A Brand New You

At age 3, Mark Walker already knows what he wants from life. And thanks to a streaming video on his Reebok-sponsored website, The Missouri toddler, who nails 18 baskets in a row, is able to tell the world. In the video, wide-eyed Mark doesn't commit to a favorite food or a favorite basketball player, but he does commit to a brand. "I am the future of basketball," declares Mark. "I am Reebok."

In San Diego, the son of Sean and Deanna Chesleigh answers to the name of Horton. In the summer of 2003, the couple named their child after a Ruffles potato chips cartoon spokesbaby in exchange for $50,000 in college scholarship funds.

Whether reminding us to "Be Like Mike" or inviting us to join the Pepsi Generation, companies have long encouraged consumers to identify with products and brands. We're Mac or PC, Xbox or GameCube, Starbucks or anyplace-other-than-Starbucks.

Previously our social positions were determined by blood, family name, accent, place of birth and religious association. "These were all aspects of social place that were loaded at birth," says James Twitchell, author of Adcult USA and Twenty Ads That Shook the World. These once-permanent associations have lost much of their grounding. We can't tell a Methodist from a Presbyterian or automatically deduce a person's heritage from family name or accent. But we still yearn for community and connection, so we look for cues from those elements of identity that we can relate to.

We not only identify with brands but also, in the case of Horton or Mark (or, more specifically, their parents), appropriate them for our own use. The family crests borne by the knights and noblemen of old have been replaced by Nike swooshes and Tommy Hilfiger's red, white and blue. The fact is, we genuinely care about the stories brands tell and the emotions they evoke, according to Susan Fournier, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. "People look at brands as carriers of symbolic language and forget that a brand's first purpose is to close the sale."

Brands evolved after the Civil War as a pledge of quality for newly mobile individuals who no longer had personal connections with the cobbler who made their boots or the farmer who milled their grain. Brands served little other purpose for decades, but in the twentieth century, brands—the stand-ins for a personal relationship with a manufacturer—began to form increasingly intimate relationships with consumers.

"Brands can be endowed with characteristics all their own," says Timothy Brock, professor of psychology at Ohio State University. "The personality of the brand becomes extremely attractive to consumers, and so brands become new friends, who over time become old friends."

Brock labels such relationships "parasocial" because they take place between constructed personalities and humans—similar to those between soap opera characters and their fans. Fournier has identified a total of 15 types of consumer/brand relationships, from marriages of convenience and casual friends to courtships, flings and secret affairs. "For most people, JELL-O shows up as a childhood friendship," says Fournier. "Johnson & Johnson is more a mother and child relationship. Microsoft, for a larger than average number of people, forms a master-slave relationship."

Michael Solomon, professor of consumer behavior at Alabama's Auburn University and author of Conquering Consumerspace, says companies that have caught on to these relationships now play matchmaker. Saturn, for example, hosts owner reunions and barbecues, as if the purchasers of Saturn cars—along with the vehicles themselves—belong to the same high school or extended family. Harley-Davidson does the same with its Harley Owners Groups (HOGs), semiautonomous organizations that arrange charity rides and weekend gatherings in more than 100 countries so that you can bond with "the thousands of brothers and sisters you've always wanted."

Apple Computer doesn't create new family members so much as brothers- and sisters-in-arms. Presenting itself as the anti-IBM, Apple is the computer for those who shun the domineering image of "Big Blue." This approach can be traced from the historic "1984" television ad that depicted Macintosh computers as a tool to fight Orwellian oppression caused by widespread PC use (aired just once, during the 1984 Superbowl, but still considered one of the most successful ads ever) to its showcasing of computer owners who have made the switch from PCs and the Windows operating system. Apple presents itself as unique. It invites users to think of themselves as revolutionary—even though, by buying and supporting Apple, they're really just responding to another marketer's push.

Apple has also pushed its brand personality through product design: Other computers are gray, so theirs are colorful; others are square, theirs are round. Apple thus created a "meme"—a term the Darwinian biologist Richard Dawkins coined to describe self-replicating cultural elements. The meme lives outside of Apple advertisements, effectively turning its customers into a quasi-sales force. While most computers can be mistaken for one another, Apple computers stand out.

