Brand Hijacking
What is brand hijacking? For a start, it’s the name of a business-manual type book recently published by Portfolio and written by one Alex Wipperfurth
Cult marketing is the overall concept, with brand hijacking just a fancy sub-plot. But what a sub-plot. Put simply, a brand hijack is when consumers take your brand somewhere else, i.e. they put a gun to the head of the driver “that’s you, Mr Brand” and ask you, not so politely, to change direction. But here’s the clever bit. While superficially being hijacked isn’t so nice, those pesky hijackers often know something you don’t. They’re pretty streetwise for a start. They can take you places you didn’t know you wanted to go. Who needs to pay for focus groups, market research, product development, etc., when there are people out there who want to do it all for free? So there’s a trick, a kind of consumerist double bluff, whereby the streetwise are allowed to steer while someone else is pulling the strings.
And don’t think that you canny post-consumers can escape the vicious circle either; products like Pabst Blue Ribbon, an ostensibly blue-collar beer apparently favoured by middle America, are specifically created to appear ‘anti-design’; anodyne and earthy, just right for those who reject the concept of marketing altogether. In an age when marketers believe passionately in the power of their industry to build better lives, is it so bad to just roll over and let these carefully manufactured emotions wash over us? Or, is the post-consumer engaged in a constant battle for authenticity, ever vigilant for the fatal infiltration of the brand hijacker?
Jonathan Bell
The idea of brand-jacking has a long lineage. One of the first brands, in Britain at least, is the Monarchy who, in many ways, have been brand leaders in fashion, food, language etc at least until the beginning of the 20th Century. Whether eating habits or the latest fashion style what the monarchy practiced was scrutinised and reproduced and gradually tumbled down the social classes – caught in the net of middle class networks before disappearing into the dark hole of working class culture – how many ‘best rooms’ in Woking or Streatham remain idle but prepared for a state visit at anytime! Although here the hijacking of a brand is more nuanced, not least by the mores of the British class system, it is branding none the less – the Pabst Blue Beer phenomena in reverse.
In more recent times Dick Hebdige has looked at how brands are reconfigured by youth culture. He looks at the example of the Italian motor scooter, the Vespa and Lambretta – both originally designed with a feminine user in mind but in the context of British youth sub-culture of the 1960s, the Scooter becomes a symbol of masculine pride. Latterly, the same methods of appropriation are seen, not in youth culture, but the new sub-culture of middle age masculinity – a classic example is the rise of cargo pants – from army surplus store, to skate culture, to the deification of Gap branding until today, finally wrapping the comfortable waistline of middle age men as a symbol of ‘non-conformity’ (the irony is often missed by the wearer).
At the heart of brand-jacking is an anthropological obsession with how we consume. A brand like Nestles ‘Quality Street’ chocolate selection, first came to market in the late 1930s taking its name from a popular play by J.M.Barrie (of Peter Pan fame). The product was aimed at the aspirational middle classes; the packaging still shows a young Miss with her Major – a mise en scéne of love, class and war. Thus its history follows a ‘traditional’ form of branding whereas today, in the age of Observation, the branding industry have scrutinised and hijacked personal choice – you can now buy a giant version of many of the 14 different chocolates you find in a Quality Street box. Personal choice is sold back to you – but now bigger and better!
/phil pearson 27/11/2005