Whatever is ineffable about brands, whatever turns slogans into turns of phrase, whatever transforms logos into totems, is somehow reflected in this photo.
I think.
It's not about paying a price premium, it's not simply about trust, it's not just about selling things, even though that is why they exist.
It's because we are meaning seeking creatures and append meaning to symbols and symbols to ourselves, in order to help create ourselves, and our things, and our stories.
He thought it would make his bike more awesome, in some vague, hard to describe way.
Perhaps because of language hurdles between us.
Perhaps because symbols, by their very nature, are polysemous.
Open to interpretation.
To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, I can really only think of symbolism in a vague way.
I can't tell you what the Lighthouse represents.
And you can't tell me.
Because its meaning isn't fixed - it's created at the intersection of signifier and signified, of creator and consumer and culture.
Or something.
At the other end of the spectrum...
Whatever is most prosaic about brands, stripped down, locked up, emotional lepidoptery, pinning it down killing it in the process, is well expressed by the ad below.
Brand autopsy as execution.
Collapsing its potentialities of meaning in the consequence, rendering the symbols flat, reduced to the recommended reading.
Colors represent...
Fast forward arrows denote.
And yet.
There's something so guileless about this, so transparent, so removed from the nonsense that links brand identity to the movement of the planets and the building of the pyramids, it's, well, quite refreshing.
