Brands by Luca Turin from http://lucaturin.typepad.com/perf

[alden]

Article from Luca Turin's blog http://lucaturin.typepad.com/perfume_notes/2005/06/

Brands, etc
The article below was first published in the NZZ issue dedicated to brands

An entertaining feature of commerce is that, like chess, insect societies and fluid mechanics, it generates complex behaviour from simple rules. For example, only two motives are required to make it work: self-interest and enlightened self-interest. These alone have produced everything you've ever bought or sold. All other motives eventually crash and burn, as the twentieth century has shown at huge human cost. In this field as in others, enlightenment means resisting temptation, having the courage to forgo immediate rewards in exchange for later ones. But why be enlightened ? Because trust, i.e. the gradual subsidence of our fear of getting screwed, works wonders but takes time to build. Once you have the trust of your customer, you can run a great business on it. Example: Hermès, a thousand beautifully made objects, easily half of which are ugly, but none shabby, every single one arguably worth the money. You can also scam him, take the money and run for the border, but that means starting again from scratch: look at Pierre Cardin, the oldest fashion brand of them all, now so prostituted that there is no "real" stuff left to buy. But the greatest unenlightened scam, the one they teach in business schools, is the one where a) you screw the customer, b) they still trust you and c) they come back for more. Example: Louis Vuitton luggage. Rubbish quality (the Thai fakes are better than the real thing), dubious taste (to reverse Marx, what started as a '30s farce, "let's put the lining on the outside", is now a tragedy), outrageous price. And yet they sell. Why ?

To borrow terms first applied by 19th century journalist Walter Bagehot to the monarchy, brands have both an "effective" and a "dignified" function. One effective function is to elicit rational expectations: you only need to take one pair of jeans with you on travels, in the knowledge that wherever you see the Levi's badge you can get another one just like it. This also works well for burgers, beer, wine, hotels and medicines. The dignified function is image: the buyer advertises his purchase to others. Sometimes, this can be rational. Suppose you want to advertise your wealth to people too poor or inexperienced to know quality when they see it, for example to gain their deference. Not only do you buy something expensive and beautiful, but you also need to wear the label on the outside, so that everyone will know. That label, not the white baby sealskin bag to which it is attached, then gradually comes to mean "money". In other words, it becomes a currency.

Once you have a currency, you can do lots of fun things with it. You can debase it (real Vuitton bags); you can counterfeit it (fake Vuitton bags); but best of all you can play on the fact that all currencies work by mutual consent. In other words, if you can persuade the rich to use your debased coinage, then the poor who buy real fakes and fake fakes will not feel shafted or silly and the scam becomes self-sustaining. This requires a steady supply of people with more money than sense, but a buoyant economy will do that: sense takes longer to acquire than cash. This is what is called brand "mystique" and it works best when those who produce the lies believe in them. As Marx (Groucho, this time) said of sincerity, "If you can fake it, you've got it made". You have to believe, and to communicate the belief, that there is something intrinsically different about an object that bears a particular name. This is not a new trick: the aristocracy has practiced it to great effect since the French Revolution. A titled name used to mean having, it now means being. Titles are, in marketing terms, the human limited edition. What this means in practice: you've just bought a frog, but the ads swear it's a prince.

Luckily for the scammers, lies have a built-in inertia: victims who should have known better are reluctant ever to acknowledge that they were suckered, and even complain loudly when the sorry tale ends. Take Bentley. No decent car of that name was produced since the late 1920's when Rolls Royce bought it and used it as a badge. Since the war, Bentleys have largely been ugly, poorly engineered, soggy barges. Now a remarkable thing has happened. Bentley was bought by VW and appears to be run by people who want the cars to be the real thing: beautifully built, scary-fast, gorgeous. You'd think the punters would be grateful. Not a bit, many in the UK bemoan the dilution of the Bentley "mystique" by "foreign" input, which is a bit like complaining to your alchemist that his lead has lately become contaminated with gold.

After haste, lies and ignorance, the next greatest threat to enlightened self interest is "Strong Brand" syndrome. The CEO starts hearing voices: "Everyone out there just loves your antifouling paint, they'll go nuts about your tinned mussels". Left untreated, this condition can lead to Bugatti fragrance, Porsche Design "engineered" smoking pipes, Ferrari red sneakers, BMW jackets, Aston Martin carbon-fiber luggage as well as lesser flotsam like Victorinox watches, Virgin Cola, Harley Davidson lighters, in short shedloads of future landfill. Enlightened firms that stick to what they know must feel like the girl in a black one piece swimsuit in a Tampax ad. Gresham's Law says that bad money drives out good. Such is the general acceptance of debased coinage as legal tender, that the notion of a sensational product worthy of love is met with amused disbelief. I, for instance, have been hopelessly in love with my Macs since 1986 for the best of reasons: gratitude for having changed my life. I am in good company: the libertarian thinker Guy Kawasaki, probably best-known as a tireless Apple "evangelist", once said "I believe in God because there is no other explanation for Apple’s continued existence’’. Is this a cult ? No, and here's why.

Someone recently suggested we should wear Bluetooth-enabled jewellery that broadcasts our tastes fifty or so meters around us and lights up when a good match is within radio range. Just think, though, how dangerously easy it would be to make sure the lights stay off: all you'd need to do is to put Respighi's Poema Autunnale as favorite music and Irkutsk as favorite holiday destination, and spend the rest of your life in Byronian isolation, grimly changing the batteries on your gadget at regular intervals. Clearly, what is needed is an enlightenement indicator. This could in principle be another efficient function of brands, and so far Apple is the only example, though everyone from Patagonia to Smart would like to join. Crucially though, enlightened choices must be money-neutral. Computers are good, since unlike polo shirts and cars they all cost pretty much the same. Choosing the most original, the most beautiful, the easiest to use and the most fun is therefore not a trivial choice: it correctly suggests a set of principles at work. The fact that Apple's market share is less than 4% makes this choice cool at no extra cost.

Curiously, so-called "cult" objects are often the ones that least require irrational faith. Some examples from the distant past: Opinel knives, as fine, honest and durable a piece of design as one is likely to see. Their website is refreshing: a few knives, no fancy nonsense, just the facts. The Citroën 2CV, probably the greatest cheap car ever made, phased out for the saddest of reasons: other, less clever cars beat it to a pulp in collisions. The Quad ESL-57, still the best small-room loudspeaker ever and the clearest demonstration that if you can't beat the laws of physics, you had better join them. If these are the object of a cult, then it must like very early christianity, mostly miracles and word-of-mouth.

The distinguishing feature of these objects, of course, is that whatever they do, they do it better. This criterion rules out handbags, etc. and most everything to do with fashion, since iceman Oetzi was arguably as well dressed as anyone today. Where there can be no efficiency, only the dignified will do. This is why fashion needs irrational cults. But, as biologist David Armstrong once said, "The thing about God is, there's no new data". Many parts of the commercial landscape resemble religion in that respect, bleakly calling the old new against all odds. But sometimes the New and Improved really is just that, the result of a thousand small enlightened choices: "let's do it differently', "let's make this easy to use", "there must be a better way", "let's make this feel great". Simple motives giving disproportionately beautiful outcomes. These deserve your love. It's OK to show it by buying them.

End

Many of our members have dispensed with brands and shops altogether with respect to their wardrobes. But brands do have a place in life and escaping them is not possible, or is it?