Apple's presentation of its brand as an attitude rather than a product advantage is merely an extension of the concept that advertising superstar David Ogilvy developed in the 1950s. Ogilvy created densely written ads that told stories about the finer points of a Hathaway shirt or a Rolls-Royce. Ogilvy is perhaps best known for a 1958 print ad that carried the headline "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock" and included trivia that buyers could use to impress their friends: "The famous Rolls-Royce radiator has never been changed, except that when Sir Henry Royce died in 1933, the monogram RR was changed from red to black."

Over the years, marketers have pushed Ogilvy's ideas even further, telling stories that reduce the product to an afterthought. Any American who watched television in the 1990s will likely remember the 13-part ad campaign for instant coffee that revolved around the potential romance of its attractive lead characters. Most of the 45-second episodes ended in cliffhangers, such as the fifth ad in 1992 in which "Michael" unexpectedly found a good-looking man in his lady friend's apartment. Not until the next episode, six months later, did viewers discover that the man was her brother. In effect, the coffee served as nothing more than the sponsor for short-short films that actually made us excited to watch commercials. (The coffee, incidentally, was Taster's Choice.)

Nike is a prime example of a company that has divorced products from image. The company's "Just Do It" slogan leaves it up to the buyer to decide what "it" might actually be, whether it's running a marathon or lying on the couch. The "swoosh" logo decorates hats, headbands, T-shirts, sweatpants, socks, shoes, backpacks and maternity wear, delivering a message of grace and athletic ability that's separated from what the wearer might actually be doing. In fact, Nike has been so successful in its image-building that its brand equity—the value of its brand purely in terms of name recognition, perceived quality, mental and emotional associations, and patents and trademarks—was estimated at more than $7 billion by Interbrand and BusinessWeek in 2001, half of what the entire company is worth. That Nike's brand equity has retained its value despite accusations of unfair labor practices demonstrates how much consumers value their identification with the Nike image.

Our love affair with brands has entered a new phase: Increasingly, consumers call the shots. Consumers' ability to reformulate brands through peer-to-peer marketing is one of the biggest changes in business over the past decade. "In the old days, the successful communication of a personality through advertising gave the brand a stable meaning," says Michael Solomon. "Now consumers are more proactive in reshaping brands."

Hip-hop culture "hijacked" the Waspy outdoors image of Timberland and decided that the clothes created a cool look for city kids on the subway. Similarly, "the Cadillac Escalade was not intended to become part of the black subculture," says Solomon, but rap singers regularly plug the car in their songs. When Subaru discovered that lesbians purchase its vehicles at four times the rate of the general population, the company began running ads featuring same-sex couples in magazines that targeted gay audiences.

Our relationship with brands is increasingly symbiotic as well. We now glom onto brands and companies for our own financial gain. The auction site eBay allows sellers to create virtual storefronts, letting them serve as branded merchants instead of mere hawkers of flea market wares. Amazon.com lets visitors rank its volunteer reviewers, replacing an anarchy of opinions with a hierarchy of trusted voices. Don Mitchell, chairman of Mitchell and Company in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and Amazon's #2 reviewer, says that he receives more than 100 e-mails daily from authors and publishers seeking book reviews.

Average Joes now routinely approach companies with offers to work hand-in-hand to spread commercial messages among peers. Illinois resident Jim Nelson went so far as to have the orange, blue and black logo of Web hosting company C I Host tattooed on the back of his shaved head; in return for sporting the 25-square-inch logo for five years, Nelson will receive $7,000.

New Jersey teens Chris Barrett and Luke McCabe became living advertisements for First USA after the bank agreed to sponsor their freshman year at college. "We saw Tiger Woods on TV wearing a Nike hat with the swoosh and wondered why we couldn't do something like that ourselves," says Barrett. The duo now recruit students as test marketers. "We're peers to every other student—and creating a brand that relates to them is priceless to every company in the world," he says. "We created our brand, then found a company that fit our brand and promoted them together. We got out of it exactly what we wanted."

Basketball dervish Mark Walker can get what he wants from Reebok too.

Additional research by Thomas Sexton.