The Significance of Style & Substance: Brand Building Outside of the Box…

By Shelley Jane Graff 

            Marketing and branding opportunities used to be fairly limited in scope depending on the specific message’s medium.  Communication used to be quite limited.  Limited, that is, compared to the seemingly limitless sea of communication opportunities that exist today.  A sea that will only continue to grow, making successful marketing and branding strategies a matter of honing in on style and substance.  Success for a brand nowadays seems to lie in its ability to connect with its consumer on a deeper level than ever before. 

            In the book Brand Digital: Simple Ways Top Brands Succeed in the Digital World by Allen P. Adamson, Michael Mendenhall (Chief Marketing Officer of Hewlett-Packard) is quoted saying: “‘Many companies continue to look at marketing in conventional ways—from a mass market point of view.  Branding today is not about the media; it’s about the idea…’” (p. 94) He goes on to say, “‘The idea should be the organizing principle, and it should inform everything you do to help consumers grasp your brand promise in whatever channel you’re reaching them: the television, the blogs, the banner ads, or the word of mouth.’” (Mendenhall qtd. in Adamson, p. 94) In other words, instead of using digital media as a means of branding through medium-specific strategies use brand as a unifying notion through which the company finds specific strategies.  In the endless amount of digital media opportunities lies the potential to pick and choose them based on the brand’s “attitude.” 

            As John Morgan writes in his book: Brand Against the Machine: How to Build Your Brand, Cut Through the Marketing Noise, and Stand Out from the Competition, “Branding is about emotion, and emotion turn prospects into buyers.” (p. 6) The exponentially growing technological advancements of the modern day demand the construction of a relationship between brand and consumer that goes beyond buying and selling—it is a realm that is interactive and full of reciprocity.  Branding is a matter of building a business’s identity—to brand is to speak to the company’s character enough to identify with the character of its consumers.   

            (Word Count = 348 words total) 

On the Omission of Homoeroticism in Homoerotic Stories Made Mainstream Media…Sad but True

When I first saw the film Fight Club, I distinctly recall another person viewing with me yelling out during the ‘meeting Tyler Durden scene’ on the plane: “WHO DROPPED THE SOAP?”  Some chuckling, but not much, and then quickly the moment had passed.  Yet my thoughts remained stuck on this notion—considering it really is a highly charged homoerotic/fear-based stereotype.  The movie-poster is a close-up shot of a bright pink, sudsy bar of soap with ‘Fight Club’ imprinted like a logo on to the bar.  I was shocked to read in the article “Hiding homoeroticism in plain view: the Fight Club DVD as digital closet” by Drs. Robert Alan Brookey and Robert Westerfelhaus, that the director [Fincher] was so forthcoming in denial of a homoerotic element to the film. 

I may not have read the novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, however, I have read other works by him, and I cannot fathom the novel being done without a STRONG element of homoeroticism driving the plotline.  In fact, the film’s Wikipediapage references a review by Louis B. Hobson from the Calgary Sun, stating: “The director copied the homoerotic overtones from Palahniuk's novel to make audiences uncomfortable and keep them from anticipating the twist ending.^[1]” Indeed, homophobia is alive and well in American media, and—narratively speaking—adaptations of books into movies too often take the easy way out by skirting the issue altogether. 

Another adaptation of a book into a movie that fell short of telling the whole truth was the film version of Rules of Attraction by author Brett Easton Ellis.  Within the novel, two of the male characters—Paul and Sean—maintain a sexual relationship which is central to the narrative.  So, what did they do in the movie?  They merely made the whole relationship into one scene, which is not technically a gay love scene, but rather just a masturbatory fantasy of Paul’s (on which he founds a mild romantic obsession).  For being an otherwise well-done and faithful adaptation of the book, it remained a real letdown in the end.  Honestly…what are we so afraid of? 

(Word Count = 350 words total)