Branding for Freedom

Branding. Everyone has already come across brands, especially in our modern world capitalist society.

Humans also have their own way of speaking in the way they interact with one another, hence their own tone of voice.

Moreover, humans build their own brand experience through their conversations, thoughts and actions.

What shapes who you really are?

Through history, branding has always been the symbol for ownership, from its beginnings to the world we live in today. Hence, it is important to question the implications of branding socially, individually and ethically. Therefore, we will be questioning through this thesis what is personal freedom in our contemporary Western branded societies.

The word itself ‘branding’ comes from the Ancient Norse, an Old Scandinavian language, in which ‘brandr’ meant to burn. Branding was used as burning a piece of wood but not so long after, it started to be used to symbolize cattle branding.

The first well-known brands were using this technique to brand slaves when the first capitalist trade, the Translatlantic Slave trade, took place in the sixteenth century. As capitalism is based on the exploitation of people and of the planet, everything, even humans, were turned into objects or products.

Additionally, because of the selfish desire for domination of the human being which Hobbes describes well, other humans needed to symbolize ownership.

During the triangular economy, the Roman law, a legislation scrupulously crafted by the Roman Empire which was one of the most influential and largest institutions at the time, was considering slaves as property.

Slaves were not considered as worthy humans at that time, they were simply objects used for their owners’ purposes.

In his book Caps Lock, Ruben Pater explains the process of one of the first corporations, the Dutch West India Company, for the use of branding :

Guidelines were already used in the beginnings of branding, for the owners to make good use of their slaves and of the method of identification provided.

The owners of the slaves had to strictly follow the user manual that the company organizing this mass torture trade had carefully written. In another way, branding was not only used as a symbol of representation but it was sometimes used as a punishment for others. For instance, during the Golden Age of Piracy, pirates were marked with the letter ‘P’ when captured. Branding had then become a way of depriving one’s liberty, as the mark on their bodies would stay until the end of their lives.

Nowadays, we can also see brands everywhere we go. With the rise of globalization and the emergence of a constantly evolving digital world, brands become part of our daily lives. We can see them through our basic needs : brands invade streets, homes, supermarkets, public spaces, cities.

Branding has become part of a profession, it is now the responsibility of the designer to brand.

Still, it has also been used in order to make citizens believe in ideologies such as nazism or marxism which became totalitarian ‘brands’ in the twentieth century. Moreover, in recent years, brands have been accused to use slavery as a tool for mass production.

But how could we use branding as a mean to be free ? How can we stop branding from being in the loop for captivity ?

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