Kenmore, Sony, Chevrolet and Hamilton-Beach advertise for free in your home. It's time to stop the freeloading. Brand-blacking: Personal anticorporate "passivism" and simple mental hygiene by Cub Lea First posted 05/01; last updated 12/04; addendum 08/11

Brand-blacking isn't an esthetic choice. In fact, logotypes are so deeply integrated into product designs that blacking them out can actually blemish an item's appearance. Dollar stores now carry white, yellow and blue electrician's tape for closer color matches, but even if all you have is black, brand-blacking is still a worthwhile habit for its mental-hygiene benefits.

It seems profoundly ironic that I have a semiprofessional shill to thank for bringing brand-blacking into my life. I first got the idea from watching a closeup of a football player's shoes as the announcers explained how the logotypes on the shoes - Adidas, I believe - had been covered up due to the player's endorsement contract with Nike. Off the field, he wore and endorsed the brand which paid him. On the field, he vastly preferred a different shoe from anything his sponsor produced. The solution? Wear the better shoe, but hide the brand identification with a little clever knifework and a bit of black ink.

As I watched this, it occurred to me at that moment that I hadn't been paid to endorse the shoes I was wearing, either. Yet there was the Nike swoosh, proudly displayed four times on each shoe. It then occurred to me that no one had paid me to endorse Microsoft keyboards or mice...or AOC monitors...or Hitachi CD drives...or Pioneer stereo equipment...yet all those logotypes and brand IDs, and many more, were all plainly visible in my office and den.

Outraged? Hardly. My reaction was more one of irritation. But I was sufficiently irritated that before the game ended, I had neatly sliced the swooshes off my runners with a snap-blade knife. (This article was written several months before the "box cutter" entered our popular lexicon courtesy of a rather different form of activism. -CL) And before the end of the day, there was hardly a piece of manufactured goods anywhere in my home whose brand markings hadn't been covered with black electrician's tape.

"Before the end of the day, there was hardly a piece of manufactured goods anywhere in my home whose brand markings hadn't been covered with black electrician's tape."

In the span of a couple of hours, I went from total ignorance to joining what I understand was a teeming horde of hundreds of North Americans who at that time had taken up the practice of "blacktaping", "brand-blacking", "logo masking". In other words, it wasn't exactly a popular practice back then, and the ubiquity of black electrician's tape on my "stuff" still raises the eyebrows of guests to this day. I don't consider this a trivial matter. I don't consider it life-or-death, but brand-blacking has become a very important part of my life that I believe has real value to me.

My home has been an ad-free zone for some 15 years now, and I wouldn't have it any other way. As soon as the rush of any new toy or tool wears off, out comes the snap-blade knife and black tape, and any logotypes or brand identification marks disappear from view, not to be seen again until I'm ready to sell the item in question. Ugly? Sure. But is a strip of flat black tape any less esthetically distruptive than the RCA logo just below my TV's picture tube? Or the Harman-Kardon lettering on my stereo receiver? Or even the Aiwa lettering on my DVD player's remote control?

Well, it's a matter of taste, sure. The Nike swoosh wouldn't sell sweatshirts if people didn't like the way it looks. And no company with any sense chooses a logotype or brand ID that doesn't have strong esthetic appeal to its market. But this is an issue that goes beyond arguably cleaning up the appearance of a few home appliances. It's also about cleaning up my mind, and denying advertisers access to parts of my mind that they didn't pay for.

I can't honestly say that I ever got a genuine thrill from slicing off a swoosh or taping over a brand name. But it has undoubtedly made a real and valued contribution to reducing the degree of visual distraction in my living space, and - who knows? - it might even have improved my shopping habits. To me, that's a sufficiently substantial improvement in the quality of my life to justify the time and effort I've put into this practice.

It would be a different story if I had been asked when I bought the goods if I wanted a small discount on the item in return for visibly displaying the brand name or logotype. But I wasn't. It was just there. And it had been there since the early 1970s, when Adidas took shoe logotyping beyond the tongue and heel and made the three stripes synonymous with the Adidas brand, when stereos went modular and every manufacturer plastered their brand markings on the front panels, when for obvious reasons everyone from makers of table lamps to toothbrushes decided it was critical that the consumer be reminded of what brand they'd purchased not just when the package was opened, but every time the item was used.

