Brand’s End
When people think of branding, they usually focus on the efforts of marketers to convince people to purchase and consume. There’s more to it than that, however. Long after money has changed hands and consumer desires have been sated, the brand lives on as a discarded piece of trash.
The Trashy Brands Report describes the presence of branded garbage found along a road in an affluent, educated community in the Finger Lakes of Upstate New York.
In an modified version of classic archaeological field walking, photographs were taken of every commercially-branded object that was visible along a two-mile length of road going through the Town of Ithaca through the Village of Cayuga Heights, New York, from State Route 13 along Triphammer Road to the eastern edge of the Cornell University campus on Pleasant Grove Road. The survey took place over four days in March of 2023.
The purpose of the report is to consider the culturally-silent end of consumer branding by looking at what remains of brand designs after purchase and consumption, when branded objects are abandoned as trash.
About the Trashy Brands Report
The Brand’s shadow
Branded packaging might be dismissed as an externality to the businesses that create them, but in truth, it’s at the center of a brand’s true identity. The package gives the commodity its special identity. It not only contains the product, but defines it, creating an appealing display for consumers that’s designed to keep the brand in mind.
We long to hold it in our hands, for a while, enough to sacrifice a bit of our currency for it. We possess the brand, and consume it, and then, after its packaging has been emptied, the brand possesses us. We have been branded by it.
As much as we enjoy the thrill of consumption, when the moment is over, we want nothing more to do with the brand. The moment it is emptied, the branding takes on the pollution of our satisfied desires. Though we paid dearly for it, the branded container becomes dirty, piece of trash that we don’t want to see any more. The brand, once beloved, is now reviled.
So, we throw it into the garbage, or we toss it out the car window. Whatever it takes, we need to distance ourselves from the spent wrapping of our consumer affair. Its mere presence reminds us of our helplessness in the face of our desires. The brand container, emptied of its contents, pollutes our presence, and so it is cast out.
We try to get rid of the remnants of the brand, to pretend that our brief relationship with it never happened. The problem is that the brand won’t go away, even after the pleasure of its purchase is over.
Branding never dies. Long after the product itself is gone, branded packaging lingers on, haunting the roadsides as a reminder of the consequences of our transient longings and the lengths our corporate suppliers are willing to go to satisfy them.
