My favourite quote is Socrates walking round his local market in ancient Greece, remarking “what alot of things I don’t need.”

Alot of people feel that this crazy consumer capitalism is awry,
but we don’t know why.
Thanks Neil.

Branding can mean many things – it can simply be an exercise to clarify a business’s objectives. There will always be business, and businesses will always be wanting to find ways to make themselves stand out against the competition, or appeal to new markets. Branding can be done honestly, intelligently and creatively, and without the levels of manipulation that you refer to here on this site.

Rather than brand all branding as ‘evil’, wouldn’t it be better to call for consumers to take more responsibility for their decisions? Consumers have more power than ever to keep themselves informed and keep businesses in check. With the internet, and all its fast-moving information resources, businesses are under more pressure than ever to operate openly and honestly – and I suspect that most respectable businesses welcome this development – they are, after all, closer to their customer base than ever. It’s easy to label consumers as the ‘victims’ of businesses’ money-making objectives – but successful businesses know that it’s in their best interests to please their consumers – the ‘them and us’ attitude is wrong, and does not make business sense.

but i genuienly believe branding is not only essential but can be good for the soul. What your site refers to is the extreme failures of brands to live up to their ‘promise’ of delivering real value to consumers lives which can be blamed on how they market and use marketing. Today, marketing has become a jaded and cynical process to help many brands mask over their mediocrity. These brands have no genuine product truth and so instead use clever, witty advertising campaigns to engage with consumers. But this practise cannot continue. Consumers can son easily find out about brands in a ‘click’. Nike can longer be a ‘sqeaky, ethical’ brand nor can GAP et al and this can only be good news for consumers and consumerism in the future. But we will always want ‘difference’ in choice of products, services, politicians, banks, shoes….its what gives us humans our ‘identity’. we can buy what brand we want to buy from discounted to green to luxury, the choice I wide and liberating not suffocating.

People do not make most of their choices in life consciously. We are subconsciously and psychologically drafted into consumerism, and remain captive prisoners, due to our personal vanity and out of control egos. It’s easy to lure the ego into consumption, through marketing that suggests that we will be more beautiful, more popular, more lovable or more successful, etc. if we buy this product or that product.

The desire for immediate gratification is also a major force that keeps people in the bondage of overcosumption and debt. We think that we can only be happy if we buy what we want – right now.

The capitalist machine and consumerism is a part of a system that is killing everyone’s spirit, all over the world. Hopefully more people will wake up to the fact that buying things that we don’t need at prices we can not afford is really the slow death of the soul and our society.

I think there is a healthy middle ground. I think for myself at least the middle ground is being very skeptical about brands and resisting the influence of them. But not so much that if I genuinely like something I refuse to buy it simply because it is a well know hip or trendy brand.