Towards a strategic, ethical alternative to designing collective identity.
By Inkahoots, Oliver Vodeb and Madeleine Clifford
Preface
This is a summary version of one of three documents that were the first stage of our collaborative process in developing a strategic approach to global identity guidelines for Greenpeace.
The original literature review document is a two-part extensive literature review of relevant Greenpeace literature combined with existing critical research on branding. This version excludes the Greenpeace literature.
About the project
Greenpeace South East Asia (GPSEA) had commissioned us, Australian multi-disciplinary design studio Inkahoots, to develop global visual identity guidelines for Greenpeace — the global network of independent national and regional Greenpeace organisations (NROs) and Greenpeace International as a coordinating and enabling organisation for the network.
Our approach was to focus on an effective alternative to neoliberal branding that satisfies the vital need to globally communicate collective identity, urgently enhancing recognition, visibility and engagement. We aimed to demonstrate that conventional branding is a corporate methodology counterproductive to Greenpeace’s mission and contrary to its values. Our goal was to collaboratively develop a participatory, authentic, historically earned and evolving identity process based on Greenpeace’s core purpose.
Through the literature review, along with interviews with key Greenpeace stakeholders, we aimed to develop, identify, understand and provide a way forward on:
- Appropriate design methodologies for the development of global visual communication strategy, guidelines and tools for Greenpeace.
- Relevant critical theories and post-branding/visual identity practices from which we could draw.
- What effect we wanted to see, and how we would measure it, in relation to post-branding/critical visual identity.
About this document
This document outlines a review of literature, essays and critical perspectives relating to branding to help us understand how we could create effective global visual communication strategy, guidelines and tools for Greenpeace using a critical post-branding methodology.
For this research Inkahoots has collaborated with Dr Oliver Vodeb and Madeleine Clifford.
External literature
Research questions
Four research questions and a range of keywords guided our review of external literature. The questions (one primary question and three sub-questions) were:
- How to create effective global visual communication strategy, guidelines and tools for Greenpeace using a critical unbranding methodology? (Primary question)
- What are relevant theories and alternative branding/visual identity practices from which we can learn?
- What are the appropriate design methodologies for the development of global visual communication strategy, guidelines and tools for Greenpeace?
- How to think about effect (how to measure it) in relation to a critical visual identity/unbranding?
Key words included branding design, branding effectiveness, alternative branding practices, alternative branding theories, measuring branding effect, most successful branding design methodologies.
How branding has evolved
The evolution towards branding began with the differentiation of goods — from craftsmen stamping their mark on their products in the Middle Ages, to product differentiation during the Industrial Revolution, to ‘sub products’ designed to meet people’s very specific desires and preferences. Contemporary branding, however, has evolved into a distinctive neoliberal phenomenon.¹
In 1958, J. Gordon Lippincott coined the term ‘corporate identity’.² He helped to design the Campbell’s soup label and in the late 1950’s and early 60’s, his company Lippincott & Margulies originated the concept that a company’s corporate identity should be managed, preserved and extended with the same care given to other assets.³
In 1965, Wally Olins founded corporate identity design agency Wolff Olins, and he is widely viewed as the inventor of corporate identity consulting. According to Olins, branding is ‘a demonstration of who and what you belong to, and in a world that is increasingly competitive this is important, not just in commercial life but in every kind of activity you can think of…’⁴
Corporate identity now tends to fall within the field of branding, which extends far beyond the concept of logo design; it now covers the whole customer experience of a brand/company at all points of interaction.⁵ One agency differentiates corporate identity and branding in this way: ‘While branding can be defined as relating to the emotional relationship between a customer and a business, the corporate identity is all about the look and feel of the business.’⁶
It’s worth noting a change in language, which marks the shift from ‘corporate identity’ to ‘branding’: Olins’ books published between 1978 and 1999 all have titles that include ‘identity’ or ‘corporate identity’; after this, the titles all use ‘brand’ instead.⁷
Indeed branding’s pre-eminence occurred post 2008, in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, when the neoliberal project faltered and then ultimately consolidated after rapid interventions by central banks and governments. Although the neoliberal agenda prevailed, previously unshakable faith in free-market superiority was eroded. This newfound insecurity was the perfect impetus for the growth of less tangible and more abstract forms of capitalism. Economic data for Europe and the United States shows intangible investment overtook tangible investment in 2008, at the time of the GFC.⁸ The most significant financial assets of many of the world’s biggest companies are now no longer their physical products, services and infrastructure but rather ‘their fortunes and market dominance have been built on nebulous concepts — models, brands and algorithms’.⁹
According to one of the obituaries written about him, Olins ‘paved the way for the approach we now have to branding and identity, [where] nothing is off-limits — everything, from governments, museums, charities and universities to politicians and celebrities, is a brand to be managed.’¹⁰ AdWeek described him as ‘the leading apologist for brands and branding as the driving force of the modern world’.¹¹
Arvidsson, drawing on Olins and Van Ham, observes that ‘brand has spread far beyond consumer marketing where it originated, to enter into management (corporate branding), welfare, politics and the construction of local identities’.¹²
de Chernatony and McDonald say that as markets and consumers became more sophisticated, and as marketers became more aware of the value of brands, brands acquired ‘an emotional dimension that reflected the moods and personalities of buyers and the messages they wished to convey to others’. Referencing Aaker and Keller, they go on to say that the focus of branding has therefore ‘shifted from the tangible aspects, such as name, logo and visual features, to the intangible elements, such as personality, non-functional added values, and symbolic benefits’.¹³
Arvidsson, Banet-Weiser, and Land and Taylor describe brand as ‘a constellation of signs through which processes of social interaction and communication are mediated and captured and hence transformed into economic value’. Branding, therefore, involves ‘the strategic process of image management and the putting to work of sociality and public communication in ways that reproduce or enhance the qualities that the brand image embodies’.¹⁴
Interbrand, a brand consultancy that produces the Best Global Brands valuation report, said that ‘strong brands influence customer choice and create loyalty; attract, retain, and motivate talent; and lower the cost of financing.’ They believe that branding is ‘more imperative and valuable than ever’ and that it has shifted from ‘ensuring consistency to stimulating desire’.
In Streeck’s critique on capitalism, he said marketing has become critical for advancing capitalism because it helped not only discover but develop consumer preferences. ‘Good marketing’, he said, ‘co-opts consumers as co-designers… to haul more of their as-yet commercial idle wants, or potential wants, into market relations’.¹⁵
Mumby said that ‘branding is advocated as cure for the ailments of a vast range of groups and individuals, whether the ailments stem from financial, structural, or communicational complaints’.
¹ D Mumby, ‘Organising beyond organisation: Branding, discourse, and communicative capitalism’, Organisation, 2016
² www.creativebloq.com/branding/milestones-history-branding-91516855
³ www.nytimes.com/1998/05/07/business/j-gordon-lippincott-89-dies-pioneer-design-consultant.html
⁵ zool.agency/branding/a-brief-history-of-corporate-identity/
⁶ www.spellbrand.com/difference-between-brand-and-corporate-identity
⁷ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wally_Olins#Books
⁹ www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/26/the-guardian-view-on-capitalism-without-capital
¹¹ www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/brand-called-wally-olins-131125/
¹² A Arvidsson, ‘The Logic of the Brand’, Universita Degli Studi Di Trento, Quaderno 36, Maggio 2007
¹³ H Stride, ‘An investigation into the values dimensions of branding: implications for the charity sector’, Int. J. Nonprofit Volunt. Sect. Mark, 2006, pp 115–124
¹⁴ D Mumby, ‘Organising beyond organisation: Branding, discourse, and communicative capitalism’, Organisation, 2016
¹⁵ W Streeck, ‘How Will Capitalism End?’, Verso, 2016
Branding in the NFP sector
An increasing number of charities and not-for-profit (NFP) organisations call themselves a brand, have adopted branding, and actively implement brand management strategies.
