At age 3, Mark Walker already knows what he wants from life. And thanks to a streaming video on his Reebok-sponsored website, The Missouri toddler, who nails 18 baskets in a row, is able to tell the world. In the video, wide-eyed Mark doesn't commit to a favorite food or a favorite basketball player, but he does commit to a brand. "I am the future of basketball," declares Mark. "I am Reebok."
In San Diego, the son of Sean and Deanna Chesleigh answers to the name of Horton. In the summer of 2003, the couple named their child after a Ruffles potato chips cartoon spokesbaby in exchange for $50,000 in college scholarship funds.
Whether reminding us to "Be Like Mike" or inviting us to join the Pepsi Generation, companies have long encouraged consumers to identify with products and brands. We're Mac or PC, Xbox or GameCube, Starbucks or anyplace-other-than-Starbucks.
Previously our social positions were determined by blood, family name, accent, place of birth and religious association. "These were all aspects of social place that were loaded at birth," says James Twitchell, author of Adcult USA and Twenty Ads That Shook the World. These once-permanent associations have lost much of their grounding. We can't tell a Methodist from a Presbyterian or automatically deduce a person's heritage from family name or accent. But we still yearn for community and connection, so we look for cues from those elements of identity that we can relate to.
We not only identify with brands but also, in the case of Horton or Mark (or, more specifically, their parents), appropriate them for our own use. The family crests borne by the knights and noblemen of old have been replaced by Nike swooshes and Tommy Hilfiger's red, white and blue. The fact is, we genuinely care about the stories brands tell and the emotions they evoke, according to Susan Fournier, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. "People look at brands as carriers of symbolic language and forget that a brand's first purpose is to close the sale."
Brands evolved after the Civil War as a pledge of quality for newly mobile individuals who no longer had personal connections with the cobbler who made their boots or the farmer who milled their grain. Brands served little other purpose for decades, but in the twentieth century, brands—the stand-ins for a personal relationship with a manufacturer—began to form increasingly intimate relationships with consumers.
"Brands can be endowed with characteristics all their own," says Timothy Brock, professor of psychology at Ohio State University. "The personality of the brand becomes extremely attractive to consumers, and so brands become new friends, who over time become old friends."
Brock labels such relationships "parasocial" because they take place between constructed personalities and humans—similar to those between soap opera characters and their fans. Fournier has identified a total of 15 types of consumer/brand relationships, from marriages of convenience and casual friends to courtships, flings and secret affairs. "For most people, JELL-O shows up as a childhood friendship," says Fournier. "Johnson & Johnson is more a mother and child relationship. Microsoft, for a larger than average number of people, forms a master-slave relationship."
Michael Solomon, professor of consumer behavior at Alabama's Auburn University and author of Conquering Consumerspace, says companies that have caught on to these relationships now play matchmaker. Saturn, for example, hosts owner reunions and barbecues, as if the purchasers of Saturn cars—along with the vehicles themselves—belong to the same high school or extended family. Harley-Davidson does the same with its Harley Owners Groups (HOGs), semiautonomous organizations that arrange charity rides and weekend gatherings in more than 100 countries so that you can bond with "the thousands of brothers and sisters you've always wanted."
Apple Computer doesn't create new family members so much as brothers- and sisters-in-arms. Presenting itself as the anti-IBM, Apple is the computer for those who shun the domineering image of "Big Blue." This approach can be traced from the historic "1984" television ad that depicted Macintosh computers as a tool to fight Orwellian oppression caused by widespread PC use (aired just once, during the 1984 Superbowl, but still considered one of the most successful ads ever) to its showcasing of computer owners who have made the switch from PCs and the Windows operating system. Apple presents itself as unique. It invites users to think of themselves as revolutionary—even though, by buying and supporting Apple, they're really just responding to another marketer's push.
Apple has also pushed its brand personality through product design: Other computers are gray, so theirs are colorful; others are square, theirs are round. Apple thus created a "meme"—a term the Darwinian biologist Richard Dawkins coined to describe self-replicating cultural elements. The meme lives outside of Apple advertisements, effectively turning its customers into a quasi-sales force. While most computers can be mistaken for one another, Apple computers stand out.
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