLA everyone knows. Too bad not everyone knows what a TLA is.
He's barfing the Kool-Aid, Mike. He's barfing it all over everything and staring The Machine in the hollow sockets where it's eyes would be if it weren't a machine.
Yea, yea, you push past the ad pages of the Economist as fast as you can, and shout the marketing message dead, dead, dead. Ads in paper magazines? DOA. Why do the pod people keep pulling on the same levers harder and harder? Their monkey - Ham, call him - back seat pilots our spaceship. You're diving into the sun to escape him. He's flipping levers, eating food pellets, taking electric shocks in his feet.
Ham's on the radio back to the Closed Software Foundation:
"I've tried A! I've tried B! I've tried A! I've tried B! I've tried A! I've tried B! I've tried A! I've tried B! I've tried A! I've tried B! I've tried A! I've tried B!"
Ham's top monkey. Scientists have cut open the brains of monkeys in a tribe and found that the head monkey has the most balanced serotonin levels; the bottom monkey's levels are seriously depleted. You've got Millionth monkey syndrome and you're diving into the sun to escape.
Notice how Mike moves into the second person voice. He's not alone. We're all canaries in the coal mine of Branded Existence. Mike's just the one dropping his shovel and walking out.
Steve is another canary. A former reporter on the Formula One motor sports beat, Steve has seen a lot of logos, often roaring by at more than 200 miles per hour. He knows how branding makes racing go. A Ferrari without a coating of Marlboro logos would look like a shaved Wookie.
Branding makes Hollywood go, too. It's the Garbage In without which there would be less Garbage Out. So, Steve observes,
Miramax Films is approaching several automakers about at $35 million product placement deal for The Green Hornet , even though the directorless film does not even have a script written yet.
The other day I sat on a plane next to a woman who watched the movie with her headphones off, counting product placements. Ever notice what kinds of movies they show on airplanes? Box office failures, is what. She was calmly, morbidly, watching money commit suicide .
Steve also notes that
Freddy Adu, a 13-year-old soccer prodigy, signed a $1 million contract with Nike , even though he is not likely to sign a professional contract for at least a year.
And that
LeBron James, the 18-year-old high school basketball phenom, signed a $90 million deal with Nike , even though he has not even been drafted yet to play in the NBA.
Steve thinks this is nuts. He says "tulip fever is back." By that he means the dot-com crash failed to cure amnesia, and that we're back at it again.
I think he's wrong about that. The branding bubble started inflating the day Procter & Gamble decided to fund daytime network radio by filling it with advertising for various brands of cleaning agents. Branding was born with the soap opera. In a short time, the word "branding", borrowed from the cattle industry, came to be synonymous with Big Time Advertising. Its virtues had nothing to do with whatever made the products it labeled worthwhile. That was the job of slogans and taglines, of thirty-second sales pitches. Mixed from equal parts desperation and arrogance, branding was about causing a creepy form of trust between supply and demand in captive markets. Its symbiosis resembled the coercive relationship between guards and prisoners.
The dot-com bubble was caused in large measure by a dumb belief that branding would work as well in the Information Age as it did in the Industrial Age that preceded it. This was delusional in the extreme. The venture capitalists were high on branding gas when they gave billions of dollars to worthless companies and told them to burn it in the marketplace. Burning money, the VCs thought, was the only way to create "brand value", which is at best a warm opinion.
Yes, the Net changed the world completely. It was an asteroid administered to dinosaurs. But rather than take advantage of the new conditions created by the Net, VCs and their beneficiaries decided to emulate one of the least viable dinosaur conditions: size and dominance. Worse, they thought the New Economy was about their side of the marketplace -- that it was about supply rather than demand. So they became obsessed with "disintermediation" and shorter "value chains". They fell in lust with the preposition "to", and burned countless billions of dollars on TLAs with a 2 in the middle. Meanwhile, customers were less captive than ever before. Their choices kept expanding, to the point where they could roll their own "solutions" to all kinds of problems that brand-obsessed suppliers failed to solve.
The problem was, and still is, that most customers don't care all that much about brands. At least not in the way that branding obsessives on the supply side would like. Sure, they have brand loyalties. They trust some names more than others. Yada.
But when it comes to building technical solutions to technical problems, customers care more about materials and sources and the people doing the work. The practical choices far outweigh the kind of brand loyalty that makes us choose Ivory over Dove, or even Mercedes over Ford.
Technologists are leading the way by offering, and choosing, more stuff that simply does the job better than other stuff. Or that does as good a job for less money. They're doing it by constantly advancing POGE: the Principle of Good Enough. The history of Linux has been about POGE since Day One. That "good" and "enough" keep rising does nothing to deny the value of the principle.
So quick: What's the most popular Linux hardware? IBM? Dell? HP? Nope, it's nobody. According to John Hall of Linux International, most new Linux boxes are white. Their names aren't brands in the Procter & Gamble sense of the word. Either they have no names at all, or they have names of companies that care less about branding than about making good products -- and marketing those products on their own merits.
The brand bubble is bursting. Maybe, after it's done, the penguin will get at least some of the credit.
Links:
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal.