Reaching A Better Place

Brand Materialism
A brand materialistic person loves her Prada purse, her Gucci watch, her Chanel handbag. For her the value of each object depends on almost entirely on the identity of the manufacturer.
I once came across someone who used a brand name in his or her email address. It was something like jcrewgirl@xyzdomainnamedotcom. After talking with this person I found that he/she actually identified him/herself by his/her wardrobe, or, more specifically, the brand name which all his/her clothes had in common. Unhealthy? I’m tempted to say so but I won’t claim it is – I’m not a shrink. The point is that J.Crew or whoever it was spend millions of dollars a year in advertising, which to me always sounds like overkill, but if there are people out there who will use a company name as part of their Custom Identities …well, that has to be good for business, right?
This isn’t just about clothing or accessories either. I’ve read of company CEOs and heads of marketing, from Starbucks to Coca-Cola, who talk of establishing emotional bonds between the brand name and the customer – of going from thinking of themselves as product-oriented companies to thinking of themselves as marketing companies.

Brand Materials and Well-being
Brand materialistic people are happy when buying more products from their cherished brand and to a lesser extent they’re happy when using those products, at least for a while. To sustain the brand materialistic happiness, of course, they have to buy more of the stuff.
As I said with the J.Crew girl example, it’s tempting to point out some terrible unhappiness to this brand materialism (and I would be far from alone in doing so) but I don’t see brand materialism as a scourge of the masses anymore. I used to, but the more I analyse it the less terrible I find it. All materialism is fairly undesirable – none of the materialisms listed are good things – but brand materialism is no more or less worse than others. It’s just that it’s more practiced and so more people can’t handle it and so it does more damage than the other types. It carries the additional problem, not so much for the individual brand materialist but for others, of exclusion, peer pressure and so on – something which tends to go on more amongst children and teens.
Even for this nasty side effect I’m not going to say brand materialism is worse than the others because once again it’s a matter of practice. It just happens that many under eighteens tend to use brand materialism as a means of harsh social structure. Big deal: kids have been using family wealth, religious background, obesity, intelligence, stupidity, complexion, strength, hair colour, speech impediments, accent, height and pretty much any other trait they can to belittle and promote, include and exclude, each other for centuries. And some shrinks get worked up because in recent years they’re doing it over brand names.
If brand name items are lost or destroyed the brand materialist will be upset – but the intensity of his/her upset will almost be based just on how much money he/she spent on that item. This is different to sentiment materialists and collection materialists – for whom financial cost is an irrelevant factor. A brand name item, after all, can almost always be replaced – it’s just a matter of forking out the cash. And when the exact item can’t be replaced a brand materialist can just buy a similar, better item from the same brand.
So, if you get rich you can actually cut out all the unhappiness that can come with brand materialism. Not that vast wealth will allow you to cultivate this materialism to the point that it will expand to replace other sources of happiness.

Reducing Brand Materialism
There are at least three ways to do this.

The first is to recognise that your favourite brands sort of don’t exist. Levi Strauss & Co. is a company – which means that it is a legal entity that is semi-tangible only to shareholders and government tax departments. The people who you might say ‘were’ the company – such as Levi and Strauss – are dead. Today’s workforce that you might collectively call the company of Levi Strauss & Co. number in the thousands. And, of course, the brand could continue to exist if any of those people were replaced. Probably the only thing that hasn’t changed since 1853, when the company was founded, is that bit of legal business registration that states the company’s name. Change the figures around and this principal of human transience, of immateriality, applies to any brand name, of clothing or anything else. So if you just love Prada or Apple or Nintendo or Harrods then just what are you in love with?

The second way is to gradually buy more and more of the stuff you want from a variety of companies. The greater the variety of brands in your inventory of items the less attached you are likely to feel to any one brand – provided you like the goods from the other companies, of course.

The third is to step back and gain perspective or, put simply, to get a grip. Gap exists independently of you. It doesn’t know who you are – it probably doesn’t even have you as a customer number with a shopping history like some shops do. Your patronage of Gap has absolutely nothing to with what makes up you. Similarly you are not a Chanel-wearing person. You are a person who happens to use Chanel products – among many, many other products produced by other manufacturers. I reckon that more than 90% of the people in England buy more products made by Tesco than they do any other manufacturer. You’d be really hard-pressed to find an English person who has an emotional attachment to that brand of supermarket though – or any brand of supermarket – and you’d find it even harder to find one who includes Tesco as part of who he/she is.

Check out the other articles in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6.

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Related Articles:

• The Truth about Materialism
• How Rare is a ‘Rare’ Item?
• Is it Bad to be Materialistic?
• Is Your Sentimentality Affecting Your Happiness?
• Breaking Thought Cycles