another overview of recent Taylor Swift debate
Somewhere in that Twitter discussion, Tom Ewing suggested the issue is really about Swift’s content/product versus her brand — if you look at the image that’s being marketed around her, the criticisms are valid, whereas if you listen to what she’s actually writing and singing, they might not.
I’m not going to say much about Taylor Swift (audience perks up) because I want to clarify what I said about branding (audience slumps back into seat).
Obviously there should be no “versus” in brand and product. Talking in general here, not about a talented young pop singer-songwriter. The whole POINT of a brand is that it’s communicating the idea, the sense of a thing away from the experience of actually using it. After decades of arguing about this nonsense marketing pros seem to have settled down (for the moment) with the idea that a brand is essentially a set of associations people have about a thing. These associations range from very personal ones - I drank Coke whenever I spent weekends with my Dad - to huge abstract ideas like Nike “owning” the concept of taking decisive individual action and crystallising that in a slogan. In the middle of this swirl of associations are some which are even linked to the product and plenty more which are linked to where people consume it, who with, etc.
The upshot of the “set of associations” deal is that any given brand is both more complex and less complex than its product. More complex, because it draws in a load of personal and tight social context. Less complex, because all this context then gets aggregated and smoothed out, particularly when it comes to the way the brand gets communicated and presented in public.
For instance: one of the things marketers do which makes them so hated is that they figure out when enough people have had a very personal experience with a brand to turn that into a general experience, and suddenly your weekends with your Dad have become everyone’s weekends with their Dad, and a version of you is on an advert with a version of your Dad and a version of a weekend. It’s like crap observational comedy, except it’s observational sentimentality half the time.
And the other upshot is that the brand owners don’t wholly control the brand, whereas they do control the product*. In the vast majority of cases, though, there isn’t much difference between the brand and the product for most people, except that the public brand tends to simplify and oversell the product. So when there’s wide-scale dissonance between a brand and a product that’s often a Bad Thing. At an individual level, it happens all the time, of course, any time anyone is disappointed by something they thought would be good for instance.
It’s really tempting to say “well the product is what matters and the branding is of secondary interest.” It seems rational, progressive even. One of the interesting things about the Taylor Swift argument is that the “let’s strip away the branding and look at THE FACTS” perspective is usually used by people OPPOSED to a brand to explose the practises and material truths that go into the making of the product (“They don’t even play their own instruments!”/”Coca-cola is just sugar water really”) whereas here it’s the case for the defense. That’s unusual, as is the fact that the anti-Swift side is the ones who assume brand and product are aligned, and the pro-Swift side are the ones suggesting a difference.
*Yes, this is a gross oversimplification, partcularly as brands were invented to try and convince buyers of the existence of some level of product quality control.
