Bowing to logo gods

Both logos and advertisements seem to be taking over our lives.  Cricketers and other sports stars wear them on their sleeves and everywhere else!  Wherever one goes, one is not spared the sight of a logo or a hoarding; insidiously, they are beginning to create a new narrative about the world around us.

Who would believe that they would dare to intrude into supposedly sacred spots, like places of worship or even heritage sites?  At the entrance to Dakshineshwar, near Kolkata, I found myself gazing at a whole wall plastered over with advertisements for a jewellery brand, with models displaying a range of products.  By linking this brand name with a religious place, was the brand trying to abrogate to itself some moral or spiritual authority?

Similarly on the drive up to Jaigarh Fort in Jaipur, there were ads and logos of cola drinks everywhere, painted on rocks, demanding your attention (just in case you missed them) and intruding into the history. Or was it a plan to form a renewed identity by attaching one’s past and heritage with the present and the “choice of a new generation”?

It is as if every opportunity to grab eyeballs has to be employed. Public buses in Bangalore have started to follow in the footsteps of cabs and buses in London and other parts of Europe.  Sitting inside a bus, one has to listen carefully for the announcements, as it is no longer possible to look out of the window to identify one’s stop anymore - the windows are blocked with the logos and ads of the various sponsors! 

Durga pujas in the IT city (and perhaps elsewhere too) have turned into promotional arenas for big names.  One is forced to run the gauntlet of the various stalls with their sponsors' logos, sometimes with the occupants hawking their products, before you finally get a glimpse of the deity. I had heard of brand positioning but it felt odd to see it used in this fashion!

All this branding appearing in so many places and surreptitiously inveigling themselves into one's imagination, finally reaches a level where no one any longer notices it, or even more worrisome, ceases to find it odd or worthy of questioning. 

 No aspect of society including the media is free of this.  Granted, that advertisements are the revenue generators for newspapers.  But does that mean that one’s eyes have to be assaulted with a glaring advertisement hogging the front page of a newspaper, which was earlier reserved for the most important news of the day? Also, one cannot help remarking on how TV news channels and discussants on some serious TV live shows nonchalantly announce that they are going in for an ad break. These commercials appearing in between the announcements of tragedies like death tolls from accidents, tsunamis or earthquakes, appear as the ultimate in insensitivity.  Cannot decide if this is worse, or the shifting logos, that appear at the bottom of the television screen, even as the newsreader keeps on reading the good, bad and the ugly stuff!  Veritably, the logos or ads know no discrimination!

Marketers know the persuasive power of children, which is why they figure in many commercials, not just on television but even on the radio.  A child telling another one, where his mother shops for vegetables, on a radio commercial, surely could not have been created with the mere idea of entertaining children!  Studies by the University of Missouri, Kansas City and the University of Kansas Medical Centre have conducted tests to reveal how a child’s brain can be implanted with the logos and brands of fast-food restaurants.  Amanda Bruce who led the study observed, “Research has shown children are more likely to choose those foods with familiar logos,” which means that essentially these fast-food companies are succeeding in brainwashing a whole new generation.   Considering the harmful effects of these foods, the ethics of using these predatory tactics on vulnerable children needs to be seriously looked at.

Recently on a road trip, which involved a drive on the East Coast Road in Chennai, one was surprised to find a whole lot of metal barricades placed across the road by the Chennai Traffic Police.  In Bangalore, these barricades are placed in such a way as to check drunken driving.  Yet a sober driver can easily manoeuvre through these placements.  But this was not the case on the busy East Coast Road, where these barricades were placed right across the road, hampering the smooth flow of traffic.  On a closer look, I realised that these were sponsored by a real estate company, which was advertising its plots on the same road.   These ads could only be read properly by placing the barricades in a straight line.  Seemed so ironical that the barricades, instead of serving their purpose of regulating traffic, were doing quite the opposite, so that the sponsor’s logo and advertisement could be read clearly and digested!  

One can only wonder where this obsession with logos and branding will take us.  Will it finally end with society offering obeisance at the feet of the New Logo Gods to get entry into a special world where one has a new and exclusive identity, totally determined by the brands that one is able to flaunt? Could this be the Utopia that humankind has been striving to achieve?  But, if everybody is to have access to this lifestyle, would it really be exclusive or rather an inclusive dehumanised society totally under the spell of logos?  Not if one has to take a leaf out of the book of Naomi Klein. In her bestseller, No Logo, Klein surveyed and made a serious critique of the identification logos created by big brands. In it, Naomi exhorts society to speak out and stand up against the bullying and control. In her words,   “When we lack the ability to talk back to entities that are culturally and politically powerful, the very foundations of free speech and democratic society are called into question.”

The author is a Bangalore-based writer