When companies use places to sell their products - there’s a new word for that

Have you ever noticed that companies selling anything from cars to medications are now almost exclusively using the American West as their backdrop? Now we have a word for that.

You know the scene I’m talking about - a Honda CR-V goes blasting through a pile of red sand on a dirt road with red canyons in the background. A lady with a flannel shirt tied around her waist walks up a trail in a Douglas Fir forest in a pharmaceutical commercial. Or a model wearing REI clothing and gear sits on a mountain ledge overlooking a valley … almost all of American marketing is focusing on imagery from the American West right now. And it’s all part of helping their products sell better. 

Since I don’t have any better images to explain this post, and the ones I would really show are copyrighted by big brands, I’ll just use this one to show this ideallic scene with a clearly glowing tent amongst the “wilderness”, making clear that REI is there … and they make this possible. (tone:dry sarcasm)

The companies doing this are tying their brand with a lifestyle – and that lifestyle is apparently something like, “outdoorsiness.” You know, the “folksy” way of living, where you go outside more, and spend less time in cities, doing city-person things, and you wear special clothes just to look the part. It sells, and it apparently sells so well, it’s driving both their sales and visitation to these places. 

I spent most of my teens and twenties thinking that marketing and advertising were just an annoyance and little more. Now, I look at these marketing and advertising campaigns as a fundamental feature of American culture that shapes the American mind. And, in that shaping of the American mind, it helps to shape where people see themselves and what they want to do in those scenes. 

For many of us westerners, driving a Honda CR-V on bluffs of sand isn’t something we would do in the way it’s shown – the CR-V is a cute post-minivan AWD grocery-getter, and after working on a couple, I can tell you they aren’t built for much in the desert Southwest other than driving to paved overlooks and bed and breakfasts. It’s a great car, but the marketing is severely misleading. Yet they use it, and it sells, and it makes people drive their CR-V to the Southwest. 

Perfect example of an advertisement that’s participating in this location-centered marketing…

The use of imagery as a backdrop to the advertisement campaigns seems to act on the American brain like cocaine treats do on the minds of lab mice. They don’t really know what’s so good about it, but they want it, and they’ll chew their own leg off to get it. 

That’s how the brands get you – they sell you the product by showing you what other imagery it gets you. 

As the rest of this blog has gone and will continue to highlight, the American West is growing exponentially, and is therefore being transformed into a place that looks and feels identical to the suburbs of anywhere-else-USA, or the never-ending housing developments of places like Illinois, Florida, Texas, and so on. Every new house scrapes the land, puts in a track home, a kentucky bluegrass lawn (yep, that’s the variety - and it’s water-hungry - and it’s 100% not from here), trees native to eastern America, and landscaping that looks … nothing like the environments of the West. And, yeah, the aesthetic horizon backdrop is different – we might have mountains or foothills on the horizon, rather than just more highways, neighborhoods, and malls. 

The change being driven by marketed imagery is nothing shy of a total conversion of the place into something familiar to those coming here. You can be standing in a brand new neighborhood in Grand Junction, Colorado, where you could once see all the way to the surrounding mesas, and yet there’s no difference between what you’re seeing and what you would see in Rockford, Illinois. Why? Because it’s all been converted into the exact same landscape as in Rockford, even though every single thing built and planted there is not adapted to the conditions present in Grand Junction, at all. 

Basically, these brands are using places in a similar way that a geotagging social media addicts use places – to sell their product as a side-car to an image, entirely at the expense of the place and the people already there. They’re basically using the place to drive revenue, or boost their ego (in the case of social media users), or to help catch the attention of others from the scene rather than the thing itself.

Without paved roads, improved dirt roads, and domestic infrastructure, the Honda CR-V or most cars in the American fleet, aren’t really going to do any of the things they show in the commercials, in any of the places they show them in. Which is pretty much akin to what many have observed about the pornographic industry – none of it’s real, it’s all for show, and it probably shouldn’t be emulated. It seems like most of these advertisements share a common thread with the porn industry in this way – they show things to inspire people to go do something they saw on TV, get their attention, and make them feel like they want to do that – whatever ‘that’ may be – whether driving your Buick Enclave in a red canyon, or well … let’s discontinue use of the other analogy. 

But what these companies are doing is tying these images to their brand – you buy this brand, you can go do this thing in this place. Even if you really, really can’t. If you drive your Toyota Rav4 the way they show in the commercial, first, you’ll likely break it, and second, you’ll probably get a ticket – because you’re only doing that in places that are highly seen and visited, and the Park Rangers are definitely watching.