A common reason cited is the desire for a NFP organisation to differentiate themselves in an increasingly crowded and competitive sector.¹⁶ In an interview with a Greenpeace Executive Director, The Drum said that charities are ‘chiselling themselves into brands with a distinct identity and mission in order to cut through the clutter and bring in more donations’.¹⁷ Klein said that a key challenge for NFPs is ‘making themselves heard in a world where increasingly aggressive and intrusive commercial advertising has desensitised consumers’.¹⁸
Other claims include that branding can help recruit volunteers,¹⁹ brands can drive broad, long-term social goals and strengthen internal identity, cohesion and capacity’²⁰, a strong brand is ‘essential’ for international NGOs to survive²¹, and that it’s ‘even more important for NGOs than it is for commercial companies’.²²
Another reason is that some NFPs may believe that branding will help increase donations. A survey found that brand image contributes to the extent that people intend to give money to NFP organisations. However, past donation behaviour was found to be the most important predictor of the intention to donate in future.²³
With so much literature available about the apparent benefits of branding — put forward primarily by brand consultancies, marketing professionals and advertising agencies — it’s not hard to see why some social movement and activist groups have come to believe that brand management is ‘the only possible means by which to advance their causes’.²⁴ However, Venable et al. note ‘there still remains a need for further research into such topics as branding and brand personality in non-profit organisations’.²⁵
Stride contends that a NFP’s values make it difficult, if not impossible, for NFPs to adopt brand management. Brand reflects ‘consumers’ ‘moods and personalities’ in order to positively effect behaviour, and therefore is open to change; a NFP’s values should be non-negotiable and therefore not be open to manipulation in response to consumers’ changing moods, preferences and behaviours. Brand also influences the values of its target audiences and the values of the host organisation — the brand therefore dictates the organisation’s values, rather than reflect the values. According to Tapp²⁶, if a NFP tries to elicit a certain response from its audiences, it may comprise its values, risk its reputation, and lose the trust of its stakeholders.
¹⁶ Stride, Values dimension of branding
¹⁷ www.thedrum.com/news/2018/08/14/greenpeace-the-bravest-brand-without-brand-manager
¹⁸ Stride, Values dimension of branding
¹⁹ A Paço, R G Rodrigues and L Rodrigues, ‘Branding in NGOs — Its Influence on the Intention to Donate’, Economics and Sociology, Vol. 7, No 3, 2014 pp. 11–21
²⁰ N Kylander and C Stone, ‘The Role of Brand in the Nonprofit Sector’, Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2012
²¹ Paço, Rodrigues and Rodrigues, Branding in NGOs
²² Paço, Rodrigues and Rodrigues, Branding in NGOs
²³ Paço, Rodrigues and Rodrigues, Branding in NGOs
²⁴ M Aronczyk and D Powers (ed), ‘Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture’, Peter Lang (New York), 2010
²⁵ Paço, Rodrigues and Rodrigues, Branding in NGOs
²⁶ Stride, Values dimension of branding
Brand activism
Greenpeace identified the rise of brand activism as a key issue. In its brand audit summary, it noted that ‘the tricky part in the area of brand activism is ensuring that your brand is seen as authentic in its activism. Therefore this trend can be seen as both a positive (opportunity — this is our time to shine) and a negative (more competition) for Greenpeace.’
Brand activism is the space for for-profits trying to align themselves with the values of their target markets, and this ‘wokeness’ is designed to ‘generate headlines and head off some of our boredom and scepticism’.²⁷
Fred Smith, former president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and founder of the group’s Center for Advancing Capitalism, said that Greenpeace is ‘‘one of the most effective’ groups out there at essentially guilt-tripping corporations into becoming more socially responsible, and he maintains that the desire to be perceived as benevolent has made corporations less competitive and that it will ‘put them out of business’.²⁸
Olins saw brand activism in terms of profit: ‘if a commercial organisation believes that it will be in its interests to become charitable, or to be seen to become charitable…if they see it as being in their interest to be socially responsible, then that is what they will do.’²⁹ Graphic designer Peter Saville was even more blunt when he said that the job of a branding agency was to ‘steer and engineer people’s perceptions of things towards a profitable outcome for your clients. The brief is: make us look like we believe in something, make us or our product look believable, [and] look like we mean something.’³⁰
According to Olins, for-profits see the possibilities of flipping ‘conspicuous consumption’ to ‘conspicuous compassion. ‘People who buy things want to be seen to be giving as well as buying. And corporations with which they deal will have to demonstrate an association with some kind of socially responsible activity. And that in turn means a knock on effect for not-for-profits and charities.’
Brand activism can also act as a diversion. The Nike Foundation’s decision to focus on adolescent girls and, later, to launch the Girl Effect with financial support from the NoVo Foundation and the United Nations Foundation ‘was a non-controversial way to redirect public attention away from ongoing labour strikes and campaigns against the corporation in order to secure its social license to operate and, correspondingly, its financial bottom line.’³¹
A prominent form of brand activism is ‘greenwashing’. UK sustainability consultancy Futerra published The Greenwash Guide in 2011 to educate citizens about the signs and impacts of greenwashing. In 2014, Interbrand produced the Best Green Brands report, which measures alignment between consumers’ perceptions and company performance. The ‘best green brands’ included Ford, Toyota, Honda and Nissan in the first four places; some of the world’s biggest plastic polluters: (Danone, Nestle, Cola Cola, Pepsi); the world’s seventh biggest producer of carbon emissions (Shell); companies that rated poorly in Greenpeace US’s Guide to Greener Electronics (Sony, Samsung); and companies identified by Greenpeace International as sourcing dirty palm oil (Nestle, L’Oreal, Pepsi, Kelloggs, Colgate).
This report, along with other reports, advertising, partnerships and collaborations, gives companies the opportunity to promote their ‘green’ credentials and attach environmental commitment and sustainability to their brands — which obviously influences public perception — while continuing to benefit from their own, and others’, commodification and destruction of the environment.
But brand activism needs to be seen as a continuation of a long history of commercial companies wanting to do social good. The creative advertising revolution in the 1960s led by the DDB advertising agency rendered commercial advertising into cultural critique.³² Notably some of the most famous ads were done for VW, ‘Think Small’, which was a new value in the emerging consumerist society communicated through a commercial brand. The principle however quickly shifted into a co-optation strategy, using words like ‘revolution’ in order to convey meanings which were about breaking social norms. This strategy was tailormade for the post-modern consumer where everyone wanted to be different although in the same way.³³
While it is easy to be cynical of any attempt of commercial advertising or branding to appear socially responsible, we can observe a shift towards social responsibility. The Kaepernick ad campaign by Nike or the Dove ‘real beauty’ campaign are two of the many prominent examples. The Nike campaign provoked brand boycotts but in the five years since the start of the campaign Nike earned 6 billion USD with a stock value increase of 5%.³⁴
The question that arises here is what can we learn from such spectacle-based campaigns, and how could advertising strategies be used to support Greenpeace? More on this below.
²⁷ www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/11/no-logo-naomi-klein-20-years-on-interview
²⁸ www.businessinsider.com.au/greenpeace-fortune-500-deforestation-global-warming-2014-6?r=US&IR=T
³² Frank, Conquest of Cool.
³³ Frank, Conquest of Cool.
³⁴ Vox, Nike’s Colin Kaepernick ad sparked a boycott — and earned $6 billion for Nike www.vox.com/2018/9/24/17895704/nike-colin-kaepernick-boycott-6-billion
Critiquing branding
The ubiquitous and violent nature of commercial communication and its broader impact on culture and society has provoked radical critique, like the influential book Society of the Spectacle by situationist leader Guy Debord³⁵ and popular critique like the influential bestseller focusing on advertising, The Hidden Persuaders (Packard)³⁶, and focusing on entertainment Amusing Ourselves to Death (Postman)³⁷. While branding has a long history, it became an all-encompassing technology, broader than advertising, expanding the reach of commercial strategies dramatically. More than that, branding’s principle has infinite reach beyond any social, cultural or firm ethical boundaries.
A core critique of branding is that it creates unequal power relations. (Klein³⁸, Vodeb³⁹) Going beyond the image, and understanding that the very process of designing already creates power relations, which are later (re)produced when a design is put into the world, participatory design emerged in Scandinavia in the 1970s.⁴⁰ Its aim was to balance power between different stakeholders in the process of design.
Inspired by DADA and Situationism, culture jamming — a practice of radical critique or brands and branding — has gained a powerful momentum at the end of the 1990s and beginning of 2000s. Part of the movement was Naomi Klein’s book No Logo (Klein), which became a leading voice in the anti-globalisation movement. In 2002, Memefest had organised the first anti-branding festival focusing on cultural producers in the field of design, media and communication, and has since invited participants from around the world to critique branding and imagine alternatives to it with their creations. A rich alternative design and communication scene has continually critiqued and developed alternatives for branding, although no concrete name and methodology had been yet developed as an alternative.⁴¹ Memefest member and RMIT Design academic Oliver Vodeb has developed the theory of socially responsive communication, which concretely critiques branding and offers an alternative to commercial, marketing based communication with the definition being: ‘Socially responsive communication creates dialogue or conditions for dialogue’.⁴²
The design industry, substantially growing with the ever-expanding capitalist markets, strategies, products and media, is playing a significant role in branding. Inkahoots, together with other design organisations, has been for years at the forefront of researching and developing alternative cultures and practices of design.⁴³ The following part provides and overview of critiques of design and directions for thinking about a new alternative: post-branding.
