Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour are common household names for clothing and sports accessories. Walking in to about any building you will see a name brand of some product or clothing item. We recognize these items by their brand name at the drop of a hat, but what makes that particularly brand better than others. Ben Wetherbee made it very clear in his essay “Branded” that logos are terrible and big companies are the enemy. This problem has negatively affected our society because of peer pressure, advertising, and CEOs of companies. Ben Wetherbee is very clear in his essay “Branded” that logos and their corresponding companies are the enemy and a huge contributor to our corrupt society. He discusses further about how our generation is consumed …show more content…
No one wants to be the odd one out, because people like to be accepted in general. If working your way up the social ladder is to buy the newest and most expensive clothes, most adolescents do this. Children also do this but the difference is, they do it subconsciously. By seeing other children with certain brands, they remember that “so and so” wore that and he/she is my friend, so I have to have it too. From a young age, peer pressure has been evident in our lives with us knowing it or not. Wetherbee shows us that, “one can hardly set foot in a public school’s hallway without drowning under a barrage of geometric homage to capitalism” (483). This just shows again how adolescents conform to their peers in order to fit …show more content…
He takes the stand that we are not property and should not be owned by a company. In the past, logos haven’t been a definition of a culture; the definition was the style of the clothing. “Past generations have used symbols effectively to represent specific movements and ideas; they have personalized symbols” (487). Their symbols had a purpose and represented something bigger than a company with expensive shoes. He is sick and tired of our generation being suckers to the advertising ploys of big companies. They take advantage of us and attack our weaknesses to convince us to buy that
When people go shopping there are limitless choices of one product made by different companies, all choices of this product basically do the same thing, but what makes them different is the brand’s name. Companies with brands are trying to get their consumers by presenting their commodities in ways
There is an undoubtedly enormous influence on the world by consumerism. Consumerism and capitalism shape the nation that we live in today. Everyone knows this because they see advertisements all day long on television, on the radio, on billboards and through hundreds of other mediums. Unfortunately, what the world is not exposed to is what goes on behind the marketing and the ultimate final sale. There is a dark side to capitalism created not only by shady merchants, but the worldwide multi-national companies as well. What both of these excerpts portray is the idea that there is more to the products we buy than we are told, or unfortunately, that we bother to ask about. Through the use of interviewing, traveling, and criticism, these authors do a fine job in analyzing the relationships between branding and marketing, and more importantly, between our modern day consumption habits and hidden production processes.
Thomas Frank’s book entitled The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism takes a poignant look at the advertising world of the 1950’s and 1960’s, exploring how advertising played a role in shaping the next generation of consumers. Frank points out that he believes many misunderstand how important the key industries of fashion and advertising were to the shaping of our consumer culture, especially in getting Americans to rethink who they were. The industry of advertising was not conforming to the upcoming generation, instead the new consumer generation was conforming to the ideals of the advertising industry. Frank believes that the advertising and fashion industries were changing, but not to conform to the new generation, instead to shape a new generation of consumers.
In “No Logo” Naomi Klein presents a convincing and well-documented look into how “branding” has enabled multi-national corporations to take over the way many Americans make purchases; however, since her argument fails to include the all-important human factors often overlooked by corporations and the proliferation of Internet-based retailers who are able to deal goods directly to the consumer, it is incomplete.
Hoards of people, distracted by catchy advertising and creative logos, fuel the machine that feeds on exploiting human beings. Addidas, Nike, Banana Republic, all just a few of the brand names that encroach on poverty stricken countries and exploit the people there. As a country, society contributes to the oppressi...
Klein, Naomi. "Chapter Seven." No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador USA, 2000. 143-64. Print.
In every given business, the name itself portrays different meanings. This serves as the reference point and sometimes the basis of customers on what to expect within the company. Since personality affects product image (Langmeyer & Shank, 1994), the presence of brand helps in the realization of this concept. Traditionally, brand is a symbolic manifestation of all the information connected with a company, product, or service (Nilson, 2003; Olin, 2003). A brand is typically composed of a name, logo, and other visual elements such as images, colors, and icons (Gillooley & Varley, 2001; Laforet & Saunders, 1994)). It is believed that a brand puts an impression to the consumer on what to expect to the product or service being offered (Mere, 1995). In other application, brand may be referred as trademark, which is legally appropriate term. The brand is the most powerful weapon in the market (LePla & Parker, 1999). Brands possess personality in which people associate their experience. Oftentimes, they are related to the core values the company executes.
In everyday life we are bombarded with advertisements, projects, and commercials from companies trying to sell their products. Many of these ads use rhetorical devices to “convey meaning [,] or persuade” their audiences (Purdue OWL) . Projects, such as the Dove Self-Esteem Project uses native advertising in their commercials, which refers to a brand or product being simultaneously and indirectly promoted. In this essay, I will analyze the rhetorical devices, such as ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos, as well as the fallacies corresponding to each device, that the Dove Company uses in their self-esteem project .
It has become impossible to avoid marketing and branding. Everywhere a consumer turns, they are being persuaded and influenced by all sorts of symbols, logos, slogans etc. These aspects of a brand create the culture we live in. “The effect, if not always the original intent, of advanced branding is to nudge the hosting culture into the background and make the brand the star. It is not to sponsor culture but to be the culture.” 30 no logo. Humanity has become one large sponsored event, making it impossible in order to escape.
