It may seem heavy-handed that SABMiller and Coca-Cola sued the makers of T-shirts that mocked one of their brands. But it is the logical step for companies that believe passionately that the brand is the business.
Cape manufacturer of satirical T-shirts, Laugh It Off, was found guilty of both hate speech and trademark infringement when it printed a T-shirt with the slogan ”Black Labour — White Guilt”, a pun on ”Black Label — Carling Beer”, and a logo that closely resembles that of Black Label.
SABMiller CEO Graham Mackay has been quoted as saying: ”We don’t sell beer anywhere, we sell brands.” Of course, the company has killed off some of its own ill-conceived brands, such as the non-alcoholic beer launched in the 1980s (I can’t remember the name either).
But despite the ruling, which is more about trademarks and freedom of speech than brands, the power of the brand has begun to be questioned.
Brand believers are still fervent. They have even produced their own Little Red Book — Ten Trends in Branding Design, by brand guru Jeremy Sampson, MD of Interbrand. A slick branding exercise in itself, it smacks of an earlier time, when it could be proclaimed, ”brands are the new religion”.
Established big brands like Coca-Cola began to be valued in billions of dollars in themselves in the 1990s. Sampson’s book puts Coke’s 2001 brand value at $69-billion — at 2001 exchange rates about R690-billion, or just less than two-thirds of South Africa’s economic wealth as measured by the gross domestic product.
Books were written about how to treat oneself as a brand. Activist Naomi Klein fixed on brands as the new dark satanic mills, as her book No Logo added intellectual impetus to vague feelings about what harm globalisation may be doing.
Yet those days are no more. Two years ago one could have compared the impact of the Sampson book to the Little Red Book Maoist millions waved around in the 1960s — brandism versus Marxism, with the brand winning out.
The 1990s were the decade of ”The Brand”, but they are not the next big thing any longer. The golden arches of McDonald’s are tarnished as, in the words of satirical website The Onion, ”Consumers turn to food”.
The American justice system has dealt a blow to Microsoft’s image, and the growing disenchantment with the big gorilla of world politics has raised doubts about the wisdom if not the inevitability of Coca-Colonisation.
Ad industry specialist journalist Tony Koenderman recently questioned brand hype: ”Endless repetition has encouraged a widely held belief that there is huge value in a brand name. But how much value? Perhaps the time has come to reassess this shibboleth.”
Koenderman suggested the value of the brand is no more than the cost of the advertising necessary to create awareness. He noted a number of companies, domestic and foreign, that had renamed themselves with ease, such as Accenture, the consulting arm of Arthur Andersen.
Even Klein has moved on. Her latest book is titled, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalisation Debate.
True, aspects of the trend of using intellectual property law to take possession of what was once free space remain disturbing. Sampson’s Ten Trends notes: ”No longer is it sufficient to register a trademark in isolation. Today it is crucial to also register the website and potentially colours, smells and even create a sonic trademark.” A footnote reminds that the colour Pantone® 151 is the registered trademark of cellphone company Orange PCS.
What next? The South Africa Communist Party had better move fast before Absa registers red as its trademark. ”The People’s Flag is brightest cinnamon,” doesn’t have quite the same ring, somehow. (This is a joke: Microsoft never did get us to stop referring to windows in our daily lives in favour of ”external interfaces” by registering WindowsÂ