Consumerism: “What is the relationship between branding and The Consumer Self (Ewen)”
This was the question I chose to focus in on for this module & brief. After doing extensive research into consumerism, branding and ‘the consumer self’ we wrote an essay about it. The essay gave me a way of summerising all the information I had learnt over the months and gave me a broad overview of the different aspects of branding that effect us as the consumers.
This part of the module required us to produce a practical piece of graphic design in response to the essay question. The relevance of the practical side was to show how conceptual studies can inform our personal practice within graphic design and effect our choices.
I felt due to the reasoning behind doing the practical body of work the most appropriate part of my research to focus in on was re-branding. I’d found this particularly interesting when doing research into consumerism as this paragraph discusses it in a historical sense...
Passage from essay
Another clear example that re-branding works to make things much more desirable is the re-branding of the potato in the 18th century by the Frederick the Great; Rory Sutherland talks about this in his TED lecture- ‘Life lessons from an ad man’. Frederick wanted the Prussians to eat potatoes to increase health, the problem being potatoes look pretty bad and nobody wanted them. He tried making them compulsory but it failed to work. Eventually he decided to declare the potatoes a royal food. Only the royal family were able to eat them and the patch they were grown in was guarded. Almost immediately the Prussians stole from the potato patch and underground farms popped up all over Germany. ‘’What he’d effectively done is he’d re-branded the potato. It was an absolute masterpiece’’(Sutherland, 2009). This simple tactic of making the potatoes exclusively upper class made them desirable to people.
I also researched the re-branding that Apple does yearly to expand my knowledge of this popular tactic to entice customers.
Taking all of this into consideration I, sure that I want to take something that is considered to be undesirable in contemporary society (like potatoes were in the essay example) and re-brand it to make it more successful and more appealing so more people would want to buy it.
Other initial ideas for the practical focus include, the way our mental health is effected by consumerism and planned obsolescence. But after writing the essay I realise the most applicable and appropriate to my personal practice is probably branding.
