Here's an idea, brands are mythological.
Where at one point it felt like we had companies which just
sold products that may be aligned with some purpose
or design, now we have the much more complicated and nebulous
concept of the brand, which is not
to say that we haven't had the brand in some form or another
for a while.
It's named after the incredibly old practice
of literally burning one's mark into their products.
It's just to say that like vinyl records or Bill Murray,
brands have taken on new meaning as of late.
Usually associated with businesses, though often
with people, modern brands are often
conjured by visual markers or physical products.
But in total, they stand for something
more, a cross between a personality,
design, and purpose.
And a brand may be abstract, but that doesn't
mean that it's not valuable.
Often a brand is the most valuable thing
an entity possesses.
It's sort of like their reputation
combined with persona, a persoputation or a repusona.
My personal brand involves making dad jokes
before Smash Cuts.
An organization's brand precedes it.
PBS and the BBC take their brands very seriously,
as do Coca-Cola and automobile manufacturers, luxury ones
especially.
People even have recognizable personal brands.
Bill Murray has a great one.
Stephen Colbert's is not only strong,
but currently undergoing a very interesting transition.
Beyonce has arguably the greatest personal brand
of all time, of all time.
Smash cut.
The thing I wonder about brands is
how they function in our culture, what do they do?
They help sell things, sure.
They help guide our expectations and decision making processes.
And in many situations, they allow
us to construct ourselves.
The clothing we wear, the technology we use, most of it
is branded, even if non-explicitly.
And like it or not, those brands say something about you
to others.
Brands are these weird culturally
dependent organizational tools which help us
consume, but also help us project.
They inform our assumptions and aspirations
and provide a certain portion of the foundation
for our social interactions.
What's on your beer label, what's
on your shirt label, what logo is on your phone, your sports
teams, favorite bands, console of choice, all of these things
connect to stories constructed by entities in the hopes
that you will align with them, with their brand.
In a weird way, brands guide us.
In a weirder way, they're a lot like myths.
Myth, seriously?
Out of ideas, this guy.
No, but really hear me out.
First, let's talk a little bit about what myths are.
Classically, myths have been stories about great success
or harrowing adventure, often amazing feats
with impossible figures.
Myths are generally not based in verifiable history,
actual firsthand experience, or really
even an interest in those things.
A myth may or may not be true, but its relationship to truth
is often one of the least interesting things about it.
Myths are about relatability, even
if they are also fantastical.
Myths construct stories and situations
which we understand to be representative or significant
to contain lessons or meaning over and above truth.
Classically, myths are things like stories
about the creation of the world as dreamed by a higher power
or hatched from an egg.
These stories stress the importance, fragility,
or contingency of existence.
Countless cultures have flood myths,
which describe the rebirth of nature or culture
after times of great excess or corruption.
Joseph Campbell famously outlined the monomyth
of which there is a practical infinity of examples,
a hero goes on an adventure meets great hardship
and overcomes it after great personal transformation.
There's even mythopoesis, the creation of fictional mythology
like what happens in Lord of the Rings, Dream Theater
records, or Dark Souls.
This is all to say that though we may think of them mostly
as being at home in dusty tomes, the myth is alive and well,
which is good because Campbell also
wrote that societies without myths don't function.
The purpose of the myth is four-fold,
he said, to celebrate the grand unknown possibilities
of being a living, breathing thing,
to describe how our world in its context
came into existence, to organize and support
the function of the culture the myth belongs to,
and finally to give its audience a place within that culture,
a way to understand and interact with it.
You may be now starting to see how all of this
relates to like Tide commercials.
And why when someone cuts you off in traffic on the highway,
and they're driving a Corvette, you're like oh, of course.
But there's one more thing we have to talk about
before we reach the x on this mythopoetic treasure map,
and it's how myths do all of this stuff, how
people construct them so they can
contain this kind of meaning.
This is a thing our old friend Roland Barthes
has some thoughts on.
In myth today, Barthes says that anything
can be a myth, most things are not,
he stipulates, but anything can be.
Because myths, he says, aren't stories so much
as they are languages or really ways of talking,
types of discourse.
A myth, for Barthe and this video for the sake of argument,
isn't so much content as it is form,
not narrative, images, characters, or ideas so much
as the way those things are treated.
A paradigmatic example he provides is E=mc2.
The equation, he argues, has been mythologized.
It signifies something true, sure,
something that does exist, but it also hypersignifies.
It signifies over and above its own meaning.
It stands for mathematicity, he says,
which I think is sort of like smarts,
and Einstein, scientific progress, complexity, but also
beautiful simplicity.
In other words, E=mc2 has a mythos.
It is treated like and so has become
a myth, which I know it feels weird to say,
because we think of myths as being made up fake things.
But remember, myth and fact are not mutually exclusive.
That's why snopes.com exists.
