Branding

As Banet-Weiser discusses, brands have developed from a mode of commerce and exchange to a way of standing out from other companies through the creation of a relationship between the consumer and the brand. The brand promotes a certain lifestyle, identity or emotional connection with the consumer by forming deeper connections than just the use of their tangible product. As Banet-Weiser argues, a large part of this use of brands has been the development of our media technologies because companies are able to spread their messages through commercial advertisements, paper advertisements, twitter, facebook etc. East Boston Savings Bank is an example of a company that uses their brand to form a deep connection with the local Boston blue collar worker, their intended audiences through media platforms. In the background of this image, a recent commercial is playing. You can hear the narrator discussing the life of a local worker in Boston and how the workers of East Boston Savings Bank have the same “hard work mindset”, forming this connection between the company and the consumers. Even though they never talk about the benefits of joining the bank or what you will actually get from it, they “invoke the experience associated with a company.” If a Boston resident joins East Boston Savings Bank, they will interact with people just like them who understand the hard work that each individual puts in each day as a blue collar resident. In the background of the narrator, the words “hard work” are being sang/chanted by a group of men. This catchy tune is something that consumers will associate when they see the East Boston Savings Bank logo posted above. As they associate this logo to the words “hard work”, they are reminded each time of the familiarity and connections that East Boston Savings Bank provided for them in the commercial. Many companies use their branding to form connections like East Boston Savings Bank and affiliate a certain emotional message to their logo.

I started my process as soon as I read the article about branding. I immediately thought of this commercial that circulated TV’s all over Boston and the “Hard Work” song was something that I found constantly stuck in my head. Each time I saw this logo, this song would always come to my head. The purpose of this branding is exactly what Banet-Weiser discusses in this piece. My first step was to find and download the youtube video of the commercial. Once that was downloaded, I found a picture of the East Boston Savings Bank logo that would be large enough for people to read. The picture came from google and was a screenshot taken during a commercial. I used picfront.com to put the quote over the picture. Finally, both were uploaded to the blog post.