I once heard an advertising professional making the case that advertising doesn’t just sell products, it adds value to them – we enjoy products more because of the associations that advertising has added to them. I’m quite certain this is true (and not just because, ever since I read The Space Merchants as a kid, I have had a fascination with advertising’s dark arts).
For instance, my youngest daughter and I used to love Hobgoblin Ale’s ‘What’s the matter lager boy?’ ads, and bought the beer accordingly. I have no doubt the ads made the drink seem more fun than it would have been if we had drunk it from an unmarked glass without knowing what it was. We would still have liked it it, no doubt, but it would just have been a beer.
This podcast discusses the possibility that Stradivarius instruments might be a spectacular example of this effect. Many people are convinced that these centuries-old violins and violas, which can sell for tens of millions, make a uniquely beautiful sound. And yet, as the podcast shows, musicians involved in blind tests did not favour the Strads over modern violins, or even correctly identify them more often than you’d expect them to do by chance. In the podcast, a professional musician who actually owns a Strad refuses to accept the validity of this finding, but it is very difficult to separate a product from its branding unless you do a blind test (especially if you’ve spent a fortune on it). And, as that advertising man might ask, why would you even want to separate a product from its branding, when the branding really does make you enjoy the product more?
How much does this branding effect apply in the cultural sphere generally? There can’t be much doubt, for instance, that a simple sketch attributed to Picasso will be worth far more, and receive far more attention and praise, than would be the case if that exact same sketch had been made by an artist no one has heard of. (Duchamp famously showed that, just by signing it, he could turn a urinal into a work of art.) I’m pretty sure that I have often given films, books, paintings etc a much more sympathetic hearing when I’ve known in advance that they are considered to be masterpieces, than I might otherwise have done. In fact, it’s hard to see how our appreciation of books and films could not be affected by their reputations, given that books and films only work at all by triggering associations in our mind, and their reputation will inevitably play a part in those associations. (Being perverse and prone to jealousy, I sometimes dislike books and films more than I otherwise would have done, precisely because of the kind of praise they’ve been given – but that’s still a branding effect. It’s still me being influenced by the book or film’s reputation.)
Nevertheless it is still meaningful to ask if it’s the reputation of a work of art, or the associations that would be set up anyway by the work itself, that is the main contributor to the value that’s attributed to it. Watching a particularly good episode of Succession, my wife asked ‘Is Shakespeare really so much better than this?’ I think it’s a good question. If you make up your mind that something’s wonderful, whether it’s Shakespeare or the Beatles, Ulysses or the Bible, then you will find wonderful things in it, and you are much more likely to make up your mind that something’s wonderful if everyone keeps telling you so.
Those four examples all have whole industries devoted to celebrating their wonderfulness. In such cases, it can be almost impossible to separate the product from its branding.
