Tell me, honestly, do you buy your toilet roll because it has a cute, fluffy Labrador puppy on it? Or maybe not quite that, maybe you buy due to the slightly overweight singing bear that graces the toilet roll adverts? Yes?… sad isn’t it! However, I am not going to bombard you with cheap, Swedish scientific research that proves that toilet roll is carcinogenic, or causes migraines, or kills fish. No, I’m actually going to write about how low our lives must have sunk to make us live in a world where we brand bog roll. Shall I continue?…
Branding, originally used to identify cattle, has now become the big buck business. Today, millions of us walk down the high street with Nike, or Fat Face or even a stylish new charity, burnt onto our clothes and our consumer minds. So that even when you close your eyes at night, the familiar jingle rings in your ears and colourful billboard pasted on the backs of your eyelids encourage you to go and buy. We are owned by brands, just as cattle are owned by their branders.
Today, brands can do anything – they control us. What started as a (insert company) can expand out into (etc.). They even brand athletes, musicians…poverty?! Now, if we considered this marketing ploy slightly strange, indeed a bit sick, I wouldn’t be so worried. But the thing is, we follow! It never stops, the future could see branded “quality seaside air”, branded religions! The Worshippers of IKEA, The Nuns of the Third Chapter of Virgin. And there we will be, noses on the ground shouting out to cheap Norwegian chipboard furniture for forgiveness.
With a well-known brand, companies can overlook almost anything. The average consumer is blinded by their illusive need for the brand. Consequently, quality isn’t a factor in our desire for purchase. “We get the organisations we deserve. If we accept duplicity, greed and manipulation as a society, we should not be surprised by businesses that stretch the boundaries of corporate behaviour” - writes Nicholas Ind. So, a company with a well-known brand is able to sell the cheapest, sweatshop product for three times its worth. This makes a market, such as high-street clothes, very hard for new, small businesses to get into. They could offer a better quality, even more stylish product than their global competitors and yet inevitably not sell anything because the brand is not recognised.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t get all my clothes from Bhs (a bad example of branding) or out of the back of the Sunday Times Magazine which sells “cosy” socks and tracksuit bottoms. I just don’t see the point in buying something for its name’s sake. Yes, sometimes brands do advertise a quality and reliability guaranteed . It’s just the act of walking around like a human billboard that I think is sad.
So, next time, when you go out to buy some more toilet roll, don’t go for the Labrador (It would be rather awkward to use anyway) go for “Bryn’s Brand New Brand of Bog Standard Bog Roll” Go on, put that on a T-shirt.