THE BRANDED WORLD: CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR IN COMMERCIAL SOUTH AFRICA

Take a walk down any South African township and you will see them displayed on the billboards, posters and even on edifices in the form of ‘street art’. Switch on the radio and you can’t escape hearing about them every few minutes, they’ve become ubiquitous on television, even coming on as part of a script in some of the country’s most viewed soap operas (Generations, ahem).

I am of course talking about brands, more especially those big brands that have reached the status of transnational/multinational corporations, your Nike, Vodacom, KFC, Absa etc.

The youth of post-apartheid South Africa has gravitated towards a brand conscious state in which brand names , more especially clothing brands, are used as a huge part of one’s identity, an extreme case of this usage of brand names as identity can be witnessed in the skhotane subculture.

The subcultures what one might call a price tag fad, where consumers (skhotanes) purchase products based solely on their expensiveness, for bragging rights (and to tear and burn them), bare in mind that most of these skhotanes are reaching beyond their means to finance this consumption. The skhotanes with their luxury brand obsessions reflect what Naomi Klein talks about in her critically acclaimed book, No Logo, when she details Tommy Hilfiger’s marketing strategy of “selling... black youth on their fetishization of white wealth”, although this was written in American context, it seems to apply to the South African context.

However, consumers are far from a homogenous unit, people purchase products for differing reasons, and external factors like culture and environment play an integral part on consumer decisions. Although value for money is important to mostif not all consumers, people hold different views of what is valuable.

Therefore in a free-market like the one in Mzansi, every brand aims to make itself more valuable to it’s target market, a goal that has, according to Klein, caused corporations to move away from a value orientated business model, to a marketing orientated model. In this new business model, a lot of money is spend on marketing tools to create a brand image that connects with people on a personal level while allowing the brand to expand it’s horizons. For example; Nike is no longer just a footwear manufacturer, but rather a centre of sports excellence and innovation, allowing it to provide more products in the form of merchandise (soccer balls, sports gears, bottles, sports watches etc) whilst sponsoring events and sports stars that help to maintain that image.

This change in business conduct has in effect caused a change in labour relations, where some corporate outsource cheaper labour from as far as third world coutries in an effort to allow the headquarters to focus on branding and marketing.

Consumer activist, and author of Consumer Education Is Education For Life, Chris Lomberd, says this kind of operation opens up a loophole that has been filled by the black market in what is known in retail terms as ‘dumping’. Dumping is when surplus products such as clothing are shipped to poorer countries with a well known brandlogo stamped on it to maximise profit, in other words they are fake products.

Such information is usually covered up by glossy advertisements, and in the case of big brands, fronted by their reputation of supplying quality (a reputation that becomes dubious confronted by such facts), this pose a significant threat to the consumer’s right to information. It seems like consumers are misled to buy what they wouldn’t dare buy in good judgement. The crux of the problem in this matter is consumer education (or the lax=ck thereof).

Asked if South Africa is doing enough concerning consumer education, Dr Lombard shakes his head, “The quality and content of consumer related education is not condusive or informative enough consumers from an early age” he says.

I went around TUT Soshanguve North campus to find out what are some of the student’s favourite clothing brands, and why? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUINQeGijN0&feature=youtu.be