Ultimate Triumph of Style Over Substance: Branding as a Form of Opression
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Cars provide transportation, food sates hunger. But do you drive a used junker or a new hybrid? Inhale fast food or relish gourmet fare? A UA professor's recent work suggests the widespread 'branding' of objects as a way to convey information about the user has pushed consumers to give greater consideration to the symbolism an item conveys than to its actually utility.
In his paper, "The Sociology of Consumption: The Hidden Facet of Marketing," Jeff Murray, a professor of marketing at the UA's Sam M. Walton College of Business, examines the role that marketing plays in a consumer society as well as the potential force that it can exert over individuals. The paper was recognized with the 2004 Best Paper Award by the Academy of Marketing Conference in Cheltenham, England.
"The question we were really asking in this study was, 'Is marketing virtuous; is it good for our society?'" Murray explained. "To answer that, we drew upon a branch of communications theory known as semiotics as a sort of lens through which we could examine the concept of marketing and its relationship to consumer behavior.
"What we found is that marketing is actually a kind of double-edged sword for society," he said.
Semiotics is the study of signs and how they are used to express feelings, thoughts and ideas. When applied to consumer behavior, every object has two distinct values ñ a "use value" and a "sign value." An object's use value relates to its direct functional utility, such as the ability of a sweater to keep a person warm. The sign value of the object is the value that it has within the culture; it is less direct and more open to interpretation. A designer sweater, for instance, might have a greater sign value than a discount sweater, even though they have identical use values.
In the cultural context, the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, even the foods we eat are not merely useful objects. They are symbols that we use to represent ourselves, to convey our identities to others.
In a large free-market economy like the United States, with a variety of 'signs' to choose from, consumers can be thought of as performance artists, selecting and combining various signs to construct a code that defines their own unique identities.
From this perspective, marketing becomes a useful tool, providing consumers with access to the widest array of sign options ñ kind of like raw materials for identities. As Murray stated, "marketing provides ways of being."
"This traditional view puts the consumer ultimately in control," Murray said. "The signs are used in an expressive way. Consumers are utilizing the aesthetic resources of the culture to create and express identities that best represent themselves, and the job of marketing is to provide these resources."
However, Murray discovered in his research that the codes used for self-expression also can be used to repress individuality. Often, these political and repressive aspects of signs are overlooked.
Within every culture, there are codes that are popular and valued and therefore socially integrated, and those that are not. Consumers often are channeled into situations where they believe that they must conform to popular codes or risk social stigma and isolation.
In this case, marketing taps into the human need for acceptance and social integration, and becomes an instrument to force certain codes of society upon consumers.
"Marketing links desirable social traits such as popularity and 'coolness' with particular 'signs,'" Murray said. "It becomes a coercive force because people believe that if they don't achieve these valued identities, they will not have value in society."
These valued identities, which are constructed by marketing, are often very expensive, and are associated with particular brands of products. According to Murray, this widespread 'branding' of identity has led to the use value of products being so overshadowed by their sign value that it has almost ceased to exist. This is the other side of the sword. From this perspective, marketing is not virtuous; it causes problems.
"The sign value of objects drives our whole economy," Murray said, "so much so that use value has become almost insignificant. It's kind of the ultimate triumph of style over substance."
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