Branding a human is a demeaning act. Slaves where branded to declare ownership of a human being. Nowadays people have turned and decided to brand themselves. This concept has little to do with legal ownership. Branding is the attempt to enhance the perceived value of a good to the consumer and to blur purpose and fucntionality. Though you can achieve to create a brand with a certain communication budget, it is by far more difficult to implement a product as part of a lifestyle brand, so that people integrate the brand and logo by a product into their lifestyle and find that to be a way of expressing yourself. Several highly professionell corporations such as Microsoft, Starbucks or McDonalds have failed to present themselves as a lifestyle brand. Fashion companies have to achieve this as a necessity. A lifestyle brand embodies the values and aspirations of a group or culture. One key indication that a brand has become a lifestyle is when it successfully extends beyond its original product category. As an example, Nike used to be a product-focused company focusing on making running shoes. But over time, the company and its logo has become associated with the athlete subculture. This has allowed Nike to expand into related athletic categories, such as sports equipment and apparel. Gaiam started out as a yoga company, but has had great success in developing a lifestyle brand, which has allowed them to move into other markets as varied as solar power and green building supplies. the economic roots of the rise of lifestyle
Lifestyle marketing emerged in the 1970s as the United States underwent both dramatic cultural changes and massive shifts in economic production. During this transformation traditional low-skill, highwage mass manufacturing jobs began to “disappear” from the most advanced economies, including the United States. Manufacturing jobs, though, did not evaporate into thin air; they moved to lesser-developed countries as part of the global reconfiguration of the commodity chains of many first-world corporations. From the late 1960s to the middle 1990s, the number of manufacturing jobs worldwide grew by more than 30 percent. This increase was mainly in the labor-intensive segments of batch production and located primarily in warmer climates amenable to the cultivation of natural-fiber crops such as cotton, flax, and silk. This tells us, that the beginning of this shift dealt mostly with textile industry followed by more complex and more machine related labour. At the same time, American consumers developed a taste for natural fibers, in part as an expression of dissatisfaction with the manufactured, standardized ideal of mass modernity that synthetic fabrics seemed to represent. Market penetration of polyester fabric, a capital-intensive, mass-manufactured product, peaked in 1973, just as the new zones of production were being integrated into the global economic system. (Synthetics would be rehabilitated some two decades later years when polyester morphed into microfiber, and polyfleece, lycra, and spandex became prevalent.) With no need for expensive physical facilities, other than fertile land, and with large pools of low-cost labor awaiting mobilization, these zones were ripe to supply the growing demand for natural fibers in first-world countries. Value-added attributes such as ornamental stitchery and form-fitting tailoring, made possible by lowwage handwork, satisfied consumer desire for individualistic markers of distinction at prices relatively more affordable than those of traditional luxury goods. Designer logos once hidden from view began to appear prominently on the outside of apparel items. Haute couture brands such as Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent marketed lines aimed at middle-income consumers, effectively democratizing the distinction previously available only to the wealthy discerning few. Among the bearers of this democratization of distinction was an avatar of the aura of the brand in postmodern culture, the designer jeans.
The marketing of designer jeans and other branded apparel that began to appear at the time was facilitated by the ability to segment consumer markets through the use of computer systems capable of amassing large amounts of demographic data and sorting them geographically. These tools, known as “geo-demographic clustering systems,” present information previously hidden to purveyors to the mass market. This innovation enabled clothing manufacturers, among others, to identify and respond to smaller, more volatile market opportunities. The consumer segment interested in designer jeans was upscale (or at least aspired to be) and willing to pay double the price for the aura of the brand. While designers sold fewer pairs of jeans, their profit margins were higher than those in the mass-production model.Jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers, fundamental components of the American youth uniform, became sites for displaying the aura of the brand in the 1970s. But the move toward the democratization of distinction in casual wear was part of a larger trend of consumption in postmodern culture.
Consumption evolved as a potent form of symbolic expression. In addition to an explosion of personal credit, greater numbers of women entered the workforce, fueling the cycle of consumption. Even at the depths of the 1970s recession, U.S. Census Bureau statistics show personal consumption continued to increase virtually unabated. Thus emerged what James Miller has called a paradox of popular culture and democracy in America: that public will is often articulated in the realm of consumption because “ordinary Americans have few authorized political outlets for expressing their actual interests, for articulating their desires and aspirations.”For Nike, the rise of physical culture as an expressive form in the 1970s paved the way for athletic footwear as branded goods. This release of collective endorphin constituted, according to Donald Katz, “a new liberation of spirit,” which resonated with a generation frustrated by administered society’s inability to effect social and political change in the wake of the tumultuous 196Os. The new physicality reconstituted the desire for self-determination fundamental to the American ethos as the nation stepped uncertainly into the next decade. This metaphor of the self-contained individual was used with spectacular success by Nike, Inc., as it grew from a small operation that at times made payments in anticipation of deposits, technically the illegal practice called “check kiting,” to become one of the world’s most valuable brands.
