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240 CHAPTER 5 Style

Branding has become one of the pervasive features of the contempmary cultural landscape. Nowadays, names don't just appear in the places they always have, such as packages, labels, stores, billboards, and advertisements. The world in which we live appears to be branded. Stadiums and arenas no longer have names such as Candlestick Park or the Boston Garden. Now they're called 3Com Park and the Fleet Center. The uniforms of college and professional athletes not only identify the play­ ers by displaying their numbers but they identify which company-for example, Nike or Reebok-has the team franchise by displaying its brand. And people who once simply wore brand~name clothes are now walking advertisements for several companies, branded by the name and logo on their shirts, shoes, sweaters, caps, and other clothing. All of this branding has caused a good deal of controversy. We present three selections to explore the terms of the controversy-an excerpt from the opening chdpter of 's No Logo, a response to Klein that appeared in the British magazine The Economist, and an exchange between Jonah Peretti and Nike.

NO LOGO

Naomi Klein Naomi Klein is a journalist and anticorporate activist. She is a regular columnist for the Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper; the British Guardian; and the weekly U,S. maga­ zine In These Times. No logo (2002), the book in which this selection appeared, connects the branding phenomenon to the way multinational corporations operate in a global economy and to the anticorporate activism that has emerged ,in recent years.

SUGGESTION Notice how Naomi Klein develops the idea of branding as a corporate strategy. When FOR READING you've finished reading the selection, write a short explanation of what Klein means by the term branding.

As <1 private person. I have a passion !'or landscape, The astronomical growth in the wealth and cul­ and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. tural influence of multinational corporations over Wt1erc every prospect pleases, rnan is at his vilest the last fifteen years can arguably be traced bacl' when he erects a billboard. When l retire from to a single. seemingly innocuous idea developed Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society by management theorists in the mid-! 980s: that of rnashed vigilantes who will travel around the successful corporations must primarily produce world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down . as opposed to products. posters at the clurl\ of the moon_ How many juries Until that time, although it was understood in will convict us when we are caught in tllese acts of beneficent citizensllip? the corporate world that bolstering one's brand name was important, the primary concern of -David Ogilvy. founcle1 of the every solid manufacturer was rhe production of Ogilvy&Me~thcl- advertiSing e~gency. in Confco;sions of m1 Aclt•cnising Mon. !96"5 goods. This idea was the very gospel of the 1""-rc:cmi Kieir No Logo 241 machine age. An editorial that appeared in ovvns the least. has the fewest employees on the Fortune magazine in 1938, For instance, argued payroll and produces the most powerful images. that the reason the American economy had yet to as opposed to products. wins the race recover From the Depression vvas that America And so the vvave of mergers in the corporate had lost sight of the importance of ma!<..ing things: world over rhe last few years is a deceptive phe­ nomenon: it only looh.s as if the giants. by jotn­ This is the proposinon that the IJasic and ing forces. are getting bigger and bigger. The true irreversible function of an industrial economy is the making oj things: that the more things it l\ey to understanding these shifts is to realize that mah.es the bigger· \.Viii be the income. wherller in several crucial ways-not their profns. of dollar or real: and hence chat the l~ey to those lost course-these merged companies are acwa!ly !'ecupNative powers lies ... in the facwry where shrinhing. Their apparent bigness is simply the the lathes and the drills and the fires and the most effective route toward theit· real goal hammers at·e. It is tn tl1e factory and on the land divestment of the vvorld of things. and under the land that purchasing power Since many of mday's best-hnown manu­ originates (italics theit·s] facturers no longer produce products and advet·­ And For the longest time. the mal\ing of tise them. but rather buy products and "brand" things remained, at least in principle, the heart them, these companies are forever on the prowl of all industrialized economies. But by the eight­ for creative new vvays to build and strengthen ies, pushed along by that decade's t·ecession. their brand irnages. /Vlanufacturing products may some of the most powerful manufacturers in the require drills. Furnaces, hammers and the like. world had begun to falter. A consensus emerged but creating a brand calls for a completely dif­ that corpocations wer·e bloated. oversized: they ferent set of tools and materials. It requires an o\rvnecl roo much. employed wo many people, endless parade of brand extensions. continu­ and were weighed down with too many things ously renewed imagery for marketing and. most The very process of pmducing--running one's of all. fresh nevv spaces to disseminate the own factories, being responsible for tens of thou­ brand's idea of itself. In rhis section of the bool\. sands of Full-time, permanent employees-began l'lllooh at hovv. in ways both insidious and oven, w looh: less like the route to success and more this corporate obsession with brand identity is lihe a clunky liability waging a war on public and individual space: on At around this same time a new hind of cor­ public institutions such as sdwols. on youthful poration began to rival the traditional all-Ameri­ identities. on the concept of nationality and on can manufacturers for rnarl\et share: these were the possibilities for unmarl\eted space the Nil\es and 1\llicrosofts. and later. the Tommy Hilfigers and lntels. These pioneers rnade the THE BEGINNING OF THE BRAND bold claim that producing goods vvas only an It's helpful to go bach. briefiy and lool\ at incidental pan of their operations. and that where the idea of branding first began. rhough thanhs to recenr victories in trade liberalization the words are often used interchangeably. brand· and labor-law reform. they vvere able to have ing rtncl aclverrising are nor the same process their products rnade for· them by contractors. Aclvcrt1sing any given product is only one pan of many of them ovet"Seas. What these companies branding·s grand plan, as at·e sponsorship and produced primarily vvere nol things. they said. logo licensing. Thin h. of the IJrand as the core buL inwges of their· brands. Their real vvork lay meaning of r1·1e modern corporation. and of the not in tllanufacruring but in marhcting. This for­ advertisement as one vd1icle used to convey that mula. needless ro say. has proved enonTwusly rneaning to tile 'Nor·ld profitable, and its success has companies CO!l)" The l'irsr ma.ss-marl.;,cting campaigns. start­ !JEting tn a race tmvard weightlessness: whoever ing in tile second hZtlf of the nineteenth century. 242 CHAPTER 5 Style

