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The Branding Of Plastics
How Important Is The Branding Of A Material And How Far Do Plastics Go In Helping To Define Brands?
By Chris Lefteri
With an image as the material of progress, born out of its ability to be formed into an infinite range of shapes, plastic has gone through a number of connotations over its relatively short life. Plastics are a cultural phenomenon not just because of what they can do, but because they provide the largest contribution to our materialistic and object-based culture, in that they are available everywhere and everyday, as opposed to being rare and exclusive. As a group, they are the ultimate impersonator, perfectly able to become products of value and at the same time products of disposability. They are able to reach into every material category and take on the characteristics of metals, glass and timber - like Woody Allen’s character Zelig, in the film of the same name, a chameleon able to take on an infinite range of physical incarnations.
So how do we begin to define or “brand” this manufactured mimicry? Plastics definitely have an image, but what is that image? And how does this image differ among consumers, designers, engineers, environmentalists, students and scientists? Are we even equipped to answer these questions with the changes associated with increasing and accelerating new technologies?
Why ask these questions? Mainly because I am curious, but also because the plastic industry, like any industry, needs to be aware of how it is perceived. From the initial perception of plastic as a material of high value and esteem, where it was used as ornamentation adorned around the body, to the 1960s where it was closely linked to the new cultural revolution, with resulting bright, organic designs that took their references from images in pop culture. Creating playful, provocative and even anarchic forms in all areas of consumer design, plastic became the democratic material, epitomising youthfulness and unconventional lifestyles, allowing everyone to own low-cost, high-value products and furniture. But with the increasing fragmentation and diversification of industry, today the term “plastic” seems impossible to pin down, because for every character trait there is an opposing view. Being so successful at being the material of democracy and abundance has led now to its being perceived as one of the main culprits behind our environmental problems. And yet for every accusation of dwindling resources, there is a company looking at alternative source for raw material, and for every accusation of landfill overflows, there is research into new biodegradable recipes.
So how is the definition of the plastic family of materials changing and how can manufacturers address their communication of individual products to consumers, as well as the designers and engineers who specify the materials? How can a family of materials that is so diverse and wide reaching be classified and communicated?
Just a beautiful image
A Blurred Family Snapshot
Part of the problem of classification and definition lies in the accelerating expansion of technologies and new materials that means the family grouping of plastic materials is never stationary. In his influential book The Material of Invention, Ezio Manzini talks of materials in transformation. He compares trying to capture a snapshot of materials to taking a group photograph where everyone is in a constant state of movement. This great analogy expresses the difficulty in trying to capture not just the essence of a group of materials that contains thousands of variables, but also how to record them. From a different perspective Roland Barthes describes plastic as being “more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible”.
Therefore, with this increasing diversity in materials, it is becoming more important for manufacturers to distinguish their product / material from competitors’. Rather than what Roland Barthes describes “as having names like Greek shepherds”, the naming of specific plastics begins the process of familiarisation - technical-sounding polycarbonate becomes Lexan®, thermoplastic elastomers become Hytrel®. This serves to distinguish companies and also to provide bite-sized and friendly six-letter names, strangely with similar sounding origins, who could all be wizards from The Lord of the Rings. In terms of more technical forms of classification, these different plastics regularly fall into the same categories of thermosets and thermoplastics, but are there other ways of classifying these materials that are more relevant to the qualities that contemporary consumers assign to products?
The View From Manufacturing
Our ability to select materials based on functional criteria is something that we take for granted in most mass-produced applications. You know that if you drop your mobile phone, chances are it will survive the drop, which in turn tells us that this area of material development is well covered. On the other hand, some areas of material science are often forgotten, such as emotional responses and issues that are to do with another level of communication. It is only natural that the materials world follows fashion by acknowledging this fact and using materials to perform less tangible functions. Ask the designer and founder of fashion label Red or Dead, Wayne Hemingway, what his favourite material is and he will tell you that its Formica®, not because of its hardness and durability or decorative potential, but because it reminds him of his “nan’s kitchen table”. This captures the emotional value of materials, where surfaces have meanings beyond their technical capabilities.
If manufacturers were better able to brand and communicate their materials to designers on a level which is sympathetic to these “softer” criteria, would that mean they would be able to sell more of their product? Perhaps the difficulty lies with the fact that communication today is led by virtual experience. The easiest and quickest way to find information on materials is through company websites. Most producers market their product as a dry composition of molecular chains with precise scientific language. There are of course images of their products, often of poor “inspirational potential”, illustrating typical applications. However, what most fail to acknowledge is that the materials world has a much larger role to play in the value of our products than that of merely fulfilling physical and mechanical properties.
As I have already mentioned, we have reached a point as consumers where our expectations for our products have shifted from a performance-led expectation to an emotive state. There are obviously still performance products that use big material brands like Gore-Tex® or Kevlar® to fulfil specific criteria, but there is a whole load of products that are functionally driven and evaluated far less from this perspective. In this sense, the function of industrial materials needs to find new contexts, areas where new materials can be expressed through the communication of experience and interaction with new surfaces. Another question manufacturers need to raise is how to communicate the essence of a material to designers who are searching for innovation.