Dominant brands spawn new form of bullying

One of my friends told me in disbelieving tones recently that her teenage son wanted her to pay €50 for a two centimetre strip…

One of my friends told me in disbelieving tones recently that her teenage son wanted her to pay €50 for a two centimetre strip of material. They were looking at two almost identical jackets, one with a well-known logo and one without, and a €50 price difference, writes Breda O'Brien

She assumed her son would accept the non-branded one, but he looked at her as though she had lost her reason. When she pointed out that this meant paying €50 for the privilege of being a walking advertisement, he told her that he was worth it.

The echo of the L'Oreal catchphrase finished her, and they left the shopping centre not speaking to each other and having bought no jacket at all.

A recent survey by Combat Poverty and the Vincentian Partnership pointed out that for those on social welfare, one of the worst things for parents was not being able to afford the "right" brands, and as a result their children were subjected to bullying.

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Teenagers will tell you earnestly that this is a primary school phenomenon, and that no one is looked down on at second-level for not having the right brands.

What they are reluctant to acknowledge is that by the teenage years, they have been so efficiently socialised that no one in their right mind would appear in the wrong brand names. At second-level, a raised eyebrow is enough. You don't need to be shoved into the nearest wall to get the message.

Green Party TD Eamon Ryan has decided to try to challenge the dominance of brands by starting a No Logo day. The idea is simple. Early in the New Year, a No Logo day will be designated. The idea is to wear no logos on that day, and if you can't because everything you possess has a logo, to cover it with a printed sticker which simply says, "No Logo". The initiative will be run through second-level schools, and the stickers will be posted to them in advance.

With sufficient publicity and backing, this is an idea which could really take off. Certainly it would have the support of parents. It only remains to make it sufficiently cool for kids to be part of it. This is an issue which is affecting children at younger and younger ages. You almost expect teenagers to be very conformist, because being different can be social death. However, recently someone told me about trying to buy pyjamas for a 3½-year-old child, who refused to accept anything except Bob the Builder ones.

Those of us who try to protect our children from the worst excesses of commercialism are up against the fact that many programmes now, even relatively benign ones like Bob the Builder, are little more than extended advertisements for wide range of tie-in merchandising. Not only that, but manufacturers keep upping the ante.

To give just one example, my son sweated blood to save up to buy a Nintendo Game Boy Color. His heartless parents did not particularly want him to have one, but agreed he could, if he paid for it himself.

With pocket money of £2 a week, and a price tag of £70, we reckoned some valuable lessons in delayed gratification would be learnt. He managed it, and is naturally rather attached to it.

This Christmas, all he wants is a Game Boy game called Warioland Two, a relatively modest request. Except that those wonderful people at Nintendo have phased out Game Boy Color and all the games that go with it, including Warioland Two, and replaced them with a more expensive format called Game Boy Advance.

So his sacrifice in saving up looks like a waste. He doesn't want a Game Boy Advance. But what do Nintendo care, when they are making millions from encouraging kids to pester their parents for the new format?

One of the scariest programmes I ever watched was a BBC programme called Getting Older, Younger, which documented the fact that children are becoming less and less childlike and more and more brand-aware at younger and younger ages.

Part of the programme shows nice middle-class parents dropping their pre-school children at a crèche, where their children are going to take part in a focus group.

This is creepy enough for a start.

Who wants their child to provide the kind of information which marketers are hungry for, so that they can sell more efficiently to children? Anyway, the researcher shows large flash cards with logos and brand names to the children.

The children were able to shout out the brand names before the researcher had time to turn the card around. They could recognise them through the thin card they were written on. In other words, these children who could not read were able to recognise the brand names backwards.

In a different segment, another market researcher was visibly uncomfortable with the fact that the young girls of eight and nine with whom she was dealing with were no longer children, but mini-adults in their tastes. This was not going to lead her to change her line of work, though.

Let's just say that she was wrestling with her conscience, and she won.

But the scariest person of all was not the researcher rummaging around in a teenager's bedroom rubbish bin (with the permission of her family) to see what brands she consumed. No, it was a guy from the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi, who tried to persuade the interviewer that this was a marvellous time to be a kid, because you had entire industries geared around finding out what kids like best, and selling it to them.

So children now had all these wonderful toys of which earlier generations had been deprived. Like Nintendo Game Boy, I suppose.

It is so tempting and easy just to give in, and to accept that the relentless tide of commercialism has won.

That's why initiatives like Eamon Ryan's No Logo day are so important. Brand is an interesting word, given that an earlier generation would have associated it with the marks burned into the hide of animals to show the herd to which they belong.

If No Logo Day gives just a couple of kids the courage not to be branded, excuse me L'Oreal, but it will be worth it.