BLOG POST N°3: Branding Futures: Minimalism & Social Media.


In this third week of CTS, we focused on the futures of branding and socials medias. The structure of this session was composed of two parts, the first one was based on the vision/lens: anti-capitalist: a critique go the consumerism society referring to several influent personalities such as Marx, Guy Debord and Naomi Klein with her concept of minimalist and no logo brand. The second part of this lecture was specially focusing on socials medias and mind share presented under the format of workshop.


To start with we focused on the preface Guy Debord talks questions himself about ‘’the shape of modernity, capitalism and everyday life in the late twentieth century’’ (1967), and in the 3rd reprinted edition of The society of spectacle (2008) he assume that nothing has changed since the first version of the preface, that our society hasn’t changed just adapted to new technologies and new communication ways.

At first we’ve enumerated the rampant of capitalism, and the disaster made by: Industrialisation, consumerism and the throw away culture that came with in the 1950’s, in the 80s the globalisation, in the 90’s the amplification of the rampant capitalism, “everything and everyone is for sale”(McClaren, 2009), the beginning of part-privatisation and privatisation. Also spotting all the ‘’disaster’’ that capitalism has created such as inequalities (Pay/right/wealth…) in the world, the environmental damages caused by it. We were presented to the concept of ‘’psycho-poverty’’, an emotional hole at our centre filled by consumption basically me myself and I.
We had a look through the different types of branding present at the moment:
The corporate model, commercial: Apple/Microsoft/Adidas/Nike …
The corporate model, non-commercial: Greenpeace/PETA/UNICEF…
The institutional model: UAL/UCL/LSE/Tate/Councils
The geographic location model: Area branding: Elephant + Castle development
 The personality model used by creatives/celebrities: eg Andy Warhol, Ricardo Tisci, Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, you, me…