December 18–25, 1997

loose canon

The Brand-Name Game

by Bruce Schimmel

Me and my shadow,

Strolling down Madison Avenue...

I can imagine this conversation between little Jane Pratt and her mom:

"Well, Jane, what do you want to be when you grow up."

"I want to be a brand."

Who is Jane Pratt? you ask. Better to ask, What is Jane Pratt?

Jane Pratt was an editor (of the magazine Sassy), then talk show host (of the eponymous Jane Pratt Show), and now creator of a new magazine called (surprise!) Jane.

Jane is now a bona fide brand—though with a name as plain as Jane she might have difficulty defending her birthright. There's a radio station on the Delmarva peninsula also named "Jane," which claims to be named after no one in particular.

Though Lord knows, "Jane" (the station) might be the younger sister of Philadelphia's "Max," who himself might be inspired by the fictive Talking Head called "Max Headroom." I'd call up and ask Max, except that "Max" (the station), like "Jane" (the station), have no flesh-and-blood DJ's to talk to. Both are "personality" stations without any actual on-air personalities.

Ask Martha what to do, I say. She's a real person, right?

Or ask a certain Taylor, who didn't make his wines in time, so his own family kept him from using his own name on his own label.

If all this name brand mania is becoming a bit confusing, there's a good reason. According to the current Harper's, branding is burgeoning. In 1980, licensed goods amounted to about $9.9 billion in retail sales. Last year, 1996, that figure swelled over sevenfold, to $72.3 billion.

If you have no aspirations to become your own brand, then why not just settle back and count the twists of irony.

Turn on Seinfeld, a fictional sitcom based on an actual person, which features a fictional satire of an actual brand-name clothing catalog, J. Peterman—which itself uses the name of a (yup!) fictional person.

Or consider a brand-new brand, called Aerobleu: a catalog for a fictional store which features faux-historic tchotchkes associated with a fake French jazz club of the same name. In this bar, the likes of people such as Charlie Parker, Jean-Paul Sartre and Orson Welles never appeared. But the licensors of those (real) names figured, I guess, that it wouldn't hurt to have (formerly) real people bellying up to the bar of a phony place, especially if it moved some real, faux merchandise.

All this name-branding is nothing new, of course; there's just much more of it. After all, this Christmas season celebrates the birth of the greatest name-brand, who became the ultimate "consumable"—which is one way to think of the transubstantiation of his flesh and blood.

I say this with no disrespect to true believers. But if you wish to vent anyway, please E-mail me at my virtual address, which is (just coincidentally) bruce@schimmel.com, my real name.

I think.