Sometimes a myth is also true.
Barthes said this creates a kind of hostility between the two.
A myth might be true.
You might be able to ring truth out of it.
It may be true as long as it aligns with your outlook.
Or it might be totally unconcerned with whatever
truth is.
So there's a complex tension between myth and truth,
because navigating between the two means navigating
a whole complex network of things,
sort of like when you fight with your significant other
about apples.
The point is that things which become mythologized
are emptied and then filled back up again.
E=mc2 is an equation, Beyonce is a pop star,
a Corvette is a car.
But through a complicated interaction
with its surrounding culture, those simple meanings
are shed, subdued, or transformed.
Those things are then re-instilled with some greater
significance beyond their original significance.
Myths may be exactly what they are, a story about this
or that, an equation, an object, or a person,
but they're also something more.
This I think is how brands work.
They seek to and often succeed at subduing
an object's simple existence.
Jackets are no longer just jackets,
toothpaste is not toothpaste, and personalities
become much more than people.
Axe body spray, Maybelline cosmetics, Jack Daniels,
Tina Fey, Mark Maron, none of them
have the content of a traditional myth,
but they all have its form.
All of these things viewed as a brand or as a part of one
are freed from their simple meaning,
and they begin to hypersignify.
They become stories with varying relationships to the truth,
whether those stories are about talent, attitude,
luxuriousness, status, success, or effectiveness, the goal is
that over time you associate the thing
with its story in addition to its thingness or personess,
I guess.
That's how brands work.
Ideally, the story is one you like.
And so by extension, you like the thing.
Maybe you also like the thing directly,
but that would be nice, but it matters less.
It's tough to make something that you
can be confident millions of people will like.
It's much easier to create stories
which make it seem like millions of people should like it.
Just like traditional myths, sometimes that story
works and has great impact, and sometimes it's
just a cultural pip.
It's better in a bacon bowl.
So here is where we can ask, so what?
Brands, myths, whatever, why does this matter?
Why is it important?
Well, let's go back to Joseph Campbell's function of myths.
His first two points are a little grand for brands
as myths.
One, do brands provide opportunities
to discover the grand and unknown possibilities of life?
I mean, if you think consumerism has replaced
all manner of actual adventure in the world,
you might be inclined to say yes.
Yes they do, and then sigh heavily.
Two, do brands seek to explain the foundation of our existence
in some way?
Again, an arguable stretch in so far as our existence is defined
by media messages and consumerism,
in so far as celebrity culture could maybe
be seen as some kind of idol worship, you might say yes,
followed by several long drags on your cigarette
as you stare deeply into your pitch black espresso thinking
about the futility of all things.
C'est la vie.
But OK, The second two, do brands
organize and support the values and the function of a culture?
Do they provide the people who interact with them
a place in that culture?
I think the answer to these two questions
is a definite and unequivocal yes.
Brands are a part of an enormous and enormously complicated
cultural feedback loop which determines the ideas that
are present in a culture so that certain ones can be amplified
and popularized and then fed back into that culture
as products, media, personalities, news, whatever,
tons of things, action figures, you name it.
Is this a bad thing?
Again, depends on your outlook.
For what it's worth, at the VMAs when Kanye West talked
about advertising teaching our kids how to live,
I think this is maybe part of what he was trying to get at,
taking lessons and meaning things which resemble or are
easily mistakable for truth from a complex of media
messages behaving or being treated as myth.
And I don't know, if Kanye doesn't like it,
and he didn't seem to, I'm not sure I do either.
His is a brand I trust.
We're not going to control our kids with brands.
What do you guys think, do brands resemble myths
in any way?
And what other things do you think
have been mythologized in modernity,
which is a word that I always want
to use, but also have just great self-consciousness about using.
You know what I'm saying.
You're picking up what I'm putting down.
Let us know in the comments, and I'll respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding the Pokemon war fan
theory.
If you want to watch that, you can click right here
or find a link in the doubly doo.
Also two bits of news that are repeat bits of news.
Idea Channel has a t-shirt that you can buy.
You can find it at dftba.com.
And at the end of this month, I'm
going to be in Vienna, Austria giving a talk at their TEDx
event.
So if that is in your neck of the woods, come and say hey.
Links to information about both of those things
in the place where the links go, you know what it's called.
This week's episode was brought you
up the hard work of these living myths.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a Subreddit links
in the doubly doo.
And the tweet of the week comes from e103084
who points us towards Innuendo Studio's
latest about cultivation theory as it relates
to violence in video games.
And as always, it's a great one.
And hey, in case you were wondering,
this episode of Idea Channel was sponsored by Dropbox.
If you are designing, presenting, writing,
or building, Dropbox makes it easy to work together
on any file.
Because hey, if you can work with anyone, anywhere,
on any file, the world will surely
be full of more interesting things.
Dropbox, make it yours.