³⁵ Debord, Guy, Society of Spectacle
³⁶ Packard, Hidden Persuaders
³⁷ Postman, Neil, Amusing Ourselves to Death
³⁸ Klein, Naomi, No Logo
³⁹ Vodeb, Oliver, Druzbeno odzivno komuniciranje (2008)
⁴⁰ Spinouzzi, Clay, The Methodology of Participatory design (2005)
⁴¹ Lokidesign, First things next, Socially Engaged Design studios: https://www.lokidesign.net/journal/2017/1/23/first-things-next-socially-engaged-design-studios
⁴² Vodeb, Oliver, Druzbeno odzivno komuniciranje (2008)
⁴³ Lokidesign, First things next, Socially Engaged Design studios: https://www.lokidesign.net/journal/2017/1/23/first-things-next-socially-engaged-design-studios
Commercialisation of the NFP
Aronczyk and Powers connect the rise of public sector branding with massive changes arising from social relations, an increasing global economy, and political changes as a result of neoliberalism. ‘Crises of legitimacy and relevance in the public sector were met with claims of expertise and tried-and-tested solutions from the private realm. In this context adopting a brand was seen as a symbolic shorthand for market savvy, business acumen and global competitiveness’.⁴⁴
Under neoliberal capitalism, a NFP is simply reduced to being a brand that sells a product or service. Olins said branding is ‘a question of persuading, seducing and attempting to manipulate people into buying products and services’ and ‘the product that a charity sells is caring for the less fortunate’.⁴⁵ This perspective completely bypasses values, which Stride contends are the reason why NFPs exist.⁴⁶ It should also be noted that Olins’ company, Wolff Olins, re-branded Amnesty International and Oxfam.
A participant in Greenpeace’s brand audit research said ‘we are not Coca Cola…we shouldn’t be like them.’ This view is echoed by a university marketer cited in Chapleo’s paper, who said that ‘creating our brand is more challenging than for a can of Coke because our product is inherently complex and we are offering multiple things for multiple audiences’.⁴⁷ Designer Jason Grant from Inkahoots goes much further: ‘Ask anyone who works in a public university, for example, how deep the bureaucratic agendas of corporate marketing have seeped into the fabric of their institution. This communication is not just ‘consumer facing;’ it is internally absorbed and manifested at best as a demoralised academic culture, and at worst as a debased common good. The cynical advertisements become hallowed mission-statements. And increasingly, the reputational contrivance and competitiveness of branding in the public university sector does not merely reflect its gradually corporatised culture — it is also fuelling the change’.⁴⁸
An increasing number of for-profit concepts are being introduced into the NFP sector, with more people, including marketing professionals, entering the NFP sector from for-profit organisations; and the NFP sector’s understanding of brand being ‘those imported from the for-profit sector to boost name recognition and raise revenue’.⁵⁰
Stride notes ‘growing concern’ about the over‐commercialisation of the [NFP] sector and the misappropriation of techniques developed specifically for the commercial environment.’⁵¹ In an interview, John Sauven from Greenpeace said ‘[Greenpeace is] not a corporate brand, although you have one name under Greenpeace’ and that high awareness of Greenpeace means that ‘questions regarding brand perception can be set aside to focus purely on the causes at hand’.
Saxton warns against using ‘ill-fitting intellectual hand-me-down[s] of the commercial world’, and argues that the commercialisation of the sector may have resulted in charities losing something of their unique nature, having failed to develop their own identity as values-based organisations.⁵²
According to Grant, branding is more significant than even its cheerleaders claim, and that its ‘reconstitution of non-corporate entities as market-tamed subordinates is causing real harm’.⁵³
Branding has become an ideological Trojan horse, invading social and cultural realms traditionally resistant to corporate influence. It is promoted and accepted as a neutral tool when actually there is little it doesn’t frame and distort. It colonises social organisations, non-profits, public institutions, and geographical territories, so that even those entities with explicitly independent or oppositional agendas are displaced and transformed.
The mindless conformity to branding principles is transposing fundamental priorities … Branding is regulating critical agency and subtly directing ethos.⁵⁴
⁴⁴Aronczyk and Powers (ed), Blowing Up the Brand
⁴⁶ Stride, Values dimension of branding
⁴⁷ C Chapleo, ‘Brand ‘infrastructure’ in non profit organisations: Challenges to successful brand building?’Journal of Marketing Communications, 2013
⁴⁸ www.inkahoots.com.au/ideas/i_132-against-branding
⁴⁹ Stride, Values dimension of branding
⁵⁰ Kylander and Stone, Brand in the Nonprofit Sector
⁵¹ Stride, Values dimension of branding
⁵² Stride, Values dimension of branding
⁵³ https://www.inkahoots.com.au/ideas/i_132-against-branding
⁵⁴ https://www.inkahoots.com.au/ideas/i_132-against-branding
Co-optation of the NFP
A form of co-optation is where corporations co-opt communication approaches developed by activists to neutralise their effect and destroy their critique (but also because these tactics are very effective).⁵⁵
Another form of co-optation is convincing NFPs to adopt brand thinking, branding and brand management, and attempt to adapt it to their organisations. This diverts the NFP’s attention, time and resources away from focusing on achieving their mission — and through this distraction, neoliberalism achieves its goal of diluting the effectiveness of organisations seeking to improve environmental, social and health outcomes). It also essentially commercialises the NFP, as discussed previously, and may end up negatively influencing the NFP’s non-negotiable values and therefore put at risk their reputation, effectiveness and (internal and external) support.
Greenpeace noted in its brand audit report that ‘the brand needs to be a living, breathing entity… continuously nourished, nurtured and never neglected.’ In response to the global brand audit report, a Greenpeace member said that by implementing a brand project, Greenpeace would miss opportunities to focus on things that NROs needed most; risk becoming too corporate by following corporate practices and lose their identity; and waste time and money on outputs that could damage Greenpeace, rather than increase effectiveness.
Mumby said that neoliberalism — as a way of organising economics, politics, meaning, and identity has positioned branding at the epicentre of everyday organising processes — in some respects, brands come first and everyday organising and work processes follow. Marketing (and, by extension, branding) has become the centre or the ‘soul’ of the corporation’.⁵⁶
Naomi Klein observes ‘there are two things that drive brands’ ongoing territorial expansion. The first is that consumer capitalism is boring and so constantly requires innovative, ever more ridiculous stunts to hold our increasingly fragmented attention. The second is that consumer capitalism is insatiable’. She also said that brands ‘don’t cooperate very well — they’re built to be selfish and proprietary’.⁵⁷
If a brand is selfish and proprietary, a slave to its audiences, committed to expansion, drives organisational processes, and is the beating heart of an organisation and its values and culture — then it will demand significant investment to remain so. The NFP — Greenpeace — therefore becomes locked in an ongoing cycle of constantly having to find new and possibly risky and inauthentic ways to engage its audiences; potentially compromise its values; and meet the rising costs and resources associated with ensuring the brand strives to continue to meet the needs of audiences.
⁵⁵ Oliver Vodeb in B Holmes (interview with O Vodeb), ‘Changing the Very Logic of Communication’, 2003
⁵⁶ Mumby, Communicative capitalism
⁵⁷ www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/11/no-logo-naomi-klein-20-years-on-interview
Role in advancing neoliberal capitalism
Toward the end of the 1960s, global capitalism was falling into disarray. A significant recession occurred in early 1973, and the embedded capitalism of the post-war period was no longer working.⁵⁸ As a result of the activism of the 1960s and the militancy of labour, there was a falling rate of profit, and for the elites, this was ‘not acceptable…we have to reverse the falling rate of profit, we have to undermine democratic participation, [so] what comes? Neoliberalism, which has exactly those effects.’⁵⁹
Neoliberalism has ‘entailed much destruction, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers… but also of divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life, attachments to the land, habits of the heart, ways of thought’; with key features of neoliberalism being the ‘corporatisation, commodification, and privatisation of public assets’, and practices including the ‘commodification and privatisation of land; the commodification of labour power and suppression of alternative forms of production and consumption; and colonial, neocolonial, and imperial appropriation of assets, including natural resources’.⁶⁰
Harvey argues that the commodification of nature has depleted, degraded and destroyed the environment, and the regulatory frameworks designed to protect labour and the environment from degradation have been rolled back, which has also led to the loss of rights. The commodification of nature has even manifested as a concept called ‘natural capital’⁶¹ — essentially, under neoliberalism, the only way to apparently save the environment is to put a price on it. Monbiot said that it’s delusional to expect to ‘defend the living world through the mindset that’s destroying it.’⁶²
Ulrich Brand notes that ‘neoliberal politics has produced highly unstable relations which can no longer be controlled: the most obvious examples are the financial crisis and the social crisis of integration, but there is also a deepening of the environmental crisis.’⁶³ Monbiot said we face a ‘void of meaning, which ‘we seek to fill it with a frenzy of consumerism’.⁶⁴
The marketing industry often cites Philip Kotler as ‘the father of modern marketing’. He said ‘marketing is the enabler of capitalism. It is the engine of capitalism. Without marketing, capitalism would collapse. Marketing’s job today is to sell materialism and consumption.’⁶⁵
Consumption continues to grow, and appears to vindicate ‘the implicit premise of modern economics — that the human desire and capacity to consume are unlimited’.⁶⁶ But Streeck notes that ‘consumption in mature capitalist societies has long become dissociated from material need’, with rapid growth of consumption expenditure ‘spent not on the use value of goods, but on their symbolic value, their aura or halo. This is why industry practitioners find themselves paying more than ever for marketing, including not just advertising but also product design and innovation’.⁶⁷
Branding’s role in not just supporting but facilitating the growth of consumption that’s increasingly disassociated from material need but loaded with symbolic value is clear. And Klein’s observation that brands are ‘insatiable’ means that brands find new ways to drive consumption — for example, co-opting diversity.
