Birth of a New Product
Decorating a hotel to launch a car, VW’s Project Fox has created birth spaces for branding a product. I especially like Tokidoki world. Several designers were asked to decorate rooms to make a temporary “Hotel Fox” where journalists were lodged for the launch and rebranding of the new “Fox” model in Denmark.
What is the “it-ness” of this brand? It is not in the name, nor the functionality but rather it is an attempt to embody “coolness” in a car. Cool is a kind of charisma. Celia Lury’s work argues that logos and brand identities - like Nike’s “Swoosh” are virtualities which are
“consistent across different products - shoes, ball caps, shorts, watches - and can be consistently represented even if the logo is varied slightly in self-parody. It is independent of these objects. Branding is a non-monetary mechanism for consumer choice, but it also confers elements of the identity socially constructed around the brand on its consumers. As a media object, brands mediate: a brand is itself a medium which connects heterogeneous objects.
The phenomenon of sticking the logos of fashionable brands - pioneered in part by Apple Computer and many marketing-driven fashion accessories - onto a skateboard or onto one’s vehicle suggests that brands reach a semiotic ‘escape velocity’ at which point they are quite independent of the objects they were originally connected with. This phenomenon goes well beyond signalling product loyalty or grassroots-driven promotion. Others have observed the manner in which this allows the branding everyday objects as part of a lifestyle, making a particular brand into a badge of affiliation and inscription - into what Michel Maffesoli has called a ‘neo tribe’ (tribus).”