A century ago, display of brand IDs was considered an arrogance reserved for automakers, stove and oven casters, watchmakers and a few other elite classes of products. Today, you probably sit reading this in sight of no fewer than fifteen different items which needlessly display brand identification marks. And you may even have paid for the privilege of displaying that advertising. Brand marking has penetrated our culture so deeply that the brand ID itself is a product to be sold.

"It's one thing to want your brand and logotype associated with a racing car. But it's quite another when that brand becomes associated with a particular type of product."

While others may see it more in certain social groups and scenes, in my world NASCAR is the epitome of the brand-ID-as product. If you follow NASCAR at all, you probably refer to your favorite team by its driver and car number, but you identify the car in your mind by its colors and sponsor paint. Dale Earnhardt Jr., #8? The red "Bud" car. Jeff Gordon's #24? The rainbow Dupont Chevy. Tony Stewart? The pale red Home Depot car. Sterling Marlin? The "silver bullet" Coors Dodge. In this world, color is intimately associated with brand...color is brand as much as it is team and driver. And when you buy a Tony Stewart sweatshirt, you can bet your ass that Home Depot is getting a few cents for the use of their logotype, even after paying his racing team millions for the right to affiliate with Stewart. It's not a universal phenomenon, but that kind of brand identification with the race team is the goal of every major NASCAR sponsor, and shows just how far we've allowed brand IDs to penetrate our consciousness.

It's one thing to want your brand and logotype associated with a racing car. But it's quite another when that brand becomes associated with a particular type of product. In most of Canada, a tissue is referred to as a Kleenex. I know people who refer to their television as "the Sony" or their computer as "the Dell" or "the HP". Manufacturers have found ways into our consciousnesses so deeply that we associate whole product classes with the manufacturer, not just specific product types.

Who paid us for that privilege? How much did Kimberley-Clark give to the Canadian taxpayer to have tissues become known as Kleenex'? Not a penny. So how did they do it? By making the brand name such an integral design element of the tissue box, and not many of us use tissue box covers in our homes.

Once you've bought the product, you've paid the manufacturer for their advertising. But it doesn't stop there. In the average home, you'll find as many as 250 visible product logotypes spread throughout the home, none of which have been paid for by the owner of that logotype. We expose ourselves to these logos hundreds or thousands of times a day, selling our subconscious' brand loyalty to that manufacturer without getting a penny in return. Now really...how fair is that?

Don't think for a second that this kind of casual exposure doesn't affect us. It does, and anyone who has worked in advertising and is still able to sleep nights without the aid of tranquilizers or liquor will back that up. Every time you see Kenmore on your kitchen stove, Filter Queen on your vacuum cleaner, Crest on your tube of toothpaste, or Kellogg's on your breakfast cereal box, you give free advertising to the brand's owner. That exposure may not sway you one way or the other on any purchase decision. But it makes an impression nonetheless. All major advertisers know that the long-term success of their brands depends largely on the familiarity and comfort people have with their brand and its various representations (jingles, logotypes, color schemes, etc.) and it's only a very foolish manufacturer today that doesn't allow their marketing department to decide where and how brand IDs and logos should appear on the products themselves.

So the stuff works on you whether you like it or not. And if the manufacturer has done their job, you can't get rid of those reminders of what you bought and from whom without significantly damaging the item in question...or covering it up and detracting from its design. Everything from your PC and monitor to your coffee maker and alarm clock include logotypes and product IDs as integral design elements that can't easily or safely be removed.

That leaves only one rational choice for anyone who wants this unwanted advertising out of their life: covering it up.

Electronics are the worst offenders, whether it's in the den or the washroom, but most of us are "brand-bombed" throughout the home. It takes just seconds per product to end this corporate freeloading, and after ten years of brand-blacking I can attest that the rewards truly do last for the life of the product and beyond.

