brand-e

By Simon Fuller. Facebook users engaged in ‘ceaseless activity’? Coca-Cola residing in an ‘abode of angels’? Just a few snippets from a rather novel book on branding from London-based graphic designer Daniela Meloni which takes modern day brands and drops them into the middle of Dante’s vision of Hell, in a work entitled The Branding Comedy.
So where Divine Comedy found Dante encountering the inhabitants of each stage of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, here God has been replaced by the all-powerful consumer, with brands littering each level of existence as they try to get closer to this omnipresent being.
And not all brands are going to like where they’ve been placed. In the first section of the book, the reader meets those brands deserved of languishing in the nine stages of Hell. Here brands come under fire occasionally for being morally repellent as companies, but more often for the products they sell and for the marketing stances they take.
Red Bull, for example, with its ‘aggressive international marketing campaign’, is an interesting choice for the level of Hell they call ‘wrath’, where reside ‘souls destroyed by anger’. And when it comes to ‘gluttony’ and ‘addiction’, there we find Marlboro.
Nutrition brand Herbalife does not fare well, with the author suggesting that the brand’s business model is close to a pyramid scheme – bad enough, indeed, to warrant being dumped in at the lowest level of Hell, a place reserved for the treacherous.
Elsewhere, things aren’t as serious. Facebook is sitting on the terrace of Purgatory reserved for the ‘slothful’, but mainly because it’s guilty of wasting employee time. Melaniela provokes a smile under ‘ambitious’ by listing Branson’s multitude of Virgin venture sins. And unsurprisingly, it’s London Underground which fits the bill for ‘inconstant’.
So who comes out top in this journey through the spheres? Coca-Cola, apparently, which takes up the space ‘moved directly by God’, the Primum Mobile, as ‘the most powerful and influential brand in the world’.

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