Brands

In a single day, how many really nonsignifying fields do we cross?” Roland Barthes, the French semiotician, parlayed everything from Greta Garbo’s face to laundry soap through his prism. But brands, those all-important names we covet, consume and then consume some more, remain among modern society’s most prevalent signifiers.

Brands are everywhere: shouting from the television (through adverts and product placements), billboards and the moment you enter a shop. Not for nothing is an early signifier in The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel and now a Baz Luhrmann-directed film, the enormous yellow spectacles advertising the all-seeing optician TJ Eckleburg.

Branding is part of our culture as well as business. There is even a museum of brands in London, housing the collection of more than 12,000 labels, packages and posters of “consumer historian” Robert Opie.

A brand, says Don Williams, chief creative officer of pi global, the branding consultancy, is “a distinctive entity which communicates its values, what it stands for, what it does, how it’s different, what it looks like, how it behaves… nations are brands, religions are brands, actually… WE are brands”.

Brands, their purveyors believe, build loyalty and ensure we stick with Dove shampoo, Toyota cars or Apple iPhones, for example. Manufacturers of consumer goods, such as Procter & Gamble of the US and Anglo-Dutch Unilever, spend 10-15 per cent of sales on advertising and promotion – much of this brand building.

Monetising that brand loyalty is ever more important for businesses, whether it be supermarket loyalty cards or licensing marques – those remote-controlled Ferrari toy cars or Samsung on the shirts of Chelsea footballers.

Some companies are taking this to new levels. Ferrari and Harley-Davidson are among those making a decent chunk of their revenues from branded goods alongside their cars and motorbikes, for instance. Deluxe designers have perfumes – usually licensed out – from Gucci’s Guilty to Prada’s Candy.

Office addresses, or rather the buildings that house them, are increasingly brands in their own right – London’s The Shard or Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers, for instance.

“The world revolves around brands; unless you’re standing naked in a field, you’re surrounded by brands and brand identities,” says Williams.

Perhaps subconsciously – for this is how signifiers work – he is echoing Barthes. “Here I am, before the sea; it is true that it bears no message. But on the beach, what material for semiology! Flags, slogans, signals, signboards, clothes, suntan even, which are so many messages to me.”

Louise Lucas