Klein discusses in No Logo⁶⁸ that students, activists, wanted to subvert the media ‘to better represent us’, resulting in a society that would be ‘suddenly inspired to live up to the beautiful and worthy reflection we had retouched in its image’. However, ‘our insistence on extreme sexual and racial identities made for great brand content and niche-marketing strategies. If diversity was what we wanted, the brands seemed to be saying, then diversity was exactly what we would get’. She notes that ‘the need for greater diversity…is now not only accepted by the culture industries, it is the mantra of global capital. And identity politics, as they were practiced in the nineties, weren’t a threat, they were a gold mine. ‘This revolution,’ writes cultural critic Richard Goldstein in The Village Voice, ‘turned out to be the saviour of late capitalism.’’
According to Grant, ‘the ubiquity of the word [branding] is a candid index of neoliberal victories’.
Is there a corner of our culture still untainted by branding? Branding is a symptom of consumer capitalism’s failings, but not only a symptom. Branding has now breached the last barriers to advertising’s voracious environmental and psychological penetration. The heretofore stubborn evidence of coercive corporate power, of real social and political antagonisms, is hereafter elegantly ‘branded’ away. This is design’s complicity in maintaining social inequity, disadvantage, and atomisation. The designer is daily obscuring and reinforcing hierarchies of privilege and class division. But these are just the obvious consequences of omnipresent branding. Less obvious is its colonisation of social organisations, non-profits, public institutions, and geographical territories, so that even those entities with explicitly independent or oppositional agendas are displaced and transformed.⁶⁹
D Harvey, ‘Neoliberalism as creative destruction’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 610, 2007, pp. 22–44
www.thenation.com/article/noam-chomsky-neoliberalism-destroying-democracy
Harvey, Neoliberalism
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/15/price-natural-world-destruction-natural-capital
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/15/price-natural-world-destruction-natural-capital
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.473.6818&rep=rep1&type=pdf#page=105
www.monbiot.com/2018/01/31/stepping-back-from-the-brink/
www.marketingjournal.org/the-relationship-between-marketing-and-capitalism-phil-kotler/
Streeck, Capitalism
Streeck, Capitalism
N Klein, ‘No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies’, Vintage Canada, 2000
www.inkahoots.com.au/ideas/i_132-against-branding
Exploitation of audiences and employees
Arvidsson said that brands are expected to generate value but not as an object of itself but based on their brand equity, which comprises ‘subjective meanings or social functions’. Mumby, drawing on Arvidsson, Banet-Weiser, Dholakia and Firat, and Morandin et al said that ‘brand value is increasingly tied to identity management as corporations shift from providing consumers with products and services to creating experiences that enable particular ‘lifestyles’ that are lived through brands and brand communities’.
Building brand equity aims to foster possible attachments between the consumer and the brand, for example experiences, emotions, attitudes, lifestyles or loyalty. Willmott said that ‘economically speaking, leveraging brand equity has become one of the principal modes through which organisations translate potential into actual economic value’.⁷⁰
Arvidsson contends that some of a brand’s value derives from the productive practices of consumers — that is, consumers’ engagement with the brand generates value from their consumption labour. Aronczyk and Powers state that consumers not only add value to the brand by engaging with the brand, they also do so by communicating to others about the brand. Consumers therefore ‘become promotional intermediaries themselves, working in the service of the brand yet without the financial remuneration that its owners enjoy’.⁷¹
Arvidsson⁷² argues that for an activity to function as labour, the values it produces must be ‘subsumed under capital’ — and brand management has been developed to accomplish precisely this. ‘Brands work as platforms for action that enable the production of particular immaterial use-values: an experience, a shared emotion, a sense of community’. Arnould and Thompson⁷³ said that consumers ‘actively rework and transform symbolic meanings encoded in advertisements, brands, retail settings, or material goods’ as a way to ‘further identity and lifestyle goals’.⁷⁴
Consumption can therefore be seen as a productive activity, embedded in a meaning-making process tied to communities and everyday life: ‘The branding of life does not so much replace communal or collective pursuits with the individualised pleasures of shopping, as much as it tends to make sociality and the production of a common evolve through and on the premises of brands.’⁷⁵ Arvidsson’s analysis can be applied to the largest advertising medium of all time, Facebook, which effectively operates as a sociality platform via the participation of (personal) brands. In this way, branding is explicitly involved in some of the most problematic ways capitalism exerts its dominance: surveillance, precarisation, personal debt and destruction of attention and crucially with it, the destruction of care.⁷⁶
As the main concept Arvidsson is using what Lazzaratto coined as ‘ethical surplus’, which extends the once cold economic rationality penetrating economic production. The ethical surplus manifests in what Habermas called the ‘lifeworld’, the inter-subjective sphere of private life. [The brand produces a social relation, a shared meaning, or a sense of belonging; what Hardt and Negri (2004) have more recently called a common, that feeds into the post-Fordist production process by providing a temporary context that makes the production or the realisation of value possible. Surplus value becomes (partially) based on the ability of immaterial labour to produce ‘surplus community’ (Lazzarato, 1997:13) in Arvidsson.
‘The production of such an ethical surplus is generally not organised by a logic of monetary exchange value, but by an ethical logic of sharing and respect. Some actions are motivated by genuine altruism, by the desire to be or do something for others. Other acts are motivated by the quest for the recognition of others, whether this be one’s peers in a community or a friend or a loved one. (Other actions might be motivated by fear, fear of the loss of face or of standing within the community.) In any case, the ethical economy builds on a structure of ethical motivations: motivations that in some way take account of the other as a subject. The ethical economy is similar to some versions of traditional gift economies, as Barbrook has pointed out, only that the expectation of reciprocity is weaker and more indirect than what is generally the case in gift economies. Also the anthropological literature on gifts and gift economies tends to underline how gift-exchange serves to maintain and reproduce existing social bonds. The ethical economy, on the other hand is geared towards the production of new such bonds: towards the production of an ethical surplus.’⁷⁷
The intersubjective relations generated in the lifeworld is where a large part of reality is constructed⁷⁸ and therefore branding largely tries to operate on this level. However, if we take this logic to the extreme, we might ask — does branding have boundaries? Could we in the case of the new Chinese social rating system speak about branding: how about brand China?
As David Aaker puts it in his classic management manual, Building Strong Brands: ‘A common pitfall [for brand managers] is to focus on the product attributes and tangible benefits of a brand’; instead one should consider the ‘emotional and self-expressive benefits as well as functional benefits’⁷⁹. Building brand equity is about fostering a number of possible attachments around the brand, be these experiences, emotions, attitudes, lifestyles or, most importantly perhaps, loyalty. From a managerial perspective brand value represents the monetary value of what a brand can mean to consumers (cf. Keller, 2001). Brands are ‘monetizable symbolic values’ (Gorz, 2003: 60). (In Arvidson)⁸⁰
Mumby⁸¹ contends that the ‘increased centrality of brand equity as the yardstick for corporate viability has enabled the production of value to escape the walls of the corporation and enter everyday life through ‘immaterial labour’. In these circumstances, ‘any free, autonomous act of communication has the potential to become free labour that is brandable and transformable into economic value.’ This is what Jodi Dean calls ‘communicative capitalism’.
Dean⁸² said that while industrial capitalism exploited labour, ‘communicative capitalism’ exploits communication and does so in a way that subsumes democracy, undermining the possibilities for genuine political action and social transformation. She argues that communicative capitalism ‘directly exploits the social relation at the heart of value’, and it has three features: (1) message as contributions i.e. their content is less important than their ability to circulate, and the exchange value is more valuable than the message; (2) the decline of symbolic efficiency i.e. symbols are increasingly local, highly contextual, and don’t foster shared norms and reality; and (3) reflexivity i.e. where we are in endless loops of uncertainty and doubt.
Branding, therefore, can be seen to exploit both an organisation’s consumers and its workforce — and women in particular, who usually comprise a significant proportion of the marketing and communications workforce, and are also more frequently targeted in marketing activities.
