The most important function of a brand is to promote consistency. Institutions trust that the appearance of their logo, whether on a remote mountainside or on top of a skyscraper, on a bedsheet or on a cloak, will instantly communicate the reliable presence of a particular set of values and act as a promise of uniformity and quality.
The enemy of branding is local variation. Here too we sense a certain tension between Romantic and institutional values, for whereas Romanticism appreciates the charms of the particular and the regional, the home-made and the spontaneous, institutions cannot forget the hazards of provincial initiatives. Instead of touching improvements on the rules of the centre, they see only depressing deviations from minimal standards. They are reminded of corruption, laziness, degeneracy and the abandonment of initial ambitions. To stamp out eccentricities, the training manual for new staff of the McDonald’s Corporation runs to 300 pages, providing instructions for every imaginable action and transaction: there are rules about where the employee’s name badge must be placed, what sort of smile each customer must be treated to and precisely how much mayonnaise should be added to the underside of every top bun. The hamburger company has little faith in what the members of its workforce will do if left to their own devices.
(illustration credit 10.4)
In this, at least, McDonald’s has much in common with the Catholic Church, which has similarly spent a good deal of its history struggling to ensure a regularity of service across a vast and scattered labour force. Taken collectively, its edicts — specifying details down to what sort of wine should be used at Holy Communion and what colour priests’ shoes ought to be — indicate extreme concern about the standards of its peripheral branches. Following the Fourth Council of the Lateran, convoked by Pope Innocent III in 1213, the Church decreed (with evident irritation over the frequency with which even such basic rules were being broken) that ‘clerics shall not attend the performance of mimes, entertainers or actors. They shall not visit taverns except in case of necessity, namely when on a journey. They are forbidden to play dice or games of chance or be present at them.’ And lest some be tempted to show flair in their hairstyles, it was added that ‘they must always have a shaved crown and tonsure’.
Heavy-handed though such decrees may have been, they helped to establish and enforce the consistent standards of ritual and performance that the faithful came to expect from the Church, and that all of us have in turn come to expect from corporations.
The advantages of an institutional delivery of soul-related needs: Father Chris Vipers listens to a confession at St Lawrence’s Church, Feltham, England, 2010. (illustration credit 10.5)
It is a singularly regrettable feature of the modern world that while some of the most trivial of our requirements (for shampoo and moisturizers, for example, as well as pasta sauce and sunglasses) are met by superlatively managed brands, our essential needs are left in the disorganized and unpredictable care of lone actors. For a telling illustration of the practical effects of branding and the quality control it is typically accompanied by, we need only compare the fragmented, highly variable field of psychotherapy with the elegantly discharged ritual of confession within the Catholic faith. Confession, well regimented in its every particular since the latter part of the fourteenth century, thanks to a stream of papal edicts and Vatican-issued manuals, is an epitome of the sort of reliable global service industry that would become the norm for consumer goods only in the mid-twentieth century. Everything from the positioning of the confessional box to the tone of voice used by the priest is governed by explicit rules, designed to assure all Catholics from Melbourne to Anchorage that their expectations for a redemptive examination of their soul will be met. No such provisions apply to our closest secular equivalent. Psychotherapy as currently practised lacks any consistency of setting or even any benchmarks for such apparently small yet critical details as the wording of the message on the therapist’s answering machine, his or her dress code and the appearance of the consulting room. Patients are left to endure a run of local quirks, from encounters with their therapists’ pets or children to gurgling pipework and bric-a-brac furnishings.
An imaginary branded chain of psychotherapists. Why should only phones and shampoos benefit from coherent retail identities? (illustration credit 10.6)
4.
After successfully defining their identity, many corporations have gone on to engage in what business writers refer to as ‘brand extension’, the process whereby a company revered for its approach in one commercial sector carries over its values into another. Companies that began by making suits, for example, have realized that their values could just as effectively be applied to the design of belts and sunglasses, from which point it was only a short leap to imagine translation into furniture, then restaurants, apartments and eventually whole holiday resorts. These companies have wisely recognized that their customers’ allegiance is to an ethos rather than to a single product, and that the beauty and goodness that were first distinguished in a tie could be no less present in a chair leg, an entrée or a sun lounger.
Inertia or unnecessary modesty has to date, however, prevented the most vigorous of modern companies from extending their brands across the full range of human requirements and, most cogently for the purposes of the present discussion, from applying their expertise to the apex of Maslow’s famous pyramid of needs. Corporations have instead chosen to set up shop along the base of this pyramid, making minor improvements to services and products designed to help us to sleep, eat, be safe or move while leaving unaddressed our desire to self-actualize, learn, love and inwardly grow. It is a failing of historic proportions, for instance, that BMW’s concern for rigour and precision has ended so conclusively at the bumpers of its cars rather than stretching to the founding of a school or of a political party, or that Giorgio Armani’s eponymous corporation has determinedly skirted the possibility of running a therapy unit or a liberal arts college.
Intellectual movements have likewise, and just as regrettably, shunned attempts at brand extension. They have failed to imagine that their ideas could generate complementary, analogous services and products in the material realm, and become more vivid to us for having physical equivalents.
What makes religions so distinctive is that they have dared to assert coherent brand identities across a diverse range of areas, from the strictly intellectual and theological to the aesthetic, sartorial and culinary. Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism have all succeeded in relating larger ideas about the salvation of mankind to such subordinate material activities as managing weekend retreats, radio stations, restaurants, museums, lecture halls and clothing lines.
Because we are embodied creatures — sensory animals as well as rational beings — we stand to be lastingly influenced by concepts only when they come at us through a variety of channels. As religions seem alone in properly understanding, we cannot be adequately marked by ideas unless, in addition to being delivered through books, lectures and newspapers, they are also echoed in what we wear, eat, sing, decorate our houses with and bathe in.