Did you know that we have a gesture for "what the fuck", one for "I couldn't care less", one for "gay", one for "I'm gonna kick your ass" and many more? In fact, we could say that Italian is the second more gestured language after the sign language.
Funny introduction yeah, but something happened to me a couple of weeks ago and I was very shocked (it has nothing to do with italians): I had an unplanned sleepover at my friend's house, this means I didn't have glasses with me and I had to throw away my daily contacts. This mean the next morning I was blind. Really blind: I am shortsighted like minus 4.50 or so. Basically I can distinguish colours and shapes but the world tends to look quite blurred. The next morning we go to the supermarket to hunt some breakfast, we enter the supermarket and I suddenly realise something is wrong. I can't see brands, names, signs, nothing! I was lost, I never realised before how much I usually rely on these informations. So, without seeing much I started thinking and thinking. Why have some brands become symbols? When did it happen that a brand, a name, acquired the meaning of the object it labels? When I was a kid, in Italy this used to happen even more, we called the kitchen tissue "scottex" (which is the italian for andrex), the anti-mosquito spray was "Autan" while the tinned meat was "simmental". It didn't matter if the product we were actually buying wasn't by that brand, we would still call it like that.
How did those brands manage to monopolise the market in such a way to become symbols for the product they represent? When adverts are created the target is in general to evoke an connection with the concept of "tribe"in the customer's perception. So, let's imagine we have this product with this logo and we are targeting male individuals in the age of 15-20. What we will try to do is create, through symbols, the ideal "tribe" for males in this age and pass to their brain the information that they need that product by that brand in order to be a part of that tribe. Like in here:
References:
http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/library/r67150_3.pdf
The tipping point, M.Gladwell, Abacus 2001
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