The difference between products and brands is fundamental. 

A product is something that is made in a factory; a brand is

something that is bought by a customer.

Peter A. Schweitzer, President & COO of the J. Walter Thompson Agency

Of course, the search of a corporate identity—of an emotional core of sorts or soul of a company—had been going on for decades, but it was only with the crisis in the manufacturing sector that it was able to move to the forefront of the corporate scene and manifest itself in full force. Until then, corporations had never offered resistance to the idea of investing in facilities for production (and employment), which were in fact seen as an undeniable mark of corporate growth and stability. However, the idea of the brand as the spiritual core of the corporation, says Naomi Klein, not only led to

cutting edge ad-campaigns, ecclesiastic superstores and utopian corporate campuses. It is changing the very face of global employment. After establishing the “soul” of their corporations, the superbrand companies have gone on to rid themselves of their cumbersome bodies, and there is nothing that seems more cumbersome, more loathsomely corporeal, than the factories that produce their products. The reason for this shift is simple: building a superbrand is an extraordinarily costly project, needing constant managing, tending and replenishing. Most of all, superbrands need lots of space on which to stamp their logos. For a business to be cost-effective, however, there is a finite amount of money it can spend on all of its expenses—materials, manufacturing, overhead and branding—before retail prices on its products shoot up to high. After the multimillion-dollar sponsorships have been signed, and the cool hunters and marketing mavens have received their checks, there may not be all that much money left over. So it becomes, as always, a matter of priorities; but those priorities are changing. As Hector Liang, former chairman of United Biscuits, has explained: “Machines wear out. Cars rust. People die. But what lives on are the brands.”

Ultimately it is an economic imperative, the need to recover investment and provide a wide margin of profit within an increasingly complex supply chain, what has led to the expansion of a profoundly asymmetric economic model between manufacture and retail. Following this logic, throughout his career Andre Agassi signed endorsement contracts with sports brands such as Prince, Donnay, Head, Penn and even more importantly with Nike and Adidas and other miscellaneous brands such as Canon, Schick, the perfume Aramis by Estée Lauder, Deutsche Telekom, Nintendo and Longines among others. Agassi won $30 million in prizes during his professional career, little compared to the $25 million in annual endorsements since then, the fourth place in sports since Roger Federer surpassed him. “Image is everything” said Agassi in a 1992 Canon commercial.

It goes without saying that in a finite world this lofty notion of “corporate transcendence” peddled by the superbrands and fed by the image of athletes and celebrities who exercise a new form of sovereignty over the market (3.2, 5.3, 5.7, 5.8) must necessarily come at the expense of the working class, domestic or foreign, which once outside the public eye and put in a state of exception (8.4, 8.6) manufactures the precious goods that, however, according to Peter A. Schweitzer are not what is being bought by the customer.

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1. Naomi Klein, No Logo, 196. ↩︎