Ludovico Technique

Murketing’s Rob Walker is in the New York Times magazine today, on “Why imaginary brands can be even better than the real thing.” I was curious about what the possibly-redundant phrase “imaginary brands” referred to, and my imagination went wild with what I might encounter after clicking over to the full article…

Would it be Shepherd Fairey’s once-imaginary Giant brand? Or how about American Apparel and the “brand-free” brand, or the jaded - about - branding branding of Blackspot and Antipreneur? Or did this have to do with the MacLeod / Doctorow / Fawkes / Godin dialectic of whether branding is dead or not or is or not, kinda? No one disputes that “people who like using the word ‘Brand’ a lot are assholes,” but how could anyone refute Godin’s final say, in haiku form:

Big brands are dying.
Little brands are doing great.
Branding is a weird gig.

I ventured over to the article, for something else entirely:

There is no shortage of logos in the world, no dearth of brands striving for consumer allegiance and no chance that the creation of new brands and logos will cease. In fact there’s an interesting subset of brands and logos that don’t bother with what seems like a crucial component: an actual product, service or company. Consider the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It’s part of the fictional universe depicted in the 1979 film “Alien” and its sequels; Nostromo, the spaceship freighter in the first movie, is a Weyland-Yutani vessel. The company doesn’t do much in the way of branding in, you know, reality. But as it turns out, it’s possible to buy yourself a Weyland-Yutani T-shirt, or even a Nostromo T. It also turns out many people have. ::link

Oh. Cool, t-shirts. I want one.