The ‘blurring’ between production and consumption, and work and life, means that employees’ performance functions ‘as both medium and an outcome of the corporate brand’. An important part of the work of the brand, therefore, ‘involves both providing internal symbolic resources for employees’ professional identity work and its mobilisation by organisations as a source of corporate meaning management and employee control’. Branding can therefore also be seen as a proxy for corporate culture: ‘As the shift to neoliberalism and employment precarity picked up pace in the 1990s and it became difficult to expect employees to identify with and commit to an organisational culture, the brand increasingly became a key point of reference and meaning for employees whose traditional identity markers were disappearing.’⁸³
⁷⁰ Mumby, Communicative capitalism
⁷¹ Aronczyk and Powers (ed), Blowing Up the Brand
⁷² Arvidsson, The Logic of the Brand
⁷³ Mumby, Communicative capitalism
⁷⁴ Mumby, Communicative capitalism
⁷⁵ Arvidsson, Brands a critical perspective (2005:16)
⁷⁶ Vodeb, Janovic, InDEBTed to intervene, (2015)
⁷⁷ http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Ethical_Surplus
⁷⁸ Berger, Luckman, Social Construction of Reality
⁷⁹ Aaker, Building Strong Brands (1996: 25)
⁸⁰ Arvidsson, Brands a critical perspective
⁸¹ Mumby, Communicative capitalism
⁸² Mumby, Communicative capitalism
⁸³ Mumby, Communicative capitalism
Power and political struggle
Branding has intensified in line with the growth of neoliberalism, with branding being increasingly globalised; applied to organisations, services, groups and individuals; and integrated with organisational communication.⁸⁴ Branding is also now a way of constructing particular ‘common sense’ realities, which has become an endemic feature of everyday life for corporations, non-profits, political parties, and individuals interested in increasing their value.’⁸⁵
Harvey⁸⁶ said that ‘for any system of thought to become dominant, it requires the articulation of fundamental concepts that become so deeply embedded in common sense understandings that they are taken for granted and beyond question’.
Mumby said that the marketisation and monetisation of everything within neoliberalism create a form of common sense that privileges individual freedom (rather than justice or equality of opportunity). ‘Common sense’, then, presumes a particular ethics, privileging and reifying particular conceptions of the true, the good, and the possible. The notion of ‘common sense’ can therefore be thought of as a site of political struggle (Gramsci) that has ethical consequences — as the discursive space in which everyday realities are reproduced, negotiated, and contested.⁸⁷
⁸⁴ Aronczyk and Powers (ed), Blowing Up the Brand
⁸⁵ Mumby, Communicative capitalism
⁸⁶ Harvey, Neoliberalism
⁸⁷ Mumby, Communicative capitalism
Control, surveillance and anti-democracy
Arvidsson⁸⁸ said that brands act as platforms for action that enable ‘an experience, a shared emotion, a sense of community’. Aronczyk and Powers⁸⁹ say that brands are facilitators of platforms for interaction and that brand owners manage these social aspects by collecting and harnessing information provided by consumers, and use them to strengthen the relationships between brands and their consumers as well as further determine the range of ‘acceptable’ social positions and patterns. In this way, brands can operate as what Zuboff⁹⁰ calls ‘surveillance capitalists’, with ‘the ability to shape the behaviour of individuals and populations, [and] their ownership and control of our channels for social participation.’
While Zuboff primarily positions corporations such as Google and Facebook as surveillance capitalists, her thinking is relevant to any organisation engaging with audiences on digital and social media because the ‘power to shape behaviour for profit or power is entirely self-authorising. It has no foundation in democratic or moral legitimacy, as it usurps decision rights and erodes the processes of individual autonomy that are essential to the function of a democratic society.’ A data scientist told Zuboff that ‘we can engineer the context around a particular behaviour and force change that way… We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.’⁹¹
Arvidsson⁹², drawing from Dean, Hardt and Negri, and Rose asserts that ‘like many other instances of contemporary capitalism, brand management makes use of bio-political governance: a governance that works from below by shaping the context in which freedom is exercised, and by providing the raw materials that it employs’. This could be called ‘controlled freedom’, and it can take many forms.
A crucial problem, which needs to be related directly to Greenpeace’s efforts, is the question of attention and care. There is strong evidence that our attention is being destroyed through what Bernard Stiegler calls psychotechnologies — namely, attention-capturing and -destroying marketing based-technologies. Our attention is shallower as we engage with many things daily but only with a very few in an in-depth manner. Our attention is also dispersed as we engage with many different things daily. Bernard Steigler relates the destruction of attention through cultural industries as directly related to the destruction of care. Stiegler extends on Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘biopower’ to his own concept of ‘psychopower’ as the next stage of governance. While biopower, for Stiegler, is a form of care imposed by the state — even for disciplinary purposes — the new governance, namely psychopower, is based on a state of care-less-ness that controls hegemonically through psychotechnologies.⁹³ The purpose of this power is to control and produce consumers: Stiegler calls it a consuming machine.⁹⁴ Vodeb theorises psychopower in relation to debt as a crucial instrument for social control, and points to the self-branding practices happening on social media as Facebook and elsewhere, showing that the self-branding practices are a result of considerate design and are not only enabling the ‘indebted-person’ to self-brand but are also creating the indebted person through self-branding.⁹⁵
Arvidsson discusses how brand management techniques work to ensure that consumers ‘enact the intended brand identity’. Mobility of the brand image is needed, however this mobility must be controlled and kept within the boundaries of the intended brand identity. Brand management doesn’t seek to ‘impose a certain structure of tastes or desires, not even a certain manner of relating to goods. And there are seldom sanctions. Rather, brand management works by enabling or empowering the freedom of consumers so that it is likely to evolve in particular directions’. It recognises the autonomy of consumers, and provides an environment that anticipates and programs the agency of consumers.
Mumby⁹⁶ said that brands are ‘part of the hegemonic struggle at the centre of what Deleuze refers to as the ‘societies of control’. Societies of control provide ‘freedom to do whatever we want, but always in contexts where our behaviour is coded and modulated (rather than molded)’.
‘We experience a regulated freedom in which we are constantly evaluated according to our ability to live up to the neoliberal entrepreneurial ideal of excellence. The brand, in this sense, is a flexible system of capture that is constantly adjusting to shifting meanings, identities, and affects. While symbolic identity is increasingly fragile and uncertain in the societies of control, brands provide a frame of reference that — however temporary and imaginary — provides meaning and value for the neoliberal, entrepreneurial self’.⁹⁷
In discussing how NFP organisations could adopt a framework for branding, Kylander and Stone⁹⁸ outline the concept of ‘brand democracy’. They state that a NFP’s goal should not be to ‘police’ the brand but implement a participatory form of brand management but still produce a consistent image through organisational cohesion and a strong internal brand identity. They quote a senior communications officer at Oxfam America, who describes it as ‘creating bookends’ explaining that ‘these are the boundaries of our brand. And within those boundaries, each affiliate will have the ability to dial up and dial down certain messages to meet their local market, but they will be unified in overall look, in overall voice, and in graphic standards so that we do convey one brand’. It becomes clear that the goal is not to achieve democracy but control.
⁸⁸ Arvidsson, The Logic of the Brand
⁸⁹ Aronczyk and Powers (ed), Blowing Up the Brand
⁹² Arvidsson, The Logic of the Brand
⁹³ Stiegler, Bernard (2012) Care, Telemorphosis, Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Cohen, T. ed., Open Humanities Press
⁹⁴ Stiegler, Bernard (2012) Care, Telemorphosis, Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Cohen, T. ed., Open Humanities Press
⁹⁵ Vodeb, Oliver Debt and Public Communication: Towards and Interspatial Counterpractice in InDEBTed to Intervene, (2015)
⁹⁶ Mumby, Communicative capitalism
⁹⁷ Mumby, Communicative capitalism
⁹⁸ Kylander and Stone, Brand in the Nonprofit Sector
Framing
Market values squeeze out non-market values. As the cognitive linguist George Lakoff ⁹⁹ reveals, those using the frames and language of their opponents are more likely to adopt their values: ‘Their words draw you into their worldview.’ ‘Framing is about getting language that fits your worldview. It is not just language. The ideas are primary — and the language carries those ideas, evokes those ideas.’ The way forward is to promote your own values, rather than enable the mindset you challenge.
⁹⁹ Lakoff, George (2005) Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
Fostering and profiting from inequality
Philippa Goodall said ‘we live in a world designed by men’¹⁰⁰ — and certainly, there appears to have been little examination of feminism, gender equality and patriarchy in the context of branding. However, it is useful consider some of the literature that discusses the issues in the broader context of capitalism, and the related context of design.
