Defined by Your Brand
There's a trend among a certain group of folks to define themselves by the brands that they buy. Whether it's a designer handbag or a hot new piece of technology, boys and girls alike are falling for the brand name. It seems that self-esteem and self-respect is less about what's inside and more about how they can get other people to admire – or is it "envy" – them.
Even from within the fashion industry, there are people who are outraged at the way consumers are manipulated. Tomas Maier who is the creative director of Bottega Veneta is quoted in the New Yorker:
"The It Bag is a totally marketed bullshit crap[...] You make a bag, you put all the components in it that you think could work, you send it out to a couple of celebrities, you get the paparazzi to shoot just when they walk out of their house. You sell that to the cheap tabloids, and you say in a magazine that there's a waiting list. And you run an ad campaign at the same time.."
And those with an undeveloped sense of who they are, or fragile egos, those who are trying to replicate what they see in order to pretend to a life they actually cannot afford, eat it up.
Designer labels were once the domain of the wealthy, except in outlet stores or resale shops. Easy access to credit meant that people could buy crap with a label and still pay their rent. If they had to choose, I wonder how many would have chosen to spend their monthly food allowance on a high-priced brand? But they didn't. They could have it all, and they did. And now as disposable income is eaten by monthly payments, people are beating their breasts and wailing about the mess they've made.
So why were (are) people willing to go into debt for the dubious pleasure of saying that they own a specific brand? Could the lure of the brand label be more than just a case of Wannabe Wonderful?
From the Institute of Education at National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan comes research that demonstrates brand matters to people's egos. And it's not just the young who are susceptible. In one experiment, seniors were asked to compose resumes on iMacs, some with generic keyboards and some with Apple accessories. Y'know what? Those assigned to the computers with generic accessories expected to make less ($976) than those who used the Apple accessories ($1,071). Whazzup with that?
In a second experiment, after completing complicated dating profiles, students were given the phone number of their "match" and a cell phone in which the battery was dead. Researchers gave half the students a generic replacement battery and the other half a brand-name battery. After the five-minute phone calls, students were asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 7 (1 being "least attractive" to 7 being "very attractive") how they thought their matches would rate them. Those using the generic product rated their attractiveness at an average of 3.7; the brand-name group rated themselves at 4.6.
Have we become so brand-focused that the kind of battery we use or the label on our socks really impact our perceptions of ourselves? Wow. And how do we protect our children from this phenomenon? I know I don't want either of my kids to believe that they can buy a sense of self. I want that sense of who they are to come from what they achieve and how they interact with the world. I want them to know who they are. I want them to be happy… and I want their stuff to play no role in defining them.
So far I've been lucky. I haven't really seen any sign of brand-hounding in my kids. Maybe it's because I'm not a brand-hound. I know that some brands offer better value but I weigh that value against the cost and what it is I'm trying to achieve. I might use a brand as a short-cut because the brand has served me well in the past, but I'm never a slave to it. And that's the lesson I want to my children to learn.
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The winners from Thursday and Friday are Bedalia and kandfamily. I've sent your emails off so you should be getting a notification shortly.
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Gail Vaz-Oxlade's Blog
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