Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Ads
Here's something that's pretty weird. And I'm guilty of it myself. Think about the t-shirt or shoes you wore last - or maybe are wearing now. One of those probably has a logo on it. The logo identifies the company who sold it. Now think about logos for awhile.
Tiger Wood gets paid millions to wear a logo in the hopes that you or I will figure that wearing that logo will make us a better golfer. Michael Jordan would get paid millions so that a company could use his name and face to sell basketball shoes. The idea being that if you bought those shoes (you being 5 foot 8 and 220 pounds) you could approach the easy grace in playing basketball that Jordan did. Sure it does.
However knowing that doesn't seem to make much difference. Why do people pay companies who pay stars to wear their clothes to wear their clothes. (oddly that sentence seems correctly, if awkwardly written). Why after paying $15,000 for a VW Beetle do I pay an additional $15 for a VW Beetle t-shirt and not $6 for a no-brand JCPenny t-shirt (which of course has a JCPenny logo on it someplace).
I guess in some cases, like the Beetle t-shirt, we buy stuff to show support for the stuff we buy, or maybe in more logical cases for stuff we can't buy. I once looked high and low for a Caterpillar hat (back in the days when logoed accessories weren't quite so common). I knew I'd never buy a Caterpillar bulldozer or front-end loader, but I really liked the idea of Caterpillar. Who knows why. I don't really think they're any better or worse than dozens of other brands of heavy equipment. Why not an International Harvester cap - since I drove those as well.
What it boils down to is that somehow the gnomes at Caterpillar's marketing agency did good. They managed to make me believe that Caterpillar is cooler than Komatsu (not that I'd ever heard of Komatsu in the 70s). The same kind of folks using the same kind of psychology have also managed to convince many of us that wearing a Michael Jordan branded shoe is so much better (by $100s) than a generic New Balance sneaker. Kind of scary isn't it?