had more to do with advertising than with brand­ act the new and unsettling anonymity of pach­ ing as we understand it today. Faced with a range aged goods. "Fam\liar personalities such as Dr. of recently invented products-the radio, phono­ Brown, Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, and Old Grand­ graph, car, light bulb and so on-advertisers had Dad came to replace the shopheeper, who was more pressing tasks than creating a brand iden­ traditionally responsible for measuring bulk foods tity for any given corporation: first, they had to for customers and acting as an advocate for prod­ change the way people lived their lives. Ads had ucts ... a nationwide vocabulary of brand names to inform consumers about the existence of replaced the small local shopheeper as the inter­ some new invention, then convince them that face between consumer and product." After the their lives would be better if they used, for exam­ product names and characters had been estab­ ple, cars instead of wagons, telephones instead lished, advertising gave them a venue to speal'.. of mail and electric light instead of oil lamps. directly to would-be consumers. The corporate Many of these new products bore brand "personality," uniquely named, pachaged and names-some of which are still around today­ advertised, had arrived. but these were almost incidental. These products For the most part, the ad campaigns at the were themselves news: that was almost adver­ end of the nineteenth century and the start of the tisement enough. twentieth used a set of rigid, pseudoscientific for­ The first brand-based products appeared at mulas: rivals were never mentioned, ad copy used around the same time as the invention~based declarative statements only and headlines had to ads, largely because of another relatively recent be large, with lots of white space-according to innovation: the factory. When goods began to be one turn-of~the~century adman, "an advertise­ produced in factories, not only were entirely new ment should be big enough to make an impres­ products being introduced but old pmducts­ sion but not any bigger than the thing advertised." even basic staples-were appearing in strikingly But there were those in the industry who new forms. What made early branding efforts understood that advertising wasn'tjust scientific: different from more straightforward salesman~ it was also spiritual. Brands could conjure a reel­ ship was that the marhet was now being flooded ing-thinh ol' Aunt Jemima's comforting pres­ with uniform mass~produced products that were ence--but not only that, entire corporations virtually indistinguishable from one another. could themselves embody a meaning of their Competitive branding became a necessity of the own. In the early twenties, legendary adman machine age--within a context of manufactured Bruce Barton turned General Motors into a sameness. image based difference had to be metaphor for the American family, "something manufactured along with the product. personal, warm and human," while GE was not 10 So the role of advertising changed from deliv­ so much the name of the faceless General Elec ering product news bulletins to building an image tric Company as, in Barton's words. "the initials around a particular brand-name version of a of a friend." In 1923 Barton said that the role of product. The first tasl'i. of branding was to bestow advertising was to help corporations find their proper n2'1mes on generic goods such as sugar. soul. The son of a preacher. he drew on his re\i .. flour, soap and cereal. which had previously been gious upbringing for uplifting messages: "1 \i\'..e to scooped out of barrels by local shophecpcrs. In thin\'. of advertising as something big, something the 1880s. corporate logos were introduced to splendid, something which goes deep down into mass-produced products lih.e Campbell's Soup, an institution and gets hold of the soul of H.J. Heinz pickles and Qua\<..er Oats cereal. As lt ....lnstitutions have souls. just as men ath"i design historians and theorists Ellen Lupton and nations have souls." he told GM president Pierre J. Abbott Miller note. logos were tailored to evol'..e du Pont. General Motors ads began to tell storiE>:._; Familiarity and folksiness, in an effort to counLer­ about the people who drove its cars-the 243

