Point of Purchase by Sharon Zukin

Author:Sharon Zukin [Zukin, Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Sociology
ISBN: 9781317325369
Google: 2QPFDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 604177
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2003-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

8

how brooks brothers came to look like banana republic

Lifestyle Factory

—Sign on furniture store, Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, 1998

I’d like to think that doing all this research on consumer culture has made me immune to the lure of brand names, but I still have my little weaknesses. Why do I always buy Scott’s toilet paper and never even look at Charmin’? Have I ever abandoned Band-Aids for a cheaper generic? I tend to swear by Bounty, while the usually rational Marge Simpson gets passionate about “Burly”-brand paper towels: “You’re about to get a lesson in value!” Marge excitedly tells her daughter Lisa, rapidly tearing off towel after towel to wipe up puddles all over her kitchen floor. Even cartoon characters develop an emotional attachment to brand names.

The brand name speaks to both our open anxiety about making choices and our partly submerged desire for status. From Ivory Snow and Crest to Yves Saint Laurent, a brand name on consumer products assures us of quality. This marketing strategy wasn’t born in the status-conscious, “best”-listed eighties. Branding goes back to the birth of modern trademarks and packaged goods—with the packaging of “Quaker” Oats and “Uneeda” Biscuits, in the 1870s. For more than a century, brands have developed close—and even intimate—relations with our bodies and our lives, and certainly with our aspirations for value.

The connection between branding and value plays an important part in consumer culture. During the 1980s, consumer products companies decided to capitalize on our anxieties about value. They emphasized the charisma of brands and extended it over a wider range of products. Tried-and-true brand names acquired a snazzy new image, and corporate managers attempted to ride this image all the way up the Dow Jones stock market average. Who could resist, they asked, the power of brand names?

But the evolution of Brooks Brothers, from a clothing store to a brand, illustrates the pitfalls of branding’s power. When I walk into Brooks Brothers’ flagship store on Madison Avenue, I sense value all around me. I feel I am returning to that classical period, in the early twentieth century, when a great store was an oasis of civility. The six-story building is much smaller than B. Altman’s, but they are of the same generation, and Brooks Brothers is even more of a cultural icon of old New York. I half expect to see a little brass plaque, like the kind you see on the wall of a fancy tailor shop or teashop in London, certifying that this firm enjoys the patronage of royalty. At Brooks Brothers, however, the whole ensemble—dark wood paneling, pale blue button-down shirts and rep ties lined up in glass-fronted display cases, elderly, dark-suited salesmen, and, until recently, the absence of escalators—all discreetly announce that this is a store of the American aristocracy.

Brooks Brothers was founded in 1818, near the waterfront in Lower Manhattan. Over the first hundred years, the store moved northward as the commercial center of the city shifted—first to Union Square, next to lower Broadway at Bond Street, then

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.