What is Post-Branding? by Jason Grant of Inkahoots Diamond Studio and Oliver Vodeb from RMIT School of Diamond is a work of “practical theory.” It is a meaty pocketbook publication well-balanced of four main sections. The first, “DIS-BRANDED,” is well-balanced of 20 short page-long chapters exposing the ideological underbelly and real-world impact of branding. The second, “MIXED MESSAGES,” is a provocative visual essay illuminating the texts’ main themes. The third, “MANUAL,” presents a framework for a hair-trigger volitional to corporate branding, humorously appropriating found instructional diagrams as a trademark transmission satire. This section moreover includes examples of completed trendy projects that have implemented post-branding principles. The typesetting concludes with “CONTEXT,” featuring a conversation with cultural theorist Brian Holmes and an “argument” with me.
The typesetting is reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage, cautioning versus a kind of mind (and soul) tenancy that was on the rise, and brings some of those pre-branding, pre-digital ideas to the 21st century. Jason Grant, Oliver Vodeb and I discussed the concepts raised herein—most of all to wordplay the question posed in the title of this post.
Before we tackle the title, your typesetting is subtitled “How to Counter Fundamentalist Marketplace Semiotics.” What are Fundamentalist Marketplace Semiotics?
We should probably unclose that the idea of Fundamentalism will likely be interpreted differently in variegated parts of the world. In the United States, for example, we understand there are a lot of people (mainly “born-again” or “evangelical” Christians) who unquestionably identify as fundamentalist. And on the other hand, it’s often used politically to wade non-hegemonic interests. But we’re borrowing both its religious connotations, and using it in its unstipulated pejorative sense, suggesting rigid and lattermost trueness to a script as the source of total truth. Branding over the last few decades has wilt the dominant mass liaison orthodoxy. It’s rarely questioned and it’s everywhere. It’s both a symptom and impetus of neoliberal capitalism, a super-efficient mechanism for tastefulness and transmitting market values. One of the ways this happens is through strategically deployed systems of signs that end up mediating our social relationships. Semiotics in this sense is not only used to interpret the meaning of a visual text but, importantly, moreover to understand the process overdue constructing meanings. Individual and joint whoopee is, to a significant degree, unswayable by the ways meaning is created.
There are several problems with branding, as we see it. A big problem is the reinforcement of neoliberal suffrage through an imposed consensus, through which our imagination for (designing) alternatives is colonized and our social relations are atomized. Branding diminishes our relations by filtering the world through a neoliberal market lens. And while branders are employing sophisticated knowledge from other disciplines, any findings end up serving the dominant market logic, resulting in a language that is as coercive and treasonous as it is limiting.
One of the key domains that should be self-ruling from fundamentalism is unquestionably one of its main incubators. Should universities be teaching branding as omnipotent and axiomatic? “Brands are so persuasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, upstanding and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected and unaltered. Any knowledge of culture is untellable now without an understanding of the implications of ‘brand.’” So goes the online intro to “the world’s first-ever masters in branding” at the School of Visual Arts, where you teach in New York. But is there really an struggle (here, or anywhere else, offering branding courses in diamond and merchantry schools) to teach a genuinely hair-trigger understanding of the “implications of ‘brand’”? Can branding’s implications really be understood when it is taught as inevitable and desirable? In all of this giddy branding of branding, is there any hint that the miracle might be problematic, or plane damaging? Or that there might be other, largest ways to engage a public and connect as humans?
What was your goal in writing and producing this book?
The willpower of diamond has made some important progress in developing a increasingly hair-trigger self-understanding. Students respond very well to ideas well-nigh hair-trigger design, radical design, voluntary design, social design, participatory design, and more. Many young designers want to work in ways that are less treasonous and increasingly meaningful. The number of diamond studios working on alternatives to the usual narrow logic of what can be tabbed extractive design, is growing. Our typesetting is providing thoughts, critique, concepts, provocations and tools for this emerging and important scene. It aims to help professional designers. It builds on decades of rich research and practice, and articulates a variegated way to communicate. So we aim to provide a critique and propose an alternative. What do you do if you’re an organization that doesn’t have short-term profit as your main mission, or if you’re an artist, or an objector attempting to counter the harms of corporate greed and if you want to employ diamond in ways that will contribute to a sustainable world? How do you create symbols of joint identity that aren’t undermined by commercial liaison methods that contradict your ethos and dilute or redirect your very mission?
