Political Brands

Consider how brands work. The central question that every consumer faces is, “How do I know I’m not getting ripped off?” How do you know that this bag of flour isn’t adulterated or that these new shoes won’t fall apart the minute you get home? Unless you’ve managed to follow the entire production process from start to finish, you don’t. You trust the flour isn’t full of sawdust because Robin Hood says so. You have faith the sneakers will withstand a running season or two because Nike has put its swoosh on them. Brands are one of the earliest and most effective forms of consumer protection, where trust in the brand (and the company behind it) substitutes for first-hand knowledge or expertise.

Political brands work the same way. In an election, the question every voter needs an answer to is, “How do I know what I’m buying into with my vote? How do I know I’m not getting snookered?” This is where political brands, better known as parties, come in. The role of the party is more or less to take the dense convolutions of modern governance and reduce them to a relatively simple brand proposition. Are you generally in favor of a strong central government that will build national social programs? Then vote Democrat (or, in Canada, Liberal). Would you prefer a more decentralized federation and limited state interference in your life and in the economy? Then the Republicans or Conservatives are the party for you.

The paradox of all branding is that the more complicated things get, the simpler the messaging has to be, which is why politics has become so intensely focused on the party leader’s character and image. It’s pretty remarkable that in an election in which American voters were being asked to decide who would control a budget of somewhere north of $3 trillion, they were essentially offered a choice between two brands: Barack Obama’s “Change” and John McCain’s “Honor.” But what is more surprising still is how well the system actually works. Most people don’t have the time or, frankly, the ability to properly digest budgets, policy documents, or drafts of new bills, and the distillation of the stupendous complexities of the modern state to a handful of simple but distinct brands is not just useful, but necessary. As in the consumer economy so in modern politics — both would grind to a halt without brands as a lubricant.

What of the worry that politics ends up being marketed like Big Macs, pitched to the lowest common denominator? The proper reply is to this is, So what? People always put the emphasis in that phrase on the word lowest, when it should be placed on the word common. The government wields a monopoly over the use of violence, among other things, and any party that wants to claim the right to use violence had darn well better make sure it has the lowest common denominator on its side or it is in big trouble. To adapt a line from the genius of twentieth-century advertising, David Ogilvy: the lowest common denominator is not a fool, she is your neighbor. In a democracy, every politician is in the business of selling electoral Big Macs, and anyone who thinks that’s not his job is either a born loser or a tyrant manqué.

We need to give voters a little more credit. People are no more bamboozled by a John McCain action figure into voting for John McCain than they are tricked into buying a PC because Jerry Seinfeld is in the ad. That just isn’t the way branding or human behavior works. Indeed, whether it’s Nike’s swoosh, or the ubiquitous Hope poster of Obama designed by Shep Fairey, or Stephen Harper’s blue sweater vest, no one ever admits to being a dupe of the marketing. The worry is always that other people — in particular, the people who support the other side — are being manipulated. And so throughout the Bush years, the left in America complained about the way Karl Rove and Dick Cheney were sowing fear and panic over terrorism and keeping the religious right all a-boil over fears about abortion and Mexican immigrants. Once Obama became president and the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress, the right immediately started complaining that the electorate had been duped by his pretty speechifying and his wispy promises about Hope and Change.

This is a slippery slope, and it is dangerous for anyone, no matter what their partisan allegiances, to have so much contempt for voters. Democracy is based on the premise that reasonable people can disagree over issues of fundamental importance from abortion and gay rights to the proper balance between freedom and security. When the mere fact that someone supports the other side becomes evidence that they have been brainwashed, then the truth is you no longer believe in democracy.

- Andrew Potter

Communist China

Luxury

At a secular moment, in which neither magic nor religion the original mainsprings of art—has quite the prestige that it once enjoyed, luxury can be understood as a synthetic alternative. For certain objects, the concept of luxury is used to create the aura that art once provided. You do not have to believe in God or in magic to be seduced, in however minor a way, by a banal version of luxury. But, to judge by Koolhaas’s messianic tone, luxury itself may yet become a religious cult. Certainly luxury has become the driving force fuelling Western industrial economies. They have abandoned basic manufacturing to China, and focus instead on building cars that reek of carefully tanned leather and whose heavy doors click shut reassuringly softly. Europe is in the business of making expensive clothes and luggage, wristwatches of impossible precision, and military aircraft made from exotic carbon fibre and alloy that are capable of flying at the speed of sound.

