Just ignore it

Way back in the deep, dark depths of the 1990s, an old friend named Roland Gatin called me up depressed after a day at work as a teaching assistant in Beausejour.

Rollie, an exceedingly gentle dude with a vaguely hippie-ish outlook on life, was upset some of the kids who lined up to have their faces painted at a school carnival wanted to have the Nike swoosh emblazoned across their visages instead of being done up as lions or cats or werewolves or whatever little kids are supposed to want to be.

"Do they even know what the logo means?" he asked, to the best of my recollection. But I thought then, as I do right now, that the imprinting of popular brands has nothing to do with meaning.

To an elementary-school student in the mid-1990s, a corporate logo was no different than an NHL team insignia, a religious symbol or the flag of a sovereign nation: It was just a pattern simple enough to copy but complex enough to be immediately recognizable to someone else.

The actual meaning of the Nike swoosh -- whether it was the seize-the-day message implicit in the slogan "Just do it" or merely a simple exhortation to consume -- was less important to marketers than the fact a future generation of shoppers would become familiar and grow comfortable with the famous swoosh. I believed that then and still believe this today.

Fifteen years later, things are supposedly different. After the publication of Naomi Klein's No Logo, the explosion in popularity of personal electronics and the more recent rise of social media, a small army of pop psychologists is now trying to convince us little kids are now media-savvy and therefore immune to messaging.

To oversimplify their argument: If you started using the Internet at the age of three, learned to set your browser to smack down pop-ups by the age of five and have never watched a television show without using some form of advertising filter, you must be completely impervious to the omnipresent influence of marketing.

According to these same idealists, even if you're not completely immune from advertising, you at least know enough to mediate the messages that are constantly bombarding your mind and either consciously or subconsciously filter to out the information your brain deems coercive or repetitive or simply useless.

I would love to subscribe to this point of view. I would love to believe we live in a world of post-branding, where children, teens, post-adolescents and adults no longer succumb to overt and covert attempts at persuasion.

But the simple fact of the matter is little kids today are no different from kids a generation ago. They grow up to be adults who think precisely the same way: they consume the messages that are available to them and construct their own universes out of this information, whether or not they understand the intended message.

To put it bluntly, we're still suckers for advertising and branding, regardless of whether traditional media have been supplanted by Youtube and Twitter. Not really that much has changed in the post-postmodern world.

Barely a year ago, many otherwise intelligent citizens of Winnipeg went gaga over the announcement IKEA was coming to town. Fans of the furniture chain took the announcement as some form of civic affirmation, despite the fact the store is really coming here to take advantage of real-estate deal too good to pass up.

The recent opening of an Apple store at Polo Park turned the brand-worshiping sentiment into a spectacle. Shoppers lined up to purchase mundane devices like USB cords that could easily be purchased at any other retailer, but are somehow imbued with the magic of Jobs and Wozniak when purchased only from an Apple store.

The very same week, clothing chain H&M also chose to grace Winnipeg with its presence. The whoops of almost religious joy that followed the announcement made me realize many people in this town, if not an outright majority, have completely internalized the sort of brand loyalty Klein so despised and I idiotically believed was passé.

Living in an inner-city neighbourhood, which allows me to walk to work and back and conveniently forget the fact most people in this town actually like driving to big-box stores, I am obviously so out of touch with the average Winnipegger you can pretty much discount anything I say about consumer culture.

But that won't stop me from saying it anyway: We're all just a bunch of giddy kids with logos emblazoned across our faces, subconsciously convinced the simple symbols we embrace are somehow better than the last batch, and the last batch before.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 17, 2009 F3