We started with the premise that there must be increasingly than one way to diamond liaison relevant to processes of developing joint identities. There must be a variegated way to promote identification that isn’t predatory and exploitative. And so the typesetting moreover includes successful examples of post-branding from virtually the world.
As you indicate, branding is not new (and you are right, I’ve never seen a Peter Behrens staandards transmission either but he had to have put a system in plaace), and was never increasingly impactful than with the Nazis. So now, requite me your elevator (or longer) pitch on the essence of post-branding.
Branding does have a sordid pre-history and scandalous genealogy, from the violent branding of animals and humans through to, as you mention, the Nazi’s wholly integrated, mass calibrated public system of joint identity liaison for which they produced one of the first branding manuals. This Nazi history is particularly interesting considering although these are antecedents, and what we now undeniability branding is very much a trendy neoliberal phenomenon, the parallels are striking. For example, counter to what we might think, Nazis unquestionably wanted to unmarry the state—for them it was just a ways to an end. Does this sound familiar in today’s neoliberal context? The loss of society’s publicness, from education to the societal sphere, is a key symptom of fundamentalism and totalitarianism. Does this sound familiar too? A new insight in our typesetting is moreover the relation between branding and managerialism, as the dominant but moreover most radical and extractive form of management. While branding creates frameworks of meaning, the process of extraction can only be fully realized with the implementation of managerialism on a societal scale. French historian Johann Chapoutot has shown that Nazi theorists crucially unsalaried to the invention of modern management, with some of the key Nazi ideologues running management schools without the second world war, educating and influencing hundreds of thousands of executives virtually the world. Post-branding expands the willpower of liaison diamond in new ways, showing that the branded images produced by organizations directly relate to their inner workings, and that the implementation of any real volitional moreover demands a rethinking of how organizations and societies are organized, and to what end.
We moreover need to be enlightened of the branders attempts at “inevitablizing” their industry with revisionist claims, such as those by Lippincott at London’s Diamond Museum, like: “The concept of branding dates when to the whence of time, surpassing humans plane walked the earth. From the monarch butterfly’s spotted wings to the Bengal tiger’s stripes, branding is nature’s way of organizing the ramified world, using simple visuals to communicate a unshared and resulting message.” How did this half-baked propaganda plane get past the gatekeepers of a major museum?
In the book, we pinpoint the essence of post-branding as designing “collective identity that can create relations which include the interdependencies, needs and desires of a wholesale constituency, rather than the sectional priorities of a minority corrupting power.” And we lay out a framework with three main dimensions and respective principles as a strategic counter to branding’s totalizing, predatory ideology. These dimensions are: 1) transparency and open-source principles; 2) participatory diamond approaches, and; 3) diversity and commoning. The ideas themselves aren’t new, but using them to replace branding’s exploitative principles can be radical.
Why and how will post-branding work in a world that has embraced the trademark as holy grail?
We trust it will resonate with organizations and designers whose sensibilities are working and not yet colonized. It will be embraced by those who are looking for an volitional model. Although it will probably be used increasingly thoroughly in some cases than in others, we hope it will be a process of transpiration and learning. Of course, there will be resistance. But post-branding will empower designers and organizations, and if both sides do embrace these ideas, wondrous things can happen. In fact, in the typesetting we illustrate each post-branding principle with a specimen study, demonstrating once existing, real-word practical using of the ideas.
This typesetting is a guide as well as a wordlist of pictorial rhetoric. Please explain the “Mixed Messages” section. Are these real or false equivalencies?