In a CATO Institute debate¹⁰¹, Nicole Aschoff makes it clear that eliminating gender-based discrimination, and achieving ‘equality and a good life for everyone, regardless of their sex, gender, race, ethnicity, education, income, religion, or where they live’ cannot be achieved under capitalism. Jia Tolentino said that the logical end point of feminism ‘is always anti-capitalism’. Frasier said that neoliberal capitalism has also transformed feminism, with ideas ‘increasingly expressed in individualist terms’.¹⁰²
Aschoff makes the point that ‘sexism and racism have been a core part of strategies of accumulation in capitalism’, and Tressie McMillan Cottom — echoing Klein’s perspectives on the branding of diversity — said that the capitalist system is adept at co-opting ‘the work’ [of feminism] and ‘trying to sell it back to you’.¹⁰³
In terms of the climate crisis, Aschoff said ‘the imperatives of profit-making and the entrenched prerogatives of elites have prevented countries from adopting projects and programs to free ourselves from our destructive fossil-fuel based economies, from developing and instituting sustainable solutions to meeting our needs’. Instead of directing technology, science, resources, knowledge and energy to advance equality and empower women — ‘to vastly improve the lives of the world’s women, and all people for that matter’ — these tools were instead used to advance the goal of capitalism, which is ‘to make a profit’.
Sasha Costanza-Chock¹⁰⁴ notes that social and gender inequality in who gets paid to do design is consistent with persistent structural inequality across a stratified labour market, and also shaped by inequalities in access to education. She said that ‘intersecting forms of oppression, including white supremacy, cisnormativity, heteropatriarchy, capitalism and settler colonialism are hardcoded into designed objects and systems — largely through structural forces and unintentional bias’. She said that ‘most design processes today reproduce inequalities by what Black feminist scholars call the matrix of domination’ i.e. white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism and settler colonialism.
Buckley¹⁰⁵ said that women’s expectations, needs and desires, as both designers and consumers, are constructed within a patriarchal framework — and through this framework, women are defined by their gender or relationship with men; women are prescribed ‘a subservient and dependent role’, and circumscribed women’s opportunities to participate fully in all sectors of design and more broadly, all areas of society. For example, women are relegated to certain areas of design deemed to naturally suit them e.g. dressmaking, whereas men appropriated fashion design, which required ‘the aggressive business and marketing skills that are part of the male stereotype’. Buckley also asserts that capitalism and patriarchy interact to devalue the types of design produced by women in the domestic environment — ‘it has been made in the wrong place — the home, and for the wrong market — the family’.
Costanza-Chock said that a key way to dismantle the ‘matrix of domination’ and strive towards equality and inclusion is through design justice, which she describes as ‘a growing social movement that aims to ensure a more equitable distribution of design’s benefits and burdens; fair and meaningful participation in design decisions; and recognition of community based design traditions, knowledge, and practices’.
Simone Taffe¹⁰⁶ describes participatory design as a ‘democratic imperative’ that affords design rights to those affected by a design as well as being a pragmatic path to the creation of more commercially successful designs.
¹⁰⁰ C Buckley, ‘Made in Patriarchy: Toward a Feminist Analysis of Women and Design’, Design Issues, 1986, pp3–14
¹⁰¹ www.cato.org/events/does-capitalism-help-or-harm-women-a-debate
¹⁰² www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/feminism-capitalist-handmaiden-neoliberal
¹⁰⁴ S Costanza-Chook, ‘Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice’, Design Research Society, 2018
¹⁰⁵ Buckley, Made in Patriarchy
¹⁰⁶ S Taffe, ‘Shifting involvement: Case studies of participatory design in graphic design’, 2012
What could a ‘post branding’ approach look like?
Branding is not isolated. It is a product and symptom of capitalism. But creating meaning around signifiers, through a process of meaningful exchange like communication does not have to be predatory. And the same creative processes that construct these meanings can also subject them to critique and potential transformation. How about communication on the basis of open source and peer-peer principles, for example, or communication on the basis of real community and individual need? What would that look like? In any case, it won’t be called branding.¹⁰⁷
Branding is a particular form of power that has become normalised and taken for granted.¹⁰⁸ It is promoted and accepted as a ‘neutral tool’¹⁰⁹ and seen as a ‘smart and business-savvy’¹¹⁰ technique.
Branding is highly problematic: as neoliberal capitalist tool, it commercialises and co-opts NFPs; it exploits and controls; it fosters inequality; it’s patriarchal; and it’s anti-democratic. Therefore, an alternative approach to branding is needed that is participatory, transparent and just.
Is it possible to resist branding? Is there an alternative? What could a ‘post branding’ look like? Here, we outline a possible approach for thinking ‘post brand’ — and Greenpeace is doing much of it already.
¹⁰⁷ J Grant and O Vodeb, ‘A Branding Forecast (Draft V2.1)’, The Equal Standard, 2018
¹⁰⁸ Mumby, Communicative capitalism
¹⁰⁹ www.inkahoots.com.au/ideas/i_132-against-branding
¹¹⁰ Aronczyk and Powers (ed), Blowing Up the Brand
Greenpeace
Global social and environmental justice movements are key in resisting neoliberal capitalism and thinking ‘post branding’. The existence of Greenpeace, and the work it continues to do, is an act of resistance. We consider that the four change goals outlined in Greenpeace’s Global Engagement Plan (to help deliver on The Framework) are examples of ‘post branding’ goals:
- 200 million people are changing the world with us.
- All campaigns are designed through audience centered design processes or by change agents.
- People are telling their own stories of contagious courage.
- Greenpeace regularly wins responsive campaigns to achieve our strategic objectives.
Sauven from Greenpeace told The Drum: ‘There are forces much larger than us … that have the immense power to hit back against us. But it’s what you believe in that it’s really important — the values that you hold — because ultimately that is what will win out. Whatever it takes, in a peaceful sense, we are prepared to do: we are prepared to take risks. Putting your life on the line for things that you believe in becomes really important in terms of the urgent. And that is reflected in our comms as well.’¹¹¹
Nils Agger from Extinction Rebellion said that Greenpeace has a responsibility as an established organisation with resources and contacts to do what is necessary to avert as much as possible of the climate breakdown we are now facing.’¹¹² But Monbiot questions whether ‘the big conservation groups’ can resist the mindset that commodifies and destroys nature — citing the example of WWF’s head of campaigns who has said he’ll promote the natural capital agenda that the UK government is promoting.¹¹³
¹¹¹ www.thedrum.com/news/2018/08/14/greenpeace-the-bravest-brand-without-brand-manager
¹¹³ www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/15/price-natural-world-destruction-natural-capital
Open access tools and ideas
Greenpeace already provides access to many of its approaches and tools to volunteers, allies, supporters and the wider community, including the now-independent Mobilisation Lab. According to Holmes¹¹⁴, the antidote to neoliberal capitalism is for more people to ‘access to the toolkits and the ideas that will allow them to challenge the worldview of the mass media’.
¹¹⁴ Holmes, Changing the Very Logic of Communication
Mobilisation
Mobilisation is a critical component of Greenpeace’s work — and it’s also one of the best and most effective ‘post branding’ strategies. Zuboff¹¹⁵ believes mobilisation is also important in challenging surveillance capitalism: ‘…mobilisation and the resistance it engenders will define a key battleground on which the next generation of collective action will be contested at the new frontier of power’.
Brand ‘jamming’
Brand attacks are a highly effective, powerful tool for Greenpeace (discussed at length in this Business Insider article), and another example of a ‘post branding’ approach. Brand attacks are related to culture jamming, where activists alter a brand’s message to tell a story of their own,¹¹⁶ call into question the brand image and values attached to the corporate logo, question the consumer relationship to the brand, or illuminate harmful actions on the part of the corporation.¹¹⁷
Mumby cites Greenpeace’s successful attempt — via the ‘Everything is Not Awesome’ video — to get Lego to end its promotional arrangement with Shell Oil. In this instance he said, ‘the brand’s ability to fix and normalise systems of meaning and their attendant efforts to extend modes of capital accumulation are challenged’.
¹¹⁶ mumbrella.com.au/no-advertising-has-not-beaten-culture-jamming-at-its-own-game-75462
¹¹⁷ www.thoughtco.com/culture-jamming-3026194
Storytelling
Storytelling, especially stories that celebrate courage, are an important part of Greenpeace’s communications approach, as articulated in the Seven Shifts, and another example of ‘post branding’. It’s articulated as a change goal in Greenpeace’s Global Engagement Plan: ‘People are telling their own stories of contagious courage.’
