What Brand of Church?

The [grid::brand] leads to some neighborhoods I've never seen before:

.:dydimustk:. What brand of church do you wear?

Brand v. Branding [grid::blog]

Was planning a longer post on brand versus branding, but Anne Galloway has gone and written a lot of up better then I:

it seems to me that discussions of BRANDING too often ignore use-value or the active participation of users in creating meaning and value around commodities and BRANDS. In other words, just as designers cannot predict every way their products will be used, we cannot make easy arguments for how BRANDS are used. A BRAND-in-use is different than a BRAND-as-representation, its meaning separate from its actual use; what a BRAND represents is different from how it acts.

...

The BRAND is never stable, and arguably only becomes (contextually) meaningful in use. To speak of BRANDS as invasive and oppressive neglects people's everyday strategies and tactics of resistance and reappropriation. In more religious or mythological contexts, syncretism refers to the practice of merging different beliefs and practices. We do the same with material culture.

...

BRANDS comprise shifting assemblages of people, ideas, objects and practices - and my belief that we need to ask how BRANDS act, and not (just) what or who they represent.

perhaps I'll have a bit more to add later on...

On Adbusters - [grid::brand]

Adbusters is a lifestyle magazine for consumerist anorexics and bulimics. Everyone in the western world enjoys shopping wether they like to admit it or not. Even those who hate to shop do buck eighties when it come to their product. Maybe its high heeled shoes, maybe its obscure Japanese comics, X-mas ornaments or hemp jewelry.

But even in the consumerist paradise of America, people sometimes feel a bit bloated. And Adbusters is where they go to purge. Feeling guilty about buying that handwoven toilet paper in a custom carved wooden box? Or maybe the fact that it only took 94 minutes to get bored of your new cellphone/vacuum cleaner has got you down? Adbusters sells the perfect remedy, anti-consumption in nice bite sized, well designed chunks.

Most readers don't even need to really purge, they just need the dream of purging. A fantasy of anti-consumption to occupy brainspace next to the dreams of having a body like Giselle or becoming the next Tiger Woods with that $5,000 golf club. "You too can save the world" screams the Adbusters salesman. Its a good fantasy, worth maybe $6 or whatever it is they charge.

And then tomorrow you can wake up, toss Adbusters on top of Wallpaper in the pile and read Look Look for a while.

Now don't get me wrong, Adbusters sometimes does great work. But for the most part their grip on reality is just south of Mr Jackson's. Issue after issue reads like a deep denial of the fact that the circulation of goods and information is necessary to the functioning of the world. There is a constant inability to distinguish the very criticizable manipulations of corporations from the unfortunate but acceptable side effects of living in a world of six billion interconnected people. Advertising a new cereal just isn't the same as Nestle pushing defective baby formula in the name of profit, yes?

If the closest you've gotten to growing your own food is leaving yogurt in the fridge overnight, how do you expect me to take seriously your anticorporate ranting? I've yet to see Adbusters and its crowd come remotely close to explaining how to feed and clothe 6 billion without corporations. Well I guess the marxists of the lot have a theory, but its not one I'm buying...

That's not to say everything in Adbuster's is wrong, from time to time they hit targets right on the money. But is a little rigor too much to ask for?

[please also note that tobias c. van Veen has his own lengthy critique of the mag up here, go check it out, its good.]

[grid::brand]

[grid::brand] has begun. Here in the US its not officially the date yet, a small lesson in globalism I suppose.

You can keep track of some of the activity here.

This might be a working RSS Feed, although it looks a bit funny.

Keep an eye out for the [grid::brand] brand across the internet.

And of course Ashley Benigno deserves massive credit for imagining this experiment and bringing it to actuality.