Learning Process

“Simmering content – rich in variety and riddled with idiosyncrasies – is obscured by the catchy one-liner coined by brand consultants…isn’t it better not to bother with the subject matter of an event at all when promoting it? Instead why not just chant the values of the organisation that it brings to people? Surely we all engage with a subject because we are familiar and trusting of the organisation that brings it to us?...why bother referring to content at all when people respond much better to the branded message?” (Bell, 2004, p.23-4)

Metaphors, metaphors, metaphors…

Under the advice of a fellow student, I read Nick Bell’s article in the Eye Magazine titled The Steam Roller of Branding, and it was insightful to revisit such an article that points out that “some corporate identities exist in spite of what a company or organisation produces, and in direct contradiction to the way it behaves.” (2004, p.20) Metaphorically speaking, branding is a brand in itself, does it not contradict itself in a way? It anticipates our basic and spiritualistic needs and sells ideas, encouraging affiliation through their products by highlighting aspirations through familiar metaphors

I presented my ideas in the Final Project Presentations yesterday, and the feedback was sound; the tutors and fellow peers alike provided questions to ponder on this weekend which I had otherwise omitted during the thinking for the output; one particular question which was raised by a fellow student did make me realise how immersed into this project I was, almost to the point of not remembering the other campaigns that already exist under the sea of brands and branding: “If you are creating something through all the clutter, how do you get people to notice it?”

It’s getting closer to the time where the outcome has to be finalised and get on with the report writing, I feel less prepared than ever, but have certainly gained more of an understanding of the psychology behind branding and its effects on consumers; the use of familiar metaphors relevant to our time through a narrative, like fairytales, provide a sense of affiliation between ourselves and the overall brand itself through their products. It is like a medicine that can cure our needs, that have long been merged with our inner-spiritualistic desires in this materialistic world.

This is a real-world form of escapism, where brands utilise their products and the market to provide this escape from the realistic thoughts, to be lost within their metaphors that makes you become affiliated to it, through a  visual narrative. Over time, as consumers become susceptible to this method of escapism, the psychological high that one can get from purchasing could be explained like the following:

1. Consumers use brand (Use)
2. Consumers become dependent (Abuse)
3. Consumers begin to depend on it (Dependency)
4. Consumers purchase more as they become more susceptible (Increased Dosage)

Of course that is the most superficial description on how it works; if I was to expand on it, and providing it with more materialistic context:

1. Consumers use brands (Use);
2. Consumer becomes increasingly dependent on it; more has to be purchased in order to refill that intensity and psychological high (Abuse and dependency);
3. Over time, consumers become bored of the brand (Susceptibility) and seeks elsewhere for an alternative high;
4. Brand itself lose their consumers and creates new products, providing an external set of metaphors that will ensure they are newer, better, stronger and importantly, fresher than before for the consumer (Disillusionment);
5. Consumers learn of new brand, and returns to previous brand (Relief control); other brand amends their image;
6. Repeat cycle.

From that analogy above, if that context was placed within the context of brand terrorism, then consumers would be so spoilt for choice, causing more purchasing and more hoarding of brands; it’s no wonder that compulsive consumers exist!

In between the hoarding, what would happen if I add the metaphor of a placebo effect?
Would the cycle be broken?

With time issues, there is not much space left to research further into the relationship between branding and how it presents metaphorically as a medicine for consumers, but can I utilise that metaphor to create an outcome? More importantly, as questioned during the presentation:
How does it affect individuals?
What do you want the audience to take out from this outcome?
How do you raise awareness of your stance as a result of your research from the outcome?

One soldiers on.

Bibliography
Bell, N (2004) The Steam-Roller Of Branding. Eye Magazine. 14 (53), 18-28.

There has been a bit of restructuring of my research, helping me to organise my thoughts and development; branding a conceptual idea such as materialism would only provide a form that can be so fluid and more must be interpreted within it to reach the outcome. It is also helpful as it helps me create a running order for the imminent Major Project Presentation next week. The idea of negativity and positivity still sits well in my mind, but would I be able to make a change by utilising the psychological research that I have found and focus on consumerism as the one aspect of society? How would I be able to utilise today’s brand terrorism, i.e. the bombardment of brands so that we are never too far away from them, or any other brands, to promote something positive?
   