“Mixed Messages” is a visual essay, an volitional visual text that illustrates and extends the initial text. When making this section, which is all images, we really thought of the process as writing, increasingly than illustrating or designing.
The facing images on a spread relate to each other closely and they moreover connect sequentially to the subsequent and previous images, as well as connecting to the written text. These juxtapositions are not necessarily equivalencies; the images are not the same as each other, but rather they have some kind of objective or dialectical relationship. The image captions are then grouped together at the end of the section as an invitation to interpret the juxtapositions first.
For example, there’s a spread where the left-hand page shows a 1755 coin, and on the right is a replica of a branding iron originally used in the Transatlantic slave trade. They are two physically unrelated artifacts, but their incidental visual similarities (e.g., worldwide ‘V,’ symmetry, materiality and depicted scale) wilt metaphoric of their political and moral relationship. The forge displays the Dutch East India Visitor logo, likely the world’s first-ever multinational visitor logo, which became a hated symbol of violent colonization as the Dutch ruthlessly pursued a global spice trade monopoly. The visitor was moreover tightly involved in the slave trade.
Another spread shows an warmed-over Roman terracotta oil lamp with the maker’s mark “Fortis.” These lamps were one of the first-ever mass products and were made from well-nigh 70 AD to the end of the second century. Opposite is a 1907 poster by Peter Behrens for AEG’s Metal Filament Bulbs—Behrens of undertow is considered by some to be history’s first industrial designer and the founder of corporate identity. So both images full-length lamps—a couple of millennia apart! But notice the formal similarities: repeated round floral motifs; inside serif titling; repeated lineal borders; plane the unstipulated form of the lamps. We have no idea if Behrens was plane enlightened of this warmed-over artifact, but the visual and conceptual echoes through history were really satisfying to discover and illuminate.
As we’ve mentioned, one of the book’s main theses is that modern branding has fascist tendencies and genealogy. One of the spreads shows a Nazi propaganda spectacle in Nuremberg in 1938, and opposite, Coke bottles coming off the production line. Beyond the fact that Coca-Cola collaborated with the Nazis during the war, something to consider is that if we can winnow that Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and her other films, for example, had a significant impact on modern filmmaking, then can we moreover winnow that the ubiquitous and systematic using of the swastika in 1930s Germany has had a real impact on modern commercial communication? How do we come to terms with that?
What do you hope will be the outcome of your book? Do you believe those who believe in the positive power of branding will change? Do you see the world waffly its “late-capitalist” rituals?
Branding is not inevitable; it’s not plane that old. We did some research where we looked at the shift in how diamond studios have promoted themselves and self-identified. In Australia, for example, there were virtually no graphic diamond practices that tabbed themselves “branding agencies” or offered “branding” as their key service prior to the year 2000. Only two decades later, in 2022, virtually 85% were doing it. Moreover consider branding guru Wally Olins’ bibliography. All his books prior to 2000 have “identity” or “corporate identity” in the title, but from 2003 (with On Brand) they all full-length “Brand” instead. Universities diamond programs used to teach “visual identity design”; now they teach “branding.” This isn’t just the adoption of new terminology, it’s the emergence of a new industry.
It is really nonflexible to imagine branding fading or stuff replaced considering it is so entwined with the imperatives of capitalism. But the willpower of diamond is changing, and is much increasingly capable of envisioning itself in a variegated relation to the world than it was few decades ago. Generations are changing, and sensation is growing. Hair-trigger diamond theory and philosophy is developing. What we really need is a stronger transition between these ideas into the professional sphere. If designers use the concepts presented in our book, with some effort they will see that there are organizations and people with whom these ideas will resonate. We are offering these ideas with the hope that they will make them their own, use them, and develop them further.
Capitalism itself will, at the very least, have to transpiration and transmute to the converging crises it has caused. These crises have once begun to bite, and as they protract to wreck our communities and our ecology, we’ll sooner have to reject all their enabling machinery just to survive. In the meantime, we hope to throw a post-branding spanner in the works with an volitional framework that counters branding’s worst harms.
