While individuals are being told to keep it real by Facebook and Google+ and the likes, brands are creating avatars of themselves online and have been for years and years…
It was great fun for a while in the creative sector, pretending that companies could have “personas”, could be characterised by a set of human traits, even given first names, age, preferences, tone of voice and so on.
It helped put a sheen on products that wanted to pass themselves off as new but weren’t really, like, smoothies. And it helped companies with tarnished and downright blackened reputations recast themselves, as in tobacco, banking and pharmaceuticals.
That’s well and truly superseded now.
The “new normal” for such concepts is “narrative”. Brands don’t have personas anymore, they have coherent stories.
In 2008, I heard someone suggest that Britain needed a new “narrative”. Back in the early noughties, identity guru Wally Olins talked about branding the nation in his book On Brand.
All this talk of narrative is ironic considering the 1980s postmodernists declared the concept dead, citing the “end of the grand narrative“. And they did so on the premise of proliferation of communications and technology (and profound historical reasons, but let’s leave that aside for now).
Cultural studies practitioners at the time talked of constructions, such as ideas of nation transmitted through e.g. TV soaps like Eastenders. Narratives drawing on constructed visions of communityand nation.
And here comes branding agencies, in the formative years of the new century, ramping up cultural construction as a marketing tool. As DDB puts it in its paper, Brand Narratives (pdf), published in 2008: “Customer-driven positioning ‘narratives’ can address many diverse audience segments across fragmented media channels.”
How pre-post-post modern of them.
And then you get Facebook, Google+ etc turning the whole thing on its head. Brands can “form”, “interpret”, “construct” their stories according to the communication goal and channel they use; but individuals can’t. Online, you can only present your state-sanctioned self. If the name you’re using, or the avatar or profile you’re presenting, isn’t in your passport, driving licence or birth certificate, you can’t use it. Even if you go by the nickname that your mother’s been calling you since birth and all your friends know you by, it’s digitally unacceptable.