Going through the research that I have done for the past few months has made me realise very much that I was better defining my boundaries within my research; children specifically as a target audience was not relevant in my interests, but rather the concepts that are inherent in children’s fairytales. The adult consumer is nowadays stuck in fictional narratives that are influenced by the concepts of fantasy within branding.
   
The power of brands is by no means weak; the ability of being able to provide a narrative that merges between the fantastical and the real is beginning to morph social norms of understanding the difference between spiritualistic desires (such as freedom, love, health) with materialistic needs; brand narrative aims to offer the fulfilment of spiritualistic desires by purchasing their product of a materialistic nature; the didactic nature that used to be carried by fairytales, however, was not brought along with the creation of branding. The difference between good and bad within the climate of branding is nowadays, so blurred to the point where, its consequences as it morphed social norms has changed our own ideals, as shown with the climatic example of the London Riots.
   
It is on the realisation based on this quote by Dieter Rams:

The value, and especially the legitimisation of design will be, in the future, measured more in terms of how it can enable us to survive…on this planet.

   
The in depth research of anything and everything about psychological behaviours when exposed to brands has almost made me forget that the brand itself does not have to be about a logo marque, as I began exploring the outcome possibilities. This project output is rather about the expression of a concept that makes the statistics, or research that I found, fresh for the reader.
   
From all the gathered research, my research question now stands at:
   
Is it possible to utilise brand terrorism to encourage good?
   
Under this research question, the outcome direction will utilise the psychological effects and impact that I have discovered between brands and the consumer to address the social issue of brand terrorism through metaphors as found throughout my research.

Getting back all the responses from interviews now, results show that product placement does not appear to play a role in impacting the interviewee’s lives; the amount of time they spend on the computer and internet browsing overshadows both television viewing and watching movies, yet more than 60% of the surveys returned can recall brands from shows they have watched, so is it an unconscious understanding that the brands have already infiltrated their minds? Or is it as Martin Lindstrom describes smokers' choices when undertaking his survey (Lindstrom, 2009, p.15)

It wasn't that our volunteers felt ashamed about what smoking was doing to their bodies; they felt guilty that the labels' stimulated their brains' craving areas. It was just that their conscious mind couldn't tell the difference.

Gathering main discoveries from each week’s progress report:

• Brands need to know their audience before selecting airtime in the case of product placement; consumers themselves must also play a part, as they need to know or have minimal knowledge of products available in the market first. For children, brands have to understand both the children (their main audience), and their parents (the power of purchase). More than 75% of the UK audience were not aware of the meaning of the ‘P’ marque; the notice for product placement that is shown before programmes that have endorsed brands embedded in them.
• If campaigns are strong enough to create an impact in one’s long-term memory, the idea of the campaign will eventually become a brand. From this, it can be said that anything can be considered as a brand nowadays; products, companies, people, even metaphors and gestures. Gestures such as the ‘thumbs up’, ‘thumbs down’, ‘OK’, the Crucifix and their behaviours as a result of the usage are well-known internationally, can we therefore brand with gestures due to the known significance of them?

• As a follow up from the discussion with Eugenie in the last tutorial, can negative branding therefore be made positive by increasing the seductiveness of them? The seductiveness of eating healthily and living well, can it be made better?

• How do children, whose minds are developing, differentiate between positive and negatives before knowing the difference between right and wrong? We implant ideas into our minds with the increasing types of media that we are exposed to – books, newspapers, television, movies. These types of media are created through someone’s ideas brought to life visually or in literary senses. In both cases, both ideas are implanted into people’s minds by adding visuals effects, and in literary ways, the extensive use of descriptive words.

• Product placement, very much like advertising, is an adult invention, perhaps something which may be too advanced for children. As a result, a new materialistic culture has been produced as a result of the adult concept of product placement and advertising; the increase in commercialisation of childhood has dynamically changed the development of children.

• The notions of childhood have very much changed since the days of fairytales and fables, where it was the platform for understanding moral values and notions; the modern rendition of fairytales takes place in forms of magical worlds (i.e. Harry Potter series, or Ben 10 etc.) where there is a merging between the fantastical and of the real, but more dangerously, these are not ideals of teaching moral values and notions, but rather a franchise to increase commodity. This shows the major extent of how brands have infiltrated our minds without much control and from the brands' point of view, it is about providing the children values of a different kind.

