Brands Help Define Moments in Time
Posted: November 3rd, 2010 | Author: Ed Munro | Filed under: Brands, Copywriting, Creative, Culture, Employment Branding, Ideas, Innovation, Notes, Observations, Work | Tags: Brand Equity, Brand Reputation, Brands, GEICO, Modernity, Movies, Popular Culture, Product Placement | No Comments »
Do popular brands help define who we are? Do they help provide the visual and iconic clues that define an era or specific moments in time? And do brands need to stick to one image or campaign in order to be successful as representations of moments in time?
Brands that stand the test of time are the ones that are fully ingrained in consumers’ minds. Al Ries of Advertising Age recently wrote an excellent article that argues, “Once a brand is established with a clearly defined marketing position, the brand’s owner should ask a fundamental question before making any significant changes. Why tinker with success?”
Mr. Ries also states, “the way to build a brand is with a consistent message over an extended period of time.” The end result of creating a consistent message is what’s known as building brand equity. Brand equity is created over time through marketing, PR, advertising and more recently social media, and is constantly reinforced by gentle or sometimes over-the-top reminders (ads) that together serve as a ubiquitous force that’s woven into our collective conscience. In other words, we become so familiar with the brand that we recognize it as being a normal part of popular culture and our everyday lives.
As Colin Drummond so eloquently wrote in his blog Brands Belong in Culture, Not Categories:
A brand’s true usefulness is in how it helps us to participate in culture… brands represent aspects of today’s America: modernity, hope, intelligence, optimism, blindness and decay. These brands are culturally useful to us when we use them or even just have an opinion about them. Because our association with them says a lot about who we are. Significant brands are never just relevant to a category, they contribute to culture at large.
Marking Time with Familiar Brands 
Familiar brands from Apple and IBM to Kellogg’s and Colgate-Palmolive often form the backdrop to our daily existence and over time become the icons that help define the present and our past. As we mentioned in an earlier post on technology, “look at any old photograph and it’s the clothes and “products” around the subjects that truly dates the photo.”
Making Films Look Contemporary
And what about movies that take place in present day? Present day is only deemed “present” for a limited time, then the film becomes a representation and a reminder of the past. If you think way back to Stephen Spielberg’s 1977 classic, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind or 1982’s ET the Extra-Terrestrial, these two films were contemporary for the day and each contained scenes where many familiar brands were in view. Yes, what some may call shameless product-placement, was in fact Spielberg carefully setting a baseline for normality. In Close Encounters we see Barry Guiler’s (the little boy) refrigerator filled with familiar brands including pull-tab Coca-Cola cans spilling their contents and later we see a McDonald’s and Shell gas station that all seem to validate the “typical” landscape of Midwest America in 1977. At one point in ET the audience sees the title character looking inside a fridge that also contains several well-known brands such as Coors beer– all of which reinforces the notion that it’s just a normal American household. Of course using Reese’s Pieces is one of the most famous uses of product placement and will forever be associated with ET and the early 80′s.
The point is, Spielberg wasn’t looking to incorporate these well known brands into the script only for the product placement fees, rather, they played an integral role in creating a sense of the familiar and even framing a banal comfort zone for the viewer so that when each of the film’s extraordinary events later took place – they appeared that much more intense. Spielberg employed the use of everyday products and their core brand equity to help deliver realistic scenes that the audience would immediately (maybe even unconsciously) recognize and therefore accept as being ordinary.