preacher. the pharmacist or the councry doctor i\lore imporrant. it sparked a renevved interest in ~vvho, thanl<;s to his tl·usty Gt\'l. arrived "at the bed­ puffing up brand iclentit"tes. a project that side of a dying chtlcl" just in time ··w bring it bacl~ involved far more than a few billboards and TV to liFe." spots. It was about pushing the envelope in spon­ By the encl of the 1940s, thece was a bur· sorship deals, dreaming up ne\.v areas in whtch geonlllg awareness chat a brand wasn't just a to "extend" the brand. as well as perpetually mascot or a catchphrase or a picture printed on probing the zeitgeist to ensure that the ·'essence· the label of a company's product: the company selected for one's brand would t·esonate karmi­ as a 1.vhole could have a brand identity or a "cor­ cally with its target market. For reasons that \.viii porate consciousness." as this ephemeral quality be explored in the rest of rhis chapter, this radi­ was termed at tile time. As this idea evolved. the cal shift in cmpmate philosophy has sent manu· adman ceased w see himself as a pitchman and facwrers on a cultural feeding frenzy as they instead saw himself as "the philosopher-king of seize upon every corner of unmarh.eted lancl· commercial culture." in the wot·cts of ad critic scape in search of the oxygen needed to inflate FZandall Rothberg. The search for the true mean­ their brands. In the process. virtually nothing has ing of brands-or the "brand essence... as it is been left unbt·andecl. That's quite an impressive often called-gradually took the agencies away feat, considering that as recently as 1993 Wall from individual products and their attributes and Street had pronounced the brand dead. or as toward a psycllological/anthropological exarnina­ good as dead. tion of what brands mean to the cJiture and to people's lives. This \Vas seen to be of crucial THE BRAND'S DEATH (RUMORS OF WHICH importance. since corporations may manufacture HAD BEEN GREATLY EXAGGERATED) rroducrs. but what consumers buy are brands. 15 On April 2. \993. advertising itself v:as It took several decades for the manufaC[ur~ called into question by the very brands the ing world to adjust to this shift. It clung to the 'tndustry had been building. in sorne cases. for idea that its core business was still production over two centmies. That clay is 1.-..nown in mar­ and that branding was an important add-on. heting circles as ··rvlarlboro Friday." and it refers Then carne the brand equity mania of the eight­ to a sudden announcement from Philip Morris ies. the defining moment of which arrived in that it would slash the price of MMiboro ciga­ 1988 when Philip MatTIS purchased !'"\raft for t·ettes by 20 percent in an attempt to compete S 12.6 billion·~six t1mes what the company was with bargain br·ancls that were eating into its vvonh on paper. The pt·ice difference, apparently. market. The pundits went nuts. announcing in \vas the cost of the word "Kraft." Of course Wall frenzied unison that nor only was tvlarlboro Sueet \\'as aware that decades of marl·wting and dead. all brand names were dead. The reason­ brand bolstering added value to a company over ing \vas that if a "prestige" brand lil.-..e i\rlarlbmo. and above irs assets and total annual sales. But whose tmage had been carefully groomed \Vitll the l'\.raft purchase. a huge dollar value had preened and enhanced vvith more than a billion been assigned w something that had previously advertising dollars. \Vas desperate enough ro been abstract and unquantifiable-a brand compete \Vith no-names. then clearly the whole ncnne. This was spectacular news for the ad concept of branding had lost its currency. The vvorld. which \vas nmv able to make the cia 1m public had seen lhe aclvenising. and the public that advertising spending was more than just a didn't care. The rvlarlboro i\1an. afler all. was not sales strategy: it vvas an investtT"\enr in cold hard any old campaign: launched in 195"1. it was the cquiLy. The more you spend. the more your com­ longest-running ad campaign in hiswry. \(was a pany is worth. Not surprisingly. this led to a con­ legend. If (he 1\i<:nlboro i\lan had crashed. well. sicleral.Jle increase in spending on advertising then. b1·and equity' had uashecl as well. The 244 CHAPTER 5 Style :l loyalties and choosing to feed their families with ! implication that Americans were suddenly think­ private-label brands from the supermarket­ i ing for themselves en masse reverberated claiming, heretically. that they couldn't tell the dif­ through Wall Street. The same day Philip Morris ference. From the beginning of the recession to announced its price cut. stock prices nose-dived 1993, Loblaw's President's Choice line, Wal-Mart's for all the household brands: Heinz. Quaker Great Value and Mari