• So has brands, become the modern adulthood to the modern childhood? As substantiated from previous research, parents have decreasing importance in guiding children's development; from Nicholas Ind's Living The Brand (2004, p.32-3) He explains the notion of modern-day society using the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:

we work because we have basic needs of safety and security...there is a real fear of not being able to afford the necessities of life...Maslow, with his belief in humanistic psychology, recognized that, although people do have basic needs, they also have social needs, and needs for esteem and self-actualization...they do want to be recognized by others for their worth and they do want a sense of fulfilment.

• Our generation is a generation that is the advertised, as well as the advertiser. Branding has become the dictator to children, to childhood.

I have begun to realise that the points I have made not only emphasises on the modern ideals of children is to become older than they are; to be seen to be older and more mature than their peers  – brands exploit this notion to implant themselves into the unconscious and morph social norms.
In product placement's case, where it can be defined into several stages, or phases of embedding into children’s minds in a sentient manner to become part of the children themselves. As a result, the connection between the child and the consequence of their perception of the world from an overexposure of brands has been initiated.

The adult’s dream of childhood can be traced in the history of the fairy tale.  For the most part, we assume fairy tales are stories for children that perhaps we engage in as adults only as a form of nostalgia. We understand the fairy tale as a staple of the child’s world, a world of fantasy left behind with the maturity that comes with adulthood; fables provide a more realistic point of view by providing a moral of the story, which would make it more apt if I were to concentrate on just fables, rather than fairytales as well.

How can I present this concept and push it as the outcome?

From my research and experimentation, what is the problem?
Branding has become such an integral part of society that childhood and their development of values and morals have been jeopardised; childhood has now simply become a period of time where brands exploit by infiltrating their developing values, rendering their lifestyle increasingly materialistic.
The social implications of such an impact would mean that this Generation X, or more recently called the Generation M^2 (meaning MultiMedia) would be working to live in order to satisfy their materialistic desires; as morals and spiritual values become decadent. The loss of innocence, along with the childhood, tender mothering and care that is supposed to accompany innocence by parents has been gradually handed over quietly to the technological gadgets and their branded siblings. Children growing up too fast these days prefer to spend time with their gadgets than their parents, who on average spend only 82 minutes with their children each day.

How has branding therefore, impacted childhood?

The main issue that I discovered that has been hounding the ideology of childhood is that the modern-day child is becoming increasingly obsessive about consumption, this can be interpreted in different ways; whether in food or other products, we are becoming increasingly materialistic in our values, and the age of desiring and obtaining materialistic luxuries are getting younger. Why? Advertising.  The stressful lifestyle that the majority face in this metropolis are beginning to show strains and their children are also noticing too; reports show that parents spend on average only 82 minutes of their day with their child. Where has the time normally spent with children gone? Adults begin to go through the routine of wake up, eat sleep and work, and less time is being spent with children; bills to pay, mouths to feed. The sense of stability of a secure job with secure pay, as compared to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, combining this with the strategic methods of advertising and the overload of information everywhere, there seems to nowhere to hide, and children are being brought up in an environment where advertising is the norm that one probably gets exposed to more than their homework or more time spent with advertising than their own parents. 
   

How am I going to solve it or raise questions that may help deal with the problem?

I initially proposed a visual journey of the gradual overtaking of brands within our sights, using fairytales as the starting point, where morals and values are taught through storytelling, much like brands. Using snapshots from fairytales, a vernacular of childhood innocence, with a twist into their context with brands can aid in raising awareness of the impact of brands have in our lives and the gradual loss of innocence that childhood as a concept was supposed to attach to. By placing brands in such a  context, it shows that brands have embedded themselves into everyday language, enough to create stories out of them.

It is creating visuals that help raise awareness of the increasing amount of advertising, hence dealing with the problem from the roots, rather than providing a solution itself. A solution cannot be created in the scale that is required of the vast industry.

