Brand Story by
Martin Kornberger
Kornberger, M. (2009). Brand society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Inventing Lifestyle
- Early studies suggest that the relationship between consumers and products was more important than either two
- This juncture where the individual relates to objects and uses this relationship to make sense of and give meaning to life is the birthplace of lifestyle
- It marks the moment when life could be given form and styled through consuming brands
- The Inner and Outer Joneses were intellectual parents of the lifestyle idea
> Given their emphasis on the social and the psychological realties of consumption, individuals could shape their psychological environment through buying into a certain lifestyle
- Inner Joneses : inner satisfaction
> uniqueness and personal happiness of the Inner Joneses would triumph over competition for status with the Joneses from next door - Dr Ernest Dichter in the Harvard Business Review
- 1959 - L. Rainwater et al. published 'Workingman's Wife: Her Personality, World and Lifestyle' (L. Rainwater, 1959)
> the first study that used the concept of lifestyle to understand consumption
> It interviews 420 working-class women from across America and an additional 120 middle-class women to cross-reference data
- Rainwater et al. were interested in the 'normal' Joneses - or better, their wives
> they surveyed and interviews them, they let them tell their stories
> they gathered data on their socioeconomic status, daily routines etc
> "we need to know some of the basic facts about the working class housewife's personality and lifestyle..."
> What they found was that the central characteristic of the working class wife was 'her underlying conviction that most significant action originates from the world external to herself rather than from within herself'
- This new lifestyle focus was soon critiqued as blunt manipulation
- Vance Packard's 'The Hidden Persuaders'
- According to Packard, the old technique of 'nose counting' that divided the population into large segments did not work anymore
- These large demographic segments did not reveal enough info about the individual
- Packard criticised the 'depth approach' to motivation research that used mass psychoanalysis and other methods to manipulate the masses
- The depth approach capitalised on the idea that people did not buy a functional commodity but an emotional, cultural and social brand with meaning
. "people do not buy a car but prestige, and oranges but vitality"
- An experiment with smokers found that more than 98% of 300 brand-loyal smokers proved to be incapable of identifying their favourite brand
- For Packard, these manipulations were regressive "for man's long struggle to become a rational and self-guided being"
> What Packard ultimately tried to protect was the 'privacy of our own minds'
Branding Life, Governing People
- Despite the critique of people such as Packard, the notion of lifestyle became one of the master concepts in marketing
- The building blocks for lifestyle would be individual brands, consumed en masse, would form a stylish assemblage
- Rather than persuading consumers that products fit into their lives, the concept of lifestyle turns this on its head and by the consumers waiting to fit into a lifestyle created/ advertised by the product
- Sidney Levy explains why the lifestyle concept expanded
- According to Levy, symbolising is natural to humans
- Most of the time we are not conscious of it, we constantly use symbols to express who we are
- Lifestyle is "a large complex in motion" and
- "to explore this large, complex symbol in motion that is a man's grand life style is to seek to define his self-concept, to describe the central set of beliefs about himself and what he aspires to, that provide consistency to what he does" - (Levy, 1964)
- Levy sees products as 'sub-symbols'
> People then put together their lifestyles, and by extension their lives, through sub-symbolic products
> Hence a 'consumers personality can be seen as the peculiar total of the products he consumes'
- Marketing would no longer try to sell products by creating an image around them
- Today, in the privileged parts of the world, we are driven by lifestyle more than anything else
- The questions we ask is whether one or the other lifestyle would be better, healthier
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