,~-~--- 245 image like a cheap shin-their image vvas so whatever content a particular audience most integrated with their business that other people vvanted from its brands: 'tmellectua! in Harper·s. wore it as their shirL And when the brands futuristic in Wired. alternative in Spin, loud and crashed. these companies didn't even notice­ proud in Out and "Absolur Centerfold'" in Pfayboy. they were branded to the bone The br·ancl reinvented itself as a cultural sponge. So the real legacy of Marlboro Fr'1day is that soal-:.ing up and morphing to its surroundings it simultaneously brought the two most signifi· Saturn, too. came out of nowhere in October cant developments in nineties marheting and 1990 when Gtv\ launched a car built not ouL of in co sharp focus: the deeply unhip steel and t·ubber but out of Nevv Age spit'ituall[) big-box bargain stores that provide the essentials and seventies feminism. After the car had been of life and monopolize a clisproponionate share on the marker a few years. the company held a of the market (VVai-Marc et at.) and the extra-pre­ "homecoming"' weekend for Saturn owners, dur­ mium "attitude" brands that provide the essen­ ing which they could visit the auto p!am and have tials of lifestyle and monopolize ever-expanding a cooi\OUt with the people vvho rnade their cars stretches of cultu1·a1 space (Nike eta!.). The way As the Saturn ads boasted at tile time, "44,000 these two tiers of consumerism developed would people spent their vacations with us, at a car have a profound impact on the economy in the plant."' Jt was as if Aunt Jemima had come to 1\fe years to come. \1\/hen overall ad expenditmes and invited you over to her house for dinner. cook. a nosedive in 1991, Nil~e and Reeboh. were 15 In 1993. the year the Marlboro i\tlan was busy playing advertising chicken, with each temporarily hobbled .by "brand-blind·· con­ company increasing its budget to outspend the sunters. made ·tts striking debut on other. In 1991 alone. Reebo!-;, upped its ad spend­ Advertising Age's lisr of the top 200 ad ing by 71.9 percent. while Nike pumped an ex era spenders--the very same yeat Lhat Apple com­ 24.6 percent into its already soaring ad budget. pwer increased its marl\eting budget by 30 pet·· bringing the company's total spending on mar­ cent after already mal\ing branding history with h.eting to a staggering $250 million annually. Far its Orvvellian takeoff ad launch during the 1984 fmm worrying about competing on price, the Super Bowl (see image on page 86). Li!<..e Saturn. sneal~er pimps were designing ever more intri­ both companies were selling a hip new relation· cate and pseudoscientific air pockets, and driving ship to the machine that lcfr Big Blue JBIV1 !ooh· up prices by signing star athletes to colossal ing as clunl\y and menacing as the now-dead sponsorsh"tp deals. The fetish strategy seemed to Cold War. be worl\mg fine: in the six years pt·ior to l 993. And then thet·e were the companies that had Ni!\e had gone from a $750 million company to always understood that rhey were selling brands a $4 billion one and Phil f\nigh['s Beaverton. Ore­ before product. Coke, Pepsi. !YlcDonald's. Burget· gon, company emerged from the recession ~;vith f\ing and Disney weren't fazed by the brand cri" profits 900 percent higher than when it began. sis, opting insteacllO escalate the brand war, espe­ Benctton and Calvin Klein, rneamvhile, were cially since they ]lad their eyes firmly fixed on also upping the it· spending on lifesryle marl\eting. global expansion They ~.vere JOined in this project using ads to associate rheir lines wiLh t·isque an by a vvavc or sophisticared producer/retailers who and progressive politics. Clothes barely appeared hiL full stride in the late eighties and early nineties in these high-concept advertisemems, let alone The Gap, ll\ea and the Body Shop were spreading pr·ices. Even more abstract was Absolut Vocll\a. li!~c wildfire clur"tng this period. masterfully trans­ vvhich for some years now had been developing forming the generic into the bt·aml"specific. largely a marhcting strategy in whtch its product clise1p· rhrougf1 bold. carefully branded pocl\aging and t!lc peened and its bt·ancl was nothing bur a blanl\ promotion of an ··experienti

