Brands, Religion, and Social Media

In Brands of Faith, Mara Einstein states “branding is about making meaning- taking the individual aspects of a product and turning them into more than the sum of their parts.” This connects to social media, because as demonstrated in the movie “Generation Likes,” kids are creating their own brands through social media forums, like Facebook, YouTube, and instagram. There are the less intense examples, like the kids sitting around trying to carefully construct their facebook pages. This brings up the question, do these social media forums allow people to demonstrate their true self? The answer, in my opinion, is no, because they are controlling what aspects of their personality the public can see. This careful construction avoids showing flaws, which is a key aspect of someone’s true self. However, then you have the more extreme examples, like Tyler Oakley, or the eight-year-old skateboarding YouTube star, who takes his identity as a skate boarder and turns it into a somewhat crude and pornographic image. He creates this image because he know it is what will get him the most views because its what the public wants to see. That is the key to branding and marketing. Companies are constructing products in a way that will help them gain profits and customer loyalty. In the sense of kids and social media, “likes” are forms of profits. Those who gain so many likes are the ones who are wealthiest in the social media world because people are receptive to the things they post. That’s why the face presented on social media is not a true self, because kids are putting up the things they think people will be receptive to, not what they actually like. That shows how similar social media and branding really are.

This “reliance on brands for identity stems from a sense of rootlessness.” This is where religion comes in. Religion was created, originally as a simple cult, in order to bring people together and provide them with a community. That, as Eisntein states in the book, is the same reason for the creation of brands. Brands give people something to share and to form a community over. Brands, like mythologies, work together to create a sense of wholeness from society.