The feedback from the seminar held today (15/9) was not particularly sound; the ideas presented on negativity were given the most praise, but the outcome proposed did not support the rest of the research involved. It has been advised to focus on one societal aspect and focus the rest of the development, although the focus has been based on the collision between the increasing development of materialistic values over the spiritual from the beginning…

In retrospect, since the research that I have been conducting all along has been about materialism, it is therefore only justifiable that I can brand materialism as a concept – the justification of creating such a brand would be to increase the awareness of brand terrorism that faces us everyday, to the point where we are not allowed to choose a branded product over another due to the monopolies that particular company has purchased, and we, ourselves, become the advertiser; a walking billboard. It is merely the path of research that I undertook which took me to this point in a different way, but it will also be the research direction which I undertook which should wield interesting results.

The target audience has very much changed from the beginning of the project; instead of focusing on modern-day children, the audience, in itself, has also grown up, and now concentrating on those that do not believe that they have been impacted by brands, as described at the beginning of this report.
    
The main question now is: How does the research there fit into the research question, and produce an outcome showcasing critical reflection on the project?
 

Bibliography
Ind, N. (2004) Living The Brand: How to Transform Every Member of Your Organization into a Brand Champion. Kogan Page: London
Lindstrom, M. (2009) Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy. Random House: London

Visual experiments ad continuum – the majority of the logomarks to which the target audience associated themselves to, as gathered from the Brand Index 2011, were red, continuing from the previous discussion on colour psychology, to further this, the red logos were complimented with yellow, to signify both speed and happiness. When the logomarks were overlaid on top of each other, it simply became a “visual noise”, where little to no information can be interpreted from the result. I then repeated with the characters and mascots of the brands; there used to be more characters, but in recent years, many corporations decided to retire the majority of them, notably Ronald McDonald, one of the most recognised brand mascots of all time, due to their link and the glorification of unhealthy eating and fast food.

This most certainly reflects upon the situation of the modern world of communication, let alone in the land of advertising; ridiculous amounts of noise is generated from the bombardment of constructed media messages telling everyone to do this, do that, eat this, don’t eat that. Where does it stop?

Speaking of the yellow character, or the colour yellow itself, I read a very interesting article regarding the semiotics of The Simpsons, and how the messages behind the animation itself does not challenge the audience that watch the animation to be able to read the sign behind the animation itself; the purpose of entertainment, particularly for this show, “does not require viewers to have background knowledge of the culture, nor does it require them to really think while watching the show…” (Fakhoury, N et al.)
   
Spent an interesting day exploring the concrete jungle with a visual communication graduate, now flight attendant. His mix of knowledge of travelling to different places, soaking in many diverse cultures, combined with his knowledge of visual communication had meant that he provided some great insight onto the placement and interaction of an idea. One interesting insight he provided was a window; it acts as a barrier between the interaction of the view between the viewer and the outside. When one sits from a different position, for example, below the window ledge, the interaction between the viewer and the view is obstructed by the window’s bars, whereas, if you sit up close to the window, the interaction is more complete, and you become more in sync with your surroundings and the nature; when people look at properties they look for ones with large windows. This was an interesting insight because I started to ponder whether this concept can be applied to television screens and the media being displayed.
   
We also visited WHAT_architecture, who had previously completed a project with a school in North London involving LEGO bricks; the exterior of the school was created with LEGO walls, decorated and built by students, parents and architects in a collaborative project. The semiotics of this type of product placement revolves around using LEGO signifying nostalgia for the adults, and as its tagline suggests, “serious play” for the child; the children that aid in the construction of the school, to them, it is creativity and a chance to add a piece of themselves, to become part of the school as a contribution. For the adults, it retains an infatuation of childhood that altogether contributes towards a positive brand image for both old and young audiences.
   
This is where it brings me to gather all my previous weeks of progress reports and consider what the final outcome of this project shall be, and the intention of the project; the two main questions that I have been asking throughout are:
   

• Can positive brand images be implanted into children through product placement?
• What are the impact of brands on childhood?