he oversaw the launch of the "just Do It!" slogan, Britain since the seventies, but it wasn't until 1988 among other watershed branding moments. In that it began sprouting like a green weed on every the following passage, he explains the common street corner in the U.S. Even during the darkest techniques used to infuse the two very different years of the recession, the company opened brands with meaning: between forty and fifty American stores a year. Most baffling of all to Wall Street, it pulled off the Nil\e, for example, is leveraging the deep emotional connection that people have with expansion without spending a dime on advertis~ sports and fitness. With , we see how ing. Who needed billboards and magazine ads coffee has woven itself into the fabric of people's when retail outlets were three-dimensional adver~ lives, and that's ·aur opportunity for emotional tisements for an ethical and ecological approach leverage...A great brand raises the bar-it adds to cosmettcs? The Body Shop was all brand. a greater sense of purpose to the experience, The Starbucks coffee chain, meanwhile, was whether it's the challenge to do your best in also expanding during this period without laying sports and fitness or the affirmation that the cup out much in advertising: instead, it was spinning of coffee you're drinking really matters. off its name into a wide range of branded projects: 30 This was the secret, it seemed, of all the sue· Starbucks airline coffee, office coffee, coffee ice cess stories of the late eighties and early nineties. cream. coffee beer. Starbucl'\s seemed to under~ The lesson of Marlboro Friday was that there stand brand names at a level even deeper than never really was a brand crisis-only brands that Madison Avenue, incorporating marketing into had crises of confidence. The brands would be every nber of its corporate concept--from the okay, Wall Street concluded, so long as they chain's strategic association with books, blues and believed fervently in the principles of branding jazz to its Euro~latte lingo. What the success of and never, ever blinl<..ed. Overnight, "Brands, not both the Body Shop and Starbucks showed was products!" became the rallying cry for a market­ how far the branding project had come in moving ing renaissance led by a new breed of companies beyond splashing one's logo on a billboard. Here that saw themselves as "meaning brol'\ers" were two companies that had fostered powerful instead of product producers. What was chang­ identities by ma\<..ing their brand concept into a ing was the idea of what-in both advertising virus and sending it out into the culture via a vari­ and branding-was being sold. The old paradigm ety of channels: cultural sponsorship, political con­ had it that all marketing was selling a product. In troversy. the consumer experience and brand the new model. however, the product always extensions. Direct advertising, in this context, was tahes a back seat to the real product, the brand. viewed as a rather clumsy intrusion into a much and the selling of the brand acquired an extra more organic approach to image building. component that can only be described as spiri· Scott Bed bury, Starbuchs' vice president of tual. Advertising is about hawking product. marketing. openly recognfzed that "consumers Branding. in its truest and most advanced incar· don't truly believe there's a huge difference nations, is about corporate transcendence. between products." which is why brands must tt may sound flaky. but that's precisely the "establish emotional ties" with their customers point. On Marlboro Friday, a line was drawn in through "the Starbucks Experience" The pea· the sand between the lowly price slashers and pie who line up for Starbucl'\s, writes CEO the high-concept brand builders. The brand Howard Shultz, aren't just there for the coffee. builders conquered and a new consensus was "!t's the romance of the coffee experience, the born: the products that wll! flourish in the future feeling of warmth and community people get will be the ones presented not as "commodi­ in Starbud\s stores.,. ties" but as concepts: the brand as experience, Interestingly, before moving Lo Starbucks. Bedbury was head of marketing at Nike. where as lifestyle. l"ocrni ;(iei,, No Logo 247

