Part I
Setting the Scene – The Tangled Worlds of Brands and Social Capital
Brands are everywhere, it seems. Everything that embodies or represents any service, function or form of utility feels as if it has been ‘branded’. There’s a terrifying statistic regularly paraded to new recruits in advertising agencies, that the average UK consumer is subjected to more than 3000 commercial messages a day: messages that are made pithy and ballistic by their use of brands, branding, tight copy and arresting visuals. The statistic is trotted out to make all the new recruits realise the importance and challenge of establishing ‘cut-through’. In other words, how your message can make the cut to being in any way registered amongst those 3000. But wait – 3000 a day? It’s a wonder we have time to do anything else. Colleague Jon Alexander1 offers a novel way to look at this number. He points out that the Koutoubia in Marrakech calls the city’s Muslims to prayer five times a day.
Five times a day to prayer – that seems quite a lot.
But brands – if we position them as some similar glue from which millions also get meaning in their lives every day – call their faithful to pray 3000 times a day. Now that is a lot. And what’s more, it’s not even a case of asking the faithful to be complicit and engage in the process – nope, the messages get preached directly to you, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing.
And of course it’s not just the usual stuff we consume – from a strawberry yoghurt at breakfast ...
