Occupy The Brand

by Katherine Dodds

Hello Cool World's founder reminisces on how we came to be the company behind The Corporation ‘brand.’

My history with The Corporation is full of the kind of ironies that keep me going, not the least of which is that we formed a company - a corporation - in order to be ready to do the work of launching the film, which happened in January, exactly 8 years ago. Of course our tiny corporation is not publicly traded and as a mission-driven social venture, I get to squander money freely on social cause campaigns (More irony intended!).

Our work with The Corporation literally is a labour of love. And just when this love affair might have been growing stale, our hearts were ‘occupied’ with the fire of this new global movement. Since I like to joke that I got all my training in advertising from my days with Adbusters magazine, it’s been equally heart-warming to see how a tactical brief, poster insert and #OccupyWallStreet hashtag was the meme that finally tipped the balance. Having heard Kalle Lasn, the founder of Adbusters, going on about alternative economics since before my days at the magazine 19 years ago, the idea has finally become an activist and mainstream topic. For campaign design, Adbusters gets a grade A+ - 99%!

The Adbusters era also was the time I met Terry Sunderland, who is our graphic designer, and, with myself and Mark Achbar, created the final Corporation devilman logo. We’ve been extending the brand ever since. The Occupy movement has sent us into a flurry of logo-izing, some of which you can see on our current video blog (vlog) featured on the cover page. On the DVD extras for The Corporation, I talk about grassroots branding. Lately I’ve been referring to this as social branding.

The idea is that we can take what works out of branding, which is essentially instilling a message into something visual or conceptual — in other words, the brand promise. But why does it have to be used to just sell products, and make the most profit you can for your shareholders? Maybe it can be used to engage communities around figuring out what their common goal is. Engaging in a branding exercise can actually help non-profit organizations distill what their mission and goals are, and help them build community.

The little brand idea that was ‘occupy’ is a very powerful message, and it obviously hit a lot of chords. And the beauty of all the critiques of the occupy movement — “oh it has no leader, oh it has no demand, oh it has none of these” — well, that’s exactly what corporate branding would look like. They would like everything to be very controllable, very linked to their bottom line, and very containable. 

Our hope is that we will be able to mobilize around an idea. In the case of our brand for The Corporation, it’s meant to be ironic. It’s meant to be somewhat uncontrollable. It’s meant to be something that we welcome people to mimic or poke fun at.

I think that the strength of branding is that it allows us to succinctly, through an image or potentially a slogan, connect a bigger idea with a tactical moment. ‘Occupy your future’ is our current brand promise for The Corporation, and where we are taking our original idea of the ‘Campaign 4 Corporate Harm Reduction.’