Each of these is a conspicuous luxury of a kind. Strictly speaking, we don’t need any of them, and yet if we didn’t make them and then buy them, the economy on which we depend for our survival would suffer, so in a sense we certainly do need them.

But luxury is an ever more elusive concept in the contemporary context. It is harder and harder to make an object that feels sufficiently out of the ordinary to qualify. The wonder is that the concept has survived at all, when there are so many more possessions and they are so much easier to make than in the past, when skills were jealously guarded secrets, passed from generation to generation. It’s even more remarkable that luxury has managed to retain its allure, given the archaic nature of so many objects that are notionally its embodiment. It seems to be easier to imbue categories of object that are at the brink of redundancy with the quality of luxury than to create new ones that can demonstrate it.

For luxury to survive, the traditions on which it depends, far from staying the same, need to be continuously reinvented. Some objects are more redundant than others. The wristwatch still retains its prestige. But the fountain pen is losing the attraction it once had. For a while, the pen was presented as more than a practical writing implement. It was a possession that could be passed from father to son—the kind of industrial object that might form part of an atavistic coming-of-age rite. The protective cap could be unwound slowly and reverentially to reveal a sculpted gold nib. The proportions were satisfyingly commanding, and would be made even more so by placing the cap on the end of the barrel. There was a clip on the cap to discreetly signal the presence of the pen even when it was concealed in a jacket top pocket.

It is now on the brink of the same fate that befell the portable typewriter. The basic concept has lost its relevance. Keyboards have sharply reduced opportunities to demonstrate elegant handwriting. Pens still have those clips, because that is what they have always had, but fewer and fewer people want to risk them in a jacket pocket — ink reservoirs and traditional nibs are notoriously prone to leak over hands and clothes. Ballpoints are a less risky alternative. But, even when equipped with a barrel just as glossy, and a cap identical to that of a fountain pen, the ballpoint version of a brand has nothing like the same charisma and fails to command the same premium price no matter how many gold carats it is finished with.

The wristwatch, in contrast, has been able to maintain its position as a desirable artifact in very much the same shape that it assumed at the start of the twentieth century when Cartier first started to make them for men, followed shortly afterwards by Rolex. The traditional wristwatch has managed to see off the eruption of quartz technology despite a wobble over the introduction of digital as opposed to analog faces, mass-produced accuracy, and the impact of fashion as exemplified by the Swatch phenomenon.

What makes the wristwatch different from the pen is that its form was born from a collaboration between jewelers, who made the cases, and mechanical-movement makers, who in the early days supplied the working parts. Jewelry has a long history of addressing the emotional and tactile interaction between people and things. This is an interaction which every kind of personal object must succeed in if it is to acquire an emotional resonance, but few manage it.

Certainly archaic technologies do have their appeal. Enthusiasts for mid-twentieth-century recording technology have kept the vinyl disc alive. And there are manufacturers who have gone back to the use of vacuum tubes rather than solid state circuits for amplifiers. But the charming easily tips over into the preposterous. When digital readouts increasingly replace the dials and instruments on the dashboards of cars, how can a walnut fascia designed as the backdrop to carefully delineated sets of dials be made to accommodate them convincingly? When this is attempted, walnut turns into an anachronism, not an asset. It signals not luxury, but pretension.

Because the cellphone is permanently in the hand, and close to mouth and ear, it has a relationship with its user as intimate as any they will have with a wristwatch. The visual interface, the sound made, the mechanism that protects the keypad offer plenty of scope for a designer to give cellphones a personality. But when their makers have attempted to produce what they call luxury products they have had a much harder time of it than the watchmakers. The usual strategy has been to use precious metals and stones in the most conspicuous way possible. But a gold-plated case for an object that is technically redundant after six months looks gratingly profligate even in the midst of a culture of excess. Rather than gold adding luster to the phone, the phone undermines the prestige of gold as a material when it is used in that way.

- Deyan Sudjic

Begin your own tradition

You never actually own a Patek Phillippe

You merely take care of it for the next generation

don't buy it for yourself, buy it for your grandson

satisfaction

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Bourgeois Bohemian

Venables, Bell & Partners - Progress is Beautiful (2009)

cola

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

- Andy Warhol