Participatory design
Through neoliberal capitalism and marketing’s application of social media, solidarity, collectivism and participation are undermined. Chomsky said a crucial principle of neoliberalism is to undermine ‘mechanisms of social solidarity and mutual support and popular engagement in determining policy’. [Social democracy] is called ‘freedom,’ but ‘freedom’ means a subordination to the decisions of concentrated, unaccountable, private power. The institutions of governance — or other kinds of association that could allow people to participate in decision making — those are systematically weakened.’¹¹⁸ Klein said that ‘neoliberalism has created so much precarity that the commodification of the self is now seen as the only route to any kind of economic security. Plus social media has given us the tools to market ourselves non-stop’… and this hinders solidarity…’¹¹⁹
Participation, therefore, is an essential ‘post branding’ strategy — and again, an approach that Greenpeace already embraces. For example, participation is central to the change goal in Greenpeace’s Global Engagement Plan: ‘All campaigns are designed through audience centered design processes or by change agents.’
What is the opportunity for participation in design — specifically, the development of visual communications and identity? Participation is at the heart of Inkahoots’ approach in developing a global visual identity for Greenpeace.
The ideals of democracy, social inclusion, engagement and empowerment are the foundation of participatory design (PD). In her PhD thesis, Simone Taffe comprehensively outlines the value of PD, with its proponents seeing it as a ‘democratic imperative’; and usefully describes a range of research and design methods that organisations can use. PD’s central premise is that the people who will use a design have a right be involved to a greater or lesser degree in its creation.
Through PD, Taffe concludes that the role of the designer changes from expert to facilitator — ‘where designers use their knowledge of design and technology to help end-users fulfil their needs and wishes and to empower them in the design process’.
Credland, Kaltenborn and Holmes depart from a critique of commercial advertising culture and the need for design to liberate itself from it. Speaking from rich personal experience they believe that ‘design in an activist group or a social movement… is a success when the designer disappears, and the users take over. That’s how designs tactics can have a social impact, without all the resources and strategies of governments or big corporations.¹²⁰
Participatory design has a rich history and an elaborated methodology,¹²¹ however our literature review shows that not much serious research has been done in the realm of communication design. Vodeb has theorised the limits of visual communication rooted in the very logic of the design discipline and its epistemology related regimes of value capitalisation inscribed in different stages of the design process. As a crucial method, he proposes that: ‘a public reflection included in the process of conceptualisation, design, implementation, representation and capitalisation needs to be established. It is these communicative publics that are crucial for things to change; they are crucial for the profession to evolve, for communication to become a more powerful and relevant part of design.”¹²² This critique can be seen as connecting the historical development of communication design as a market serving discipline. In connection to our topic — branding — the discipline mostly uses the term visual identity, Vodeb proposes a ‘visual language of facilitation’. ‘Facilitation mediates within a genuine participatory culture and is by principle inclusive instead of exclusive’. Vodeb proposes stronger use of communication theory, and a socially responsive perspective, necessarily informed by critical public sociology stating that a methodology for a visual language of facilitation in all its possible manifestations still needs to be developed.
¹¹⁸ www.thenation.com/article/noam-chomsky-neoliberalism-destroying-democracy/
¹¹⁹ www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/11/no-logo-naomi-klein-20-years-on-interview
¹²⁰ www.memefest.org/en/memeblog/2018/8/design-is-not-enough/
¹²¹ Spoinuzzy, Clay, (2005) The Methodology of Participatory design.
¹²² Vodeb, Oliver (2012) Beyond the Image and Towards Communication.
Design justice
Sasha Costanza-Chock¹²³ said that most design processes reproduce inequalities by what Black feminist scholars call the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism). One of the aspects that design justice focuses on is challenging the matrix of domination. Design justice ‘rethinks design processes, centres people who are normally marginalised by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face’. It considers ‘not only the ways that we hard-code oppressive values and norms into affordances, but also the transformative potential of broader participation in the design process, as well as ownership and stewardship of the results’.
The Design Justice Network¹²⁴ outlines a range of principles that are consistent with a ‘post branding’ approach, and support/reinforce participatory design thinking:
- Using design to empower communities and seek liberation from exploitative and oppressive systems.
- Prioritising the impact of design over the designer’s intention.
- The role of the designer is that of facilitator, not expert.
- Sharing design knowledge and tools with communities.
- Seeking non-exploitative solutions that reconnect us to earth and to each other.
¹²³ Costanza-Chook, Design Justice
Effect and affect
Activist art — the effect of activism and affect of art — is an example of a post brand approach.
Duncombe¹²⁵ said that activism is the activity of challenging and changing power relations, and there are many ways of doing activism and being an activist. The goal of activism is action to generate an effect. In terms of activist art, the goal isn’t as clear — but could be said to ‘stimulate a feeling, move us emotionally, or alter our perception’. Art, therefore, is an expression that generates affect. And ‘…when it comes to stimulating social change, affect and effect are not discrete ends but are all up in each other’s business. …before we act in the world, we must be moved to act’.
Activist artists may aim to foster dialogue, build community, invite participation, transform environment and experience, reveal reality, alter perception, create disruption, inspire dreaming, provide utility, political expression, encourage experimentation… These aims are clearly relevant to the communication and engagement work that Greenpeace does.
Branding is about results, and the ability to measure them. Taking an activist art approach means that the aims and intent are more important than the results. Duncombe¹²⁶ illustrates this point with an example: a beam of white light is aimed at a certain angle at a medium, triangular chunk of glass (a prism). The white light is then refracted by the angles of the glass and broken up into its constituent spectral colors, and the result is a rainbow. ‘This is how activist art works as well. Artists focus their ideas and intentions on their work, but what results when that piece is experienced by the audience is a range of output that is interpreted and acted upon in a myriad of ways’.
¹²⁵ S Duncombe, ‘Does it work? The AEffect of Activist Art’, Social Research International Quarterly, 2016, pp 115–134
¹²⁶ Duncombe, Activist Art
Design as an agent of change
As a starting point, good work is outlined in the Good Work Toolkit¹²⁷ as work that is excellent in quality; ethical in terms of considering the impact of the work on others; and engaging, or personally meaningful, for the individual worker.
Tony Fry¹²⁸ said good design ‘…is design for the common good… design for sustainment.’ He said that sustainment is essential for ‘overcoming unsustainability. Humanity, as we understand it, has no future without this overcoming.’ He said it cannot be achieved without global equity via global redistributive social justice; without quality and moderation (wasted waste, excess and poverty are all equally destructive); and without an ethos of environmental care.
To achieve this, a community of designers needs to ‘develop forms of visual communication that devalue people’s investment in systems, products, services and lifestyles that defuture, while at the same time, generating new ambitions and material desires bonded to life-affirming futures’.
In participatory design and design justice, the role of the designer is to facilitate. According to Fry, designers become ‘change agents’.
Grant said that the ‘happiness’ created by corporate design ‘doesn’t relieve the paralysing tragedy and misery of the world; it just ignores or denies it. [But] design can enable, rather than counterfeit and exploit human relationships. Designers can promote connection, not just consumption…’¹²⁹
¹²⁷ thegoodproject.org/toolkits-curricula/the-goodwork-toolkit/
¹²⁸ www.inkahoots.com.au/ideas/i_66-good-design
¹²⁹ www.inkahoots.com.au/ideas/i_132-against-branding
The open spectacle, transparency, and socially responsive communication
Branding is inevitably tied to spectacle. Historically, the progressive left has strongly critiqued the hypnotic, narcotic, seductive and manipulative dimensions of spectacle, most notably the Situationist’s leader, Guy Debord. His complex analysis of the spectacle shows an interesting parallel to recent theorisations of branding. For Debord, the spectacle is not so much a collection of images but rather ‘a social relation among people mediated by images.’¹³⁰ While elaborated in much more depth, Arvidsson’s use of the ethical surplus is also focused on the relational aspect of branding, which we can see as spectacle. However, Debord sees an inevitable disaster via the spectacle, while Arvidsson sees a productive value creation possible within the realm of branding. (which he never theorises in relation to spectacle).
The progressive left was always, and still is, suspicious of spectacle. But as Duncombe shows in his book Dream that, a spectacle can also be empowering. ‘In brief, then, a progressive ethical spectacle will be one that is directly democratic, breaks down hierarchies, fosters community, allows for diversity, and engages with reality while asking what new realities might be possible.’¹³¹ Duncombe proposes various ways to think about the spectacle and gives concrete examples. In the participatory spectacle, ‘the people who participate in the performance of the spectacle must also contribute to its construction.’¹³² At the basic level this is nothing radical as this is a straight application of democratic principles to the spectacle. Reclaim the Streets in NYC is given as an example. Popular participation in this case must happen for the spectacle to come to fruition.
‘What a good organizer of ethical spectacles must do is provide plenty of opportunity for intervention at an intimate and personal level, for only this will translate into some sort of action that is transformative to both the individual actor and, ideally, the larger society […]’¹³³ The nature of spectacle is non-democratic as a spectacle becomes a space of non-intervention and any kind of invitation to participate is pro-forma and still within a clear framework of manipulation. The ethical spectacle ‘breaks down hierarchies of creator and spectator, producer and consumer, leader and follower.’