Nike, originally incorporated in the mid-1960s under the name Blue Ribbon Sports (BRS), was based on the thesis paper of Stanford University MBA student and former University of Oregon middle-distance runner Phillip K. Knight. The business innovation was importing lower-cost Japanese running shoes to compete against the higher-priced products traditionally dominating the market, such as those of the German-based industry leader Adidas. Knight’s partner was his running coach at Oregon, Bill Bowerman, the 1964 U.S. Olympics men’s track team coach and author of the best-selling book, Jogging: A Physical Fitness Program for all Ages. Bowerman also customized and designed running shoes. Among his innovations is the waffle-sole track shoe, the prototype for which was cast from the lowly home waffle iron.BRS’s first product, the Tiger running shoe, was designed and manufactured by a Japanese company and considerably less expensive than the German counterparts offered by the market leaders Adidas and Puma. The role of BRS in the relationship was limited to importing the shoes and marketing them in America. In 1972, BRS introduced the first Nike-branded product, a knockoff of one of the Tiger products. The Nike running shoe was created as a defensive maneuver when the Japanese partner seemed poised to broaden its penetration of the U.S. market through a wider distribution network, which meant BRS would lose its exclusivity in importing and marketing Tiger products. Ironically, the ability of BRS (at that point known as Nike) to expand its operations during the crucial period in the mid-1970s came in part from the proceeds of the cash settlement of a lawsuit filed in a Federal district court in Oregon against the Japanese partner for breach of contract under U.S. law. The majority of Nike’s full-time employees have historically been engaged in white-collar occupations, such as product design, sales, marketing and promotions, information processing, and the like, activities that the company says “are valued and desired in an advanced economy.” Most blue-collar jobs, particularly those involved in manufacturing, have always been outsourced. Nike maintains a catalog of more than fifty thousand footwear, apparel, equipment, and accessory items with an average shelf life of between three and six months.Nike’s ability to leverage the network of value creation extends beyond the production side of the commodity chain. One of the most powerful weapons in Nike’s arsenal is the “Futures” program, which requires retailers to commit to specific product volumes six months in advance to ensure timely delivery, favorable pricing, and sufficient inventory. The Futures program shifts the risk of the distribution segment of the commodity chain onto the retailers. In earlier, leaner times, the Futures program enabled Nike to secure credit from Japanese trading partners rather than rely on conventional loans from the U.S. banks that required higher levels of equity. It further serves as a negotiating lever with suppliers, providing the opportunity to realize incremental savings through guaranteed production volumes. The Futures program also enables Nike to project accurately a portion of its revenues and provide analysts and investors with a tool for measuring the company’s financial performance. Nike’s endorsement contracts typically call for compensation based on actual sales volume, protecting the company against the risk of lower-than-expected retail revenues. In all of these practices, Nike has operated heuristically. At first, Knight did not particularly like the Nike name or the Swoosh design30 much less understand their potential for creating breathtaking value. he acceded to their use-the Nike name gotten for nothing from the company’s first full-time employee, Jeff Johnson, and the Swoosh design for $35 from a Portland State University design student, Carolyn Davidson-out of pressure to meet production deadlines. But the company soon learned the value of brand marketing and advertising. Today, Nike is one of the world’s sawiest brand managers, able to accomplish virtually any marketing communications goal.
The core of their methodology is the use of brand name and logo. Nike figured that before the days when labels were worn on the outside of shirts, people wanted to be identified by their religion or political beliefs or their origin. They were Democrats or Protestants or Italians. But in the late 1970s, they began to identify themselves by brands. People wanted labels, and shoes and clothes with the right labels were cheap prestige. But simply affixing the Swoosh to products was not enough. Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson note that “initially the Swoosh logo was an empty vessel-a visual marker that lacked any intrinsic meaning.” The Nike brand and the Swoosh logo needed connotative significance. Working from the model of the self-reliant jogger, Nike cast itself as the brand for athletes. Picking up the tropes of American Transcendentalism as the aura of its brand, Nike placed freedom and individuality, available on a personal level through the experience of sport, as existing outside any and all social constraints. In keeping with the syntax of singularity, Nike projected itself through the individual athlete, who functioned as a metonym of Emersonian self-determination against the conformity of administered society. In each challenge, any great athlete, with Nike behind him, prevailed, often against the conformists of the sports aristocracy, reaffirming Emerson’s exhortation to the self-reliant genius: “that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, or worse, as his portion.”
Early in the decade, Nike’s long-standing business practice of outsourcing production to low-wage sectors of the world economy began to be increasingly criticized as part of growing concern over global economic, political, and cultural realignment. Environmentalists also began to question Nike, along with the rest of the athletic footwear industry, about the ecological consequences of chemicals such as ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) used in manufacturing. And as Nike’s position as the “Goliath” of the athletic apparel industry became increasingly indisputable, the company was hit by what Naomi Klein calls the “brand boomerang” from numerous “Davids” that began to appear. Airwalk, Van’s, Simple, and other brands positioned themselves as “anti-Nikes,” associating themselves with subcultures like skateboarding and other “X-treme” sports.
Nike’s initial response was denial and hubris. The Operation PUSH boycott was dismissed as the skullduggery of mortal enemy Reebok. The exploitation of Asian workers was also rebuffed with rationalizations as to Nike’s contributions to economic expansion in lesser-developed countries. But, following its first principle, “Our business is change,” Nike quickly adapted. (Excerpts from “The Aura of the Brand”.