   
The second question can effectively be answered visually by one of my original ideas from reading Elizabeth Tucker’s Dramatization of Children’s Narratives, and where ideas derive from. I’ve been interested in the idea of fairytales and how it provides a platform for children’s narratives for awhile. So it is more than likely that it’ll be related to such; a brand can present itself with an emotional attachment for the child in the form of a character to build the initial relationship between the audience and the brand. It can be placed from the perspective if I was to say that the signifier became the television screen, children who become raised in a room with a television may develop unrealistic emotional relationships with the bombardment of stories, through television shows. All media messages are constructed with the aid of language, as Alfred North Whitehead once said "Language foists on us exact concepts as though they represented the immediate deliverance of experience." (Whitehead as cited by Chandler, 2000)

Bibliography
Chandler, D. (2000) [Online] Biases of the Ear and Eye. Available at: <http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/litoral/litoral4.html> (accessed 2 September 2011)
Michaels, S. (2011) [Online] A Conversation With JR, Intrepid French Street Artist. The Atlantic. Available at: <http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/09/a-conversation-with-jr-intrepid-french-street-artist/244518/> (Accessed 6 September 2011)
Lyons, J.; Fakhoury, N.; Hsieh, T. and Jahazi, H. [no date] [Online] Reading Television?: The Simpsons. Available at: <http://www.yorku.ca/mlc/4318/projects/simp.html>(Accessed 5 September 2011)
http://www.prweek.com/go/kidsbrandindex/ (Accessed 28 August 2011)

ad continuum So does product placement become the modern adulthood to the modern childhood?
     
Wording for the keywords have been changed to gain a better understanding with fewer (or more) words:
   
Product placement is a form of advertising that embeds brands into forms of media; it implants ideas that provides an emotional platform between the brand and the consumer.
   
Branding targets the psychosocial implications, expressive, terminal，as well as social values, in order to create the ultimate brand loyalty between itself and the consumer.
   
Childhood is a period where cognitive, physical, social and emotional capacities are being developed, and product placement have increasingly exploited such to deliver brands and manipulate their perceptions.
   
Branding is a multi-faceted aspect within the world of design, and from the experimentation and research that I’ve been conducting in the recent weeks, it is about an implementation of an idea, particularly within the world of product placement. I can now relate my current progress back to my original research question: “Whether product placement can have a positive brand exposure towards children”, but rather, to put it simply, it is questioning “whether product placement can implement a positive idea towards children”
This opportunity has opened my eyes to experience unique perspectives on the city; the small moments we don't always pay too much attention to in the chaos that is the bombardment of brands.
   
When I was calculating the brand index scores of the brands that children aged 8-12 (this phase is also known as ‘tweens’) from data that I had gathered, I found some surprising results; even though we live in an increasingly digital world, where more things are done on the internet, from the findings from the brand index scores, tweens are actually the most influenced by sweets and chocolate, followed by electronic gadgets, rather than websites, or TV shows. From this piece of discovery, however, it has to be considered where the source of influence, as well as the content of the influence.

From the brand index data, I started compiling the colour wheel of brands that my target audience associate themselves with, I have realised that more and more are red, or yellow mostly; the colour psychologies of yellow and red combines the attention seeking energy of red with the happiness and optimistic yellow; McDonald’s is the perfect example that combines these two colours – the promise of a ‘good time’, with the excitement and movement and palpitations that it induces by attractive their customers with their insignia is surely a win. A more recent gradual decline of the use of red favour of adopting a more natural tone to their overall tone probably inclines with the quiet background murmurs of ethics within the fast food industry.
   
Whilst compiling the colour wheel, there were moments where I had to pause and reconsider which part of the colour spectrum the logo itself belonged to, as the colour of some brands, where their packaging colour is intact throughout their range, was also considered.
   
I finally began some primary research onto my surroundings; finding product placements, implanting of ideas that encompassed me left, right and centre.  Watching media that was perhaps, a little too naïve for yours truly, but the more I look into this subject, the more I become hooked into it, it is almost like as if all of these brands have amassed into a giant narrative within play, and has become a dictation towards me rather than an influence. This reminded me of a conversation that I had with an Accountant-cum-Politics-graduate, whom had a anecdote to share:

I was watching television with my cousin once, and the age difference is rather large – 10 years apart, so naturally, and watching his, his type of programmes on television…God, I couldn’t even handle the break in between the shows; the products that are associated with the cartoon is played to entice the viewer. Jeez, that gave me a headache.

What she said reminded me of Steve Jobs's saying (Mitchell, 2011)

"When you’re young, you look at television and think - There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought."

— Steve Jobs

Our generation is a generation that is the advertised, as well as the advertiser; branding has become the dictator to children, to childhood.

Bibliography

http://blog.sirmitchell.com/