So, let’s get down to it – take the keywords and slam them together – and you get the word that’s missing from the discourse to describe what brands like REI, Chevy, Toyota, Patagonia, and so on, are doing to places: 

Brandfucking 

verb

1. The use of geographic places to sell a product, tying your brand to a place with an iconic aesthetic, to help position your customers in that place and to associate it with your product. 

2. Similarly, the use of a place to increase interest in one’s social media presence, and to help show themselves in places that are not native to their cultural identity – and the use of the aesthetic of the place to make people look at you more. 

3. The use of a place as an aesthetic backdrop that is inauthentically tied to the audience or the product, and is only using the place to draw attention and catch attention. 

4. A key distinction is that the place is iconic, and / or is named in the marketing campaign or social media post to ensure that people know where it is and can figure out how to get there. 

Example: “I saw an advertisement the other day by REI, where they were brandfucking Moab, Utah, to sell Yeti coolers. Yeah, they showed the Moab sign, then a couple New York bros wearing Chacos cracking a cold beer out of a Yeti cooler over a canyon overlook where you’re not even allowed to have an open container. Brandfuckers.” 

noun - brandfucker

1. A person or company who uses a place to garner interest in them or their product

2. All it takes is once to become a brandfucker, but when one does this on a regular basis, they earn this label, perhaps permanently 

Yeah, it’s aggressive – and graphic — yet accurate. But the use of places, to help drive more and more people to a location, effectively makes a decision for people and place being used – that they’ll be overused and abused in a matter of hours to years. It took Moab about 30 years to go from off-the-beaten path to so beaten, it’s effectively a geologic tourist brothel. 

Here’s a list of companies that I’ve found to be the biggest brandfuckers, and regularly sell places to drive their own sales: 

1. REI - This extremely profitable corporation (not a quaint Co-Op, like they try to sell themselves as) might be the worst – they’re constantly selling places to help drive more gear sales

2. Patagonia - I mean, they named their business after a place, which is now so overrun with tourist idiots, it’s apparently untravelable – And they constantly show and tell where they are in their ad campaigns.

3. The Olympics - This one is interesting, because the entire center of their schtick is to build a bunch of places in a specific place, then market the place alongside the events for the entire thing. The Salt Lake Olympics – sold the crap out of Salt Lake City. The Sochi Olympics sold the bananas out of Sochi, and so on. 

4. Stio - It’s a somewhat obscure outdoor brand, but they always want you to know where they are in their ads, which is often Jackson Hole, Wyoming. With land inching up around $1 million per acre, I suppose they can sell it all they want, but it’ll continue to be unattainable to the masses … 

5. Topo Designs - These posers came from somewhere in the midwest, and decided to take up shop in the Boulder, Colorado area, and decided to use Colorado in all of their advertising. Overpriced, hipster, poser, brandfuckers to the max. 

6. Yeti - This brand is out of Texas, I believe, and constantly uses locations that aren’t … Texas … to sell their junk. The most hilarious and fascinating thing about this company is that they produce garbage, but have somehow convinced people to pay hundreds of dollars for it. Must be those locations and they “lifestyle” they sold. 

7. Car Advertisements - As a general category, all of the CUV / SUV commercials appear to be staged in Moab, UT, or places that are clearly in the Rocky Mountains. No more upstate New York estates to show off a Lincoln Towncar … it’s “all adventure, all the time” in these car ads. 

There are dozens more, and then, there are a variety of media companies, of which will be the subject of another post – there’s a lot to cover there. 

So, without beating a dead horse, I hope it’s useful to know that when you see a company or person using places to tie themselves and their products to, there’s a word for that – they’re brandfuckers. They’re making a choice to sell the place along with their product, which helps to drive people to these places — they’re brandfucking it. Think that’s not accurate? Take a look at some photos of Moab from the 1970s, then take a look at it today – it’s been annihilated, and is now a tourist cesspool crawling with people who found the place on the internet or an ad, and decided to get in on the ‘folksy adventure’ action while it’s a hot fad (their words, not mine).

Let’s cancel all of the companies that are driving this geographic colonization just to boost their brand and make a buck. 

The Fleeting West is written by a highly opinionated and highly vivid westerner with a bone to pick with private companies and tourists alike for bringing every rotten thing from the urbanized east to our western lands.