I knew from the day I began masking out the logos on my own property that I couldn't have been the first to do this. But to this day, I have yet to see any indication of an organized or informal campaign to encourage this. So there's no accepted name yet for this. The term "brand-blacking" is my own invention. I've since heard of a few geeks in a semi-famous webdev shop "black-taping" their office's computer and stereo gear when they didn't get sponsorships from the local PC builder who supplied them. When you see athletes on television with taped, sewn-over or blacked-out logos on their gear, it's referred to as "masking" or "logo masking". But until there's an agreed-upon term for the practice, I'll refer to it as brand-blacking.

There's a right and a wrong way to brand-black your home or office. But there's no one right or wrong way. I use nothing more than flat black vinyl electrician's tape, the tough, stretchy stuff that only cuts easily with a "box cutter" (snap-blade knife). Some have wondered why I wouldn't choose foil or colored tape for blacking out silver-faced items, cream or white items, but I decided that I could add the least distraction and complexity to my life, and achieve the best overall results, by using the same black electrician's tape for every job.

And how exactly do you go about brand-blacking your home or office? That's the kind of stupid question that helpdesk support personnel get paid to answer. And since Duck, Scotch, Olfa, NT and the other tape and snap-blade makers aren't paying me for this article, you can ask them.

"I believe so strongly in the personal benefits of brand-blacking that I don't allow logotypes to be visible on any product where the logo isn't a design element."

Why do I bother? There's no one reason. I first started brand-blacking as a form of personal activism against corporate intrusion into my life. I still do it partly for that reason, but I have long since discovered other benefits. The text and design elements of logotypes are designed to worm their way into our psyches, and they'll draw the eye unless we make a deliberate effort to avoid that. Distraction like that I don't need or want; it's a lot like having a jingle playing in your head that you can't stop humming to yourself. I have to believe that at some level, it improves my consumer skills as well. After all, if I don't have all this extra exposure to logotypes and brand names, would I not be more likely to avoid choosing a particular brand that might not be the best simply because I was more intimate and comfortable with its name?

Where do I stop? Well, I don't cover up the dish soap bottle, I don't tape over my toothpaste tube, and I don't make a habit of using wraps on soda cans. But any product which is a semipermanent fixture in my home, from the keyboard and mouse with which this was written to the sewn-on maker's mark on the pyjamas I wore while typing it, if I wasn't paid to advertise it, it doesn't get space in my home.

Where do I draw the line? Well, I believe so strongly in the personal benefits of brand-blacking that I don't allow logotypes to be visible on any product where the logo isn't a design element. And there are two manufacturers who get space in my home because I want them to have it. The first is Mattel...I'm a notorious Hot Wheels hoarder, and there are half a dozen HW "flames" clearly visible as decor elements in my home. The second is Apple Computers. My living-room speaker stands happen to be a pair of discarded Macintosh Plus computers, and I'm so taken with the design elegance of the early Macs that I allow the rainbow logotype, distracting as it may be, to remain uncovered.

Oh yes, and then there's my website, where a logotype graces every single page...my logotype. But from all appearances, nobody seems too willing to pay me to display that logo either.

"Someone is eventually going get famous for popularizing this. It sure as hell won't be me...not that I didn't try."

What the hell!? This was just such a ridiculously obvious choice of personal activism when I first posted this essay in 2001. It just wasn't something that had caught the public's attention yet. But let's not forget what sparked this habit of mine: seeing a very famous athlete brand-black his shoes. In the ten years since this was posted, we've seen countless headlines about anarchist/anticorporate rioting, dozens of self-styled spokespeople on television reminding us to avoid being seduced by "media chic", and the mainstreaming of the personal-message T-shirt.

So why at this late date can I still not find a single article anywhere on the Internet that covers what I've talked about here? I'm hardly a stickler for eliminating brand visibility in my household, but why, in all my travels over the last decade, have I still not met a single person who engages in brand-blacking to the same level as I do? I just don't get it.

I don't really have anything to add to this piece. I'm just very surprised and disappointed that this activity hasn't acquired greater popularity. I tried to pitch this idea to at least two dozen magazines as an article, and didn't even get back a thanks-but-no-thanks. Mark these words: someone is eventually going get famous for popularizing this. Why shouldn't it be you? It sure as hell won't be me...not that I didn't try.