“You have no power against a brand. How could you? You are but a persona, a target customer, a consumer. There is no longer culture, identity, or individuality that can be achieved outside of a brand. There is no longer a way to judge and identify one another outside of a brand. We must judge one another by what brands we associate with. There is no escape, there is no authenticity, no concrete reality. Branding is a forced perspective, one that we somehow don’t seem to mind.

At its core, brands are crafted myths. It shares a contemporary origin to another constructed myth; the American West. As Americans flooded the Western plains, cattle ranchers used the land for herding and driving their livestock. In a landscape of open fields and a lack of fencing, cattle needed to be identified by their proper owners. The simplest way of doing this was applying a hot branding iron to the side of a cow. Searing a design into the rears of cattle allowed not only a symbol of possession, but a form of differentiation between ranchers. A similar practice of product identification started to impact American consumerism around this time. American products started to incorporate logos, unique designs, and eventually a brand for the purpose of differentiation.


Branding has evolved far from this simple form of differentiation and ownership into something more nefarious. As the world became more industrialized and economies became reliant on more consumer spending, brands started to enter the realm of mental differentiation to appeal to consumers. Brands became associated with lifestyles, celebrities, countries, cultures, and identities in order to have a deeper connection with consumers. The brand now promised a particular kind of life through purchase instead of a particular product.

Branding started to become less about product differentiation and more of differentiation between consumers.

Today, branding has leaned further from lifestyles into personal identities. In an effort to ingrain even deeper with consumers, branding has become a tool of perception. Brand is no longer a lifestyle, but a form of understanding and thinking. Today, we affiliate more towards brands that we believe describe us. In turn, we have to judge others by their brand choices. Brands are now omnipresent and quietly dictate how we judge others and ourselves.


And all of this for what? At its core, a brand is a money-making tool. It doesn’t matter how well-meaning a certain company might be. It doesn’t matter if a brand is associated with a massive corporation or a small charity. No matter the intention, the brand compels you to think of a specific company in a specific way with the hopes of you connecting the company to your personality; leading to an association with the brand and thus an eventual purchase. Any company must sell products or services to exist, and the brand is solely a tool that is needed to keep a company alive. All of this is at the expense of our personalities and perceptions.


We now find ourselves in a very strange reality. Our thoughts are forced by companies through a brand because a profit is needed for their survival. The strangest part of all is how we don’t even see this manipulation. The act of branding has become so omnipresent and ubiquitous that its impacts are ironically almost impossible to see. The brand has become how we nowunderstand the world and those within it. The brand doesn’t sear into cattle anymore, but into our brains.

The purpose of a brand is to force a perception in the minds of the public. This and branding’s omnipresent dominance has made independent thought outside of the brand impossible.