Increasing awareness of a personal and unique identity distinguishes us from the pack. A brand mantra differs from a tagline, explains Guy Kawasaki, as a mantra describes internal business, a standard for a company to abide by. A tagline is for customers and what they can expect to be delivered (Martinuzzi, 2014). John Jantsch, founder of Duct Tape Marketing defines branding "the art of becoming knowable, likable and trustable” (Martinuzzi, 2014). Many specialists on the subject agree that trust building is essential in success. Being honest is one of the top five steps Forbe’s advises when it comes to brand building (Biro, 2013). Some suggestions to follow from, How to Build an Unforgettable Personal Brand (2014) include, making sure customers are provided what is promised, leading with unwavering quality and being consistent in making good on one’s word. The article also warns that the public will assign a default brand if a
In the essays that we have been reading, there is a consist theme that has been occuring. This consist theme has been that there are people who are in power, and that their conscience has been covered by hot iron, becuase their minds are being controlled by their love for money, and that they have screwed up the way that the world works in the pursuit of money. The first assignment that we had was to watch the “Story of Stuff” and then had to talk about it. In the “Story of Stuff”, the main idea was that corporations cared about one thing and one thing only, making the most money, even if that meant destroying human lives and destroying the planet. In the next assignment, we had to read Naomi Klein’s essay “No Logo”, in which she tells us that the corporations found that they could make money without making any products, instead they made something called “brands”, which were nothing but concepts that did not require them to make the actual products. So instead they had several companies that treated their workers without any respect, but could make the products for the corporations at cheap costs. And in the essay “Iron Maiden” written by Jacobson and Mazur, the authors tell us about how the media has created an environment in which women honestly believe that only when they buy “brands” and torture their bodies to the horrors of unnecessary cosmetic surgery. And all of this is because there is a group of people, who have their morals controlled by their love of money, and that they have a race for who can own the most things and that nothing can get in their way, and all of this is shown by the essays that we have been studying.
What is branding? Branding has been advocated as a potentially successful response to heightened market concentration; it offers the possibilities of centralized control and format standardization, and an added value or cost driven strategy can be used to differentiate the retail offering and reinforce market positioning. Brands provide informational cues for buyers about the store's merchandise quality, and favourable images of brands positively influence patronage decisions." Successful retail branding can provide a form of "insulation" against price competition and states: "Where the store brand name is itself a brand name based on a quality appeal, it will be easier to position the own brand as a premium product under the same name" (Schmidt, R., & Pioch, E., 2005). Further as consumers, we tend to think about brands as symbols like the Nike swoosh or McDonald’s golden arches; the working definition of a brand is broader. A brand is usually defined as a name, logo, symbol, words, or combination of these, intended to distinguish a particular company’s offerings from those of competitors. In this sense, the modern use of the word “brand” harkens back to its older meaning which is a distinguishing mark or burn to identify wine, livestock or other commodities by their owner (Koehn, N., 2013).
In one journal entry I wrote, I brought to light that the popular group is something that every one of us, for some reason feels as though we need to be a part of. This is from my own experience and things I have observed throughout my four-year career in high school. I think it was perhaps worse in junior high, however. When you are in seventh and eighth grade you are not sure of who you are and are desperately searching around for something to belong to, to be a part of. Why is this, why are we a society that are most often drawn to the most popular, "cool" and "beautiful" that high school has to offer? Why is acceptance the most important thing to us, is belonging really as important as losing your own sense of self? Who you hang out with, who your closest friends are as an adolescent without a doubt help to shape who you are. And it's funny that you seem to end up being friends with the ones who are the same type of people as you. Same fashion sense, taste in music or cars and movies. When searching for an identity in high school, it is hard not to just attempt to pick up the one that seems the most socially acceptable. I know that my personal experiences include these conforming characteristics. Still as a freshman in college I am constantly looking at the fashion of my peers, wondering to myself "do they think I fit in"? This was especially true the first few weeks of college when I wasn't sure who my good friends were going to be; I made sure that I dressed as well as I could everyday, in all the new clothes I had bought specifically for college.
The developmental stages of a successful campaign help to establish the product in the audience’s mind or consciousness. The stages of the Nike campaign can be described by using the Yale Five-Stage Developmental Model. Yale researchers developed this model while observing the growth of national identity. The first stage of this model is identification. Our text states that “Many products and causes develop a graphic symbol or logotype to create identification in the audience’s mind” (p. 264, Larson). The logo Nike is most famous for is “The Swoosh.” This is the term given to the symbol of winged victory that appears on Nike products. “The design of the swoosh logo was inspired by the wing from the Greek goddess Nike” (p. 3, http://shrike.depaul.edu /~mcoscino/word.html). The Nike logo’s presence can be noted in almost every aspect of the athletic world.
“Linked to a brand, its name is the symbol that adds to or subtract from the value provided by a product or service.” (Aeler, 1991) Like country of origin, brand equity is also one of the reasons why some people want to have a well-known brands in the whole world. Sometimes it is not all about the price anymore because in today’s generation brand is more important than