Ever since. a select group of corporatiOns still lumpy-object purveyors. though automobiles has been atcempting to free itself from the cor" are much 'smarter' than they used robe." Peters poreal world of commodities. manufacturing and writes in The Circle of Innovation ( 1997). an ode products to exist on another plane. Anyone can ro the po"ver of rnarketing over procluct"1on. manufacture a pi"Oduct. they t·eason (and as the 35 When Levi's began to lose rnarl-;et share 111 the success of private-label brands during the reces" lace nineties. the trend was \videly a.mibuted to the sian proved. any·one did). Such men"tal tasks. company·s fai!ure-clespite lavish ad spending­ therefore. can and should be farmed out to con­ to transcend its products and become a Free-stand­ tractors and subcontractors \-Vhose only concem ing meaning. ··Maybe one of Levi"s problems ts is filling the order on time and undet· budget (ide­ that it has no Cola.·· speculated jennifer Steinhauer ally in the Third VVorld, where labor is dirt cheap. in The t\'ew York Times. "It has no denim-toned laws are lax and tax breal-;.s come by the bushell house paint. Levi makes what is essentially a com­ Headquarters. rneamvhile. is free to focus on the modity: blue jeans. Its ads may evohe rugged out­ real business at hand-creating a corporate domsmanship. but Levi hasn't promoted any mythology powerful enough to infuse meaning particular life style to sell other products ·· mto these raw objects just by signing its name. In this high·scah.es new context. the cutting­ The corpor·are vvorld has always had a deep edge ad agencies no longer sold companies on Nevv Age streal"\. fed-it has become cleat"-by a individual campaigns but on their ability w act profound need that could not be met simply by as "brand stewards"": identifying. articulating and trading widgets for cash. But vvhen branding cap­ protecring the corporate soul. Not surprisingly. tured the corpmate imagination. ~ew Age v·lsion this spelled good ne\.vs for the U.S. advertising quests took center stage. As Nike CEO Phil industry. which in 1994 saw a spendirlg increase Knight F-.xrlains. "For years we thought of our­ of 8.6 percent over the previous year. In one year selves as a producrion-ot·ientcd company. mean­ the ad industry went from a near crisis w ing vve put all om emphasis on designing and another "best year yer. ·· ;\nd chat was only the manufacturing the product. But nmv we under­ beginning of triumphs to come. By 1997. corpo· stand that the most important thing we do is rate advertising. defined as "ads that position a marhet the product. VVe've come around to say­ corporation. its values. its personalicy and char­ ing that Nil-;,e is a marl"\eting-oriented company. acter'· were up 18 percem from the year· before and the product is om most irnportanc marl\.et­ With th1's wave of brand rnania has come a ing tool ··This project has since been tahen co an new breed of businessman. one who will pmuclly· even more advanced level with the emergence of inform you lhat Brand X is not a product but a on-line corporate giants such as AmaLon.com. lC way of life. an attitude. a set of values. a Jool'l. an is on-line that tt1e purest brands are being bu'tlc idea. And ir sounds really great-way better than liberated from the real-,.vorld burdens of stores that Brand X is a scre~.-vdriver. or a hamburger and product manufacturing. these brands are chain. or a pair of jeans. or even a very success­ free to soar. less as the disseminators of goods or ful line of running shoes. Nike. Phil Knrght services than as collective hallucinations announced in the lare eighties. is '·a spans corn· Torn Peters. \Vho has long coclclled rhe inner pany its mission is nor to sell shoes bur w flal-;,e in many a hard-nosed CEO. latched on to "enhance people·s lives thmugh spans and fir· tile branding craw as the secret w hnancial sue· ness'" and to heep ··rile magic or sports alive·· cess. sep

senior vice presiclenc for sales and mat·keting. vvoulcl argue that you can indeed brand not only Paul S. OtelllllL replied that Intel is "lihe Col\e sand. but also \vheat. beef. bnch. metals. con­ One brand. many differem products.~ crete. chemicals. corn grits and an endless van­ And if Caterpillar and Intel can brand, surely ery of commodtties traditionally considered anyone can. immune to the process· 45 There is. in fact. a new strain in rnarh.eting Over the past six years. spool'i.ed by the near­ theory that holds that even the lowliest natural death experience of t\1arlbom Friday, global cor­ resources. barely processed, can develop brand porations have leaped on the brand-wagon vvith identitieS, thus giving vvay to hefty premium­ what can only be described as a reltgious fervor. price mat"!<..ups. In an essay appropriately [itled Never again vvould the corporate world stoop to "How to Brand Sand," advertising executives praying at the al[ar of the commodity marl<..et Sam Hill. jack McGrath ancl Sandeep Dayal team From now on they would worship only graven up to tell the corporate \No rid that \Vith the l"ight media images. Or to quote Torn Peters. the brand marheting plan, nobody has to stay stuck in the man himself: '·Brandl Brandr! Brand![! That"s [he stuff business. ''Based on extensive research, we message ... for the late '90s and beyond."