Tuesday 27 October 2015

OUGD401: Study Task 4 - Branding & The Consumer Self Summary

After having read an lengthy extract from the Naomi Klein's book 'No Logo', I couldn't help but realise how much branding has taken over not only the media, sports and also the consumers, yet we don't realise it. Not all brands, but a large selection of them seem to consume everything in their path, for example Nike is referred to as a Super-brand. 'They're a company that swallows cultural space in giant gulps'. 'This is a shoe company that is determined to unseat pro sports, the olympics and even star athletes, to become the very definition of sports itself.' The way Naomi narrates the book makes it seem as though she, herself, has been sucked into the brands and has fallen victim of their ways. This is down to her very informative way of talking about the issues at hand, as it appears as though she's talking from a personal standpoint, backing up her points with past on goings that happened during her lifetime.

A point that Naomi mentions in the beginning of the excerpt is that branding grew with people both physically and mentally. More and more people wanted brands and started to care less about the clothes, which in turn meant that brands grew exponentially over the years. So much so that it sparked a merger between media and catalogue which reached a new high in 1998, with the launch of Dawson's Creek TV show. All of the cast members of the show had been kitted out with J crew clothing, whilst coincidentally enough J crew advertisements were based around the Dawson's Creek show theme, including, of course some of the cast members as models. A quote that ties in well with this point is that overtime other companies caught onto this idea of merging media and catalogue so much so that all sorts of different areas of the internet wanted to be in on it. For example, after reading Globe reviews, readers were able to click to order books directly from Chapters chain of which had just been reviewed. Also on the Teen People site, readers can click and order cosmetics and clothing as they read about them". The biggest and most important part of the excerpt is how nike are essentially a human branding company. Selling every piece of clothing imaginable, all of it with their branding on it. Some Nike employees even have a swoosh tattoo on their calves, not only that but tattoo parlours all over North America have said that the swoosh has become their most popular item.

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