Taking inspiration from Umberto Eco’s opera aperta, Duncombe proposes an open spectacle. As an open-ended work, a spectacle without a completely finished mission, the open spectacle is a direct opposite to branding: ‘Ethical spectacles demand something different: a commitment to plurality and contingency, and thus a bit of necessary messiness. This may work in its favor for it actualizes, better than any corporate brand, the ideal of Kevin Roberts’s “lovemark” trinity of mystery, sensuality, and intimacy. But unlike the product of a Saatchi & Saatchi advertising team, the open spectacle doesn’t hope to resemble these things; it is, instead, the very expression of them.
Nazi spectacles, the historian George Mosse argues, always culminated in order. The masses might march here and line up there, but they always arrived at the same answer: the Nazi Party. Ethical spectacle, as an opera aperta, never arrives at one answer. Open to the noisy diversity of participants, observers, and settings to create the completed work, it ends (or rather, rests) in a field of possibilities.’¹³⁴
The transparent spectacle uses its seductive power to interpolate the individual to experience pleasure, have fun, be entertained, however it does so in a transparent manner: ‘Unlike the opaque spectacles of commercialism and fascism, which always make claims to the truth, a progressive spectacle invites the viewer to see through it: to acknowledge its essential “falsity” while being moved by it nonetheless. Most spectacle strives for seamlessness; ethical spectacle reveals its own workings.’ Duncombe uses the USA wrestling shows as an example: everyone knows its fake, but everyone enjoys it.
The transparent spectacle is a similar concept to what Vodeb theorised as socially responsive communication. One of the key qualities of such work is to ‘deconstruct itself towards its own audience in the process of communication.’¹³⁵ This however is a complex and complicated strategy as it is important to remain the aura, the sense of mystery and excitement, which is necessary to evoke peoples desires. It is the fine line between the rational and emotional, which demands a thorough balancing act in such communication. The transparent spectacle is also something we can observe in the mainstream industry. The documentary Naked Brand¹³⁶ shows companies like Pepsi, Zappos and others, as well as advertising star Alex Bogusky, advocating for transparency in business. Driven by the feedback possibilities of technology, brands are forced to adjust their practices and treat consumers more as partners rather than numbers. Transparency according to the documentary has become a crucial strategy for corporations in order to make business and those who work in a non-transparent manner are being punished by the public whose standards have significantly raised in the past years. This, to us, is another significant evidence that people want branding to change and that we can, and should, be daring in our work with Greenpeace.
In the real spectacle, Duncombe points to the need to be aware that the struggle is not only in the realm of culture but structure and real political power, which can achieve material change. And also, the visions of change should come from real people and not from progressives imposing what they think the people should think and do.
The dream spectacle is positioned between the real and the fantasy. Realising that most progressive politics focus around a negation or uncompromisingly insisting upon a utopian goal claiming moral superiority while not achieving the goal, the dream spectacle dares to dream but it is rooted in reality. The Zapatistas are a powerful example given.
¹³⁰ Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle
¹³¹ Duncombe, Stephen, Dream (2010)
¹³² Duncombe, Stephen, Dream (2010)
¹³³ Duncombe, Stephen, Dream (2010)
¹³⁴ Duncombe, Stephen, Dream (2010)
¹³⁵ Vodeb, Oliver (2007) Druzbeno odzivno komuniciranje.
¹³⁶ The Naked Brand (2013)
The gap in current knowledge
This literature review shows the following gaps:
Main research question:
How to create effective global visual communication strategy, guidelines and tools for Greenpeace using a critical unbranding methodology?
We can divide the existing branding literature in two main ideological camps — a pro and against branding. The concrete ‘how’ needs to be answered in a strategy document focusing on the visual style guide, however the literature review shows concrete directions.
Our thesis is that we need an alternative to branding. This is based on the presented research findings showing that branding — as it is practiced — reproduces neoliberal power relations based on exploitation of people and nature.
A wealth of alternative design, communication and art approaches exist. They all are directed towards social change, while recognizing that the majority of problems related to society and the natural environment are caused by man situated within neoliberal capitalism.¹³⁷
Design as a discipline has developed a strong critique as well as practice against neoliberal capitalist practices. While the subdiscipline of communication design has a long activist, critical and oppositional tradition, the work on visual identities has been largely done within the framework of branding. Here we identity a clear gap, which we aim to fill with the development of post-branding.
The literature review suggests using theories from critical design, speculative design, autonomous design, participatory design, design futures, socially responsive communication, tactical media, culture jamming, and ethical approaches to spectacle.
Research sub questions:
What are relevant theories and alternative branding/ visual identity practices from which we can learn?
The literature review suggests using theories from critical design, speculative design, autonomous design, participatory design, design futures, socially responsive communication, tactical media, culture jamming, and ethical approaches to spectacle.
Crucial knowledge can be also found in the practices developed by leading radical design organisations. The existing alternative practices have been for decades developed in the radical design scene.¹³⁸ However, most of the existing projects do not focus on visual identity as a conscious alternative to branding. Alternative post branding practices have yet to be theorised and a methodology within communication design practice still needs to be developed. We aim to fill this gap with our work for Greenpeace.
What are the appropriate design methodologies for the development of global visual communication strategy, guidelines and tools for Greenpeace?
Based on our experience as design practitioners, researchers and educators, the following method is used:
- Literature review of relevant theories and practices
- Research about design through theoretical framing
- Research through design in a participatory design process
A clear gap has been detected in that the communication design discipline has not yet done much work on participatory design. More of such work has been done in social movements. We aim to fill this gap on our project by developing a participatory communication design process.
How to think about effect (how to measure it) in relation to a critical visual identity/unbranding?
The literature review shows that branding looks at effect as a) brand value: ‘the present value of predictable future earnings generated by the brand.’¹³⁸ and as b) brand equity as a ‘result of subjective meanings and social functions.’¹⁴⁰
Based on the data given by Greenpeace, there is an internal tension between controlling the brand and its meaning and on the other side allowing for a more open manifestation of the Greenpeace brand. Our literature review points out that even in the commercial branding sphere branding is mostly not seen as a disciplinary practice:
This necessity to balance between innovation and conservation means that brand management contains two sets of techniques: those that aim at the selective appropriation of consumer innovation, and those that aim to make consumers’ use of branded goods serve to reproduce the forms of life that the brand embodies. Even in this latter case it is not a matter of imposing a particular meaning or message, or of fostering a particular model of consumption to simply be reproduced by consumers. Brand management is not a disciplinary practice. It does not seek to impose a certain structure of tastes or desires, not even a certain manner of relating to goods. And there are seldom sanctions. Rather, brand management works by enabling or empowering the freedom of consumers so that it is likely to evolve in particular directions.¹⁴¹
Our review also shows that branding and especially commercial advertising have been significantly leaning towards social good and that the public (consumers) are largely rewarding such strategies. A very recent example is the French milk industry, where a new product explicitly attacking cut throat capitalist practices is attracting millions of buyers.¹⁴² Our research shows there is a significant cultural momentum built on decades of critical practices, which is ready and even demanding radical answers and alternatives to commercial branding. Again, we can find a gap in the NGO sector not answering these demands.
A clear gap is found in broader understanding of brand effect, an understanding that would take into account the social and cultural implications of branding. Relevant literature comes from social activism.
Activist art aims for a range of effects: ‘foster dialogue, build community, invite participation, transform environment and experience, reveal reality, alter perception, create disruption, inspire dreaming, provide utility, political expression, encourage experimentation.’¹⁴³
Designers have also developed strategies of collaboration with nature: ‘to understand, remediate, simulate, salvage, nurture, augment, and facilitate.’¹⁴⁴
With a rich set of strategies for social change and ‘collaboration with nature’, a clear gap is found in communication design not having yet developed clear strategies for social change and ‘collaboration with nature’ when it comes to visual identity. We aim to fill this gap.
Further to that, the new Greenpeace guidelines should integrate a solid value framework. Our review shows significant work done in design, communication as well as in ‘work’ in general. Main documents here are Design is Not Enough, People’s Communication Charter, Good Work, First Things First and Design Futures.
¹³⁷ According to the Sustainable Development Index Cuba is the most developed country.
¹³⁸ A list of radical design organisations: www.lokidesign.net/journal/2017/1/23/first-things-next-socially-engaged-design-studios
¹³⁹ Arvidsson, Brands
¹⁴⁰ Arvidsson, Brands
¹⁴¹ Arvidsson, Brands
¹⁴² How millions of French shoppers are rejecting cut-price capitalism www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/04/french-shoppers-rejecting-cut-price-capitalism-nicolas-chabanne
¹⁴³ Duncombe, Does it work?
