Are we becoming brands, are brands becoming us, and does it matter? Travel notes from Diesel Island, via Starbucks.

Are consumers and brands becoming one and what does this mean if our goal is to create consumer pull for sustainability?

A queue of shivering umbrellas at Swansea University stopped me in my tracks last week.Surprisingly, Starbucks coffee seems to be worth wet shoes, a hole in your pocket and a queue in a gale compared with other options on campus at Swansea University. Surely, chattering teeth in the pursuit of coffee is a step beyond ‘I like this brand’ to a more intimate relationship that says ‘this brand is me’? I think we’re taking our relationships with brands to the next level: from dating to committed, life partnerships where we’re getting to know each other’s friends, life-styles and hopes for the future. It could be co-habitation next – and I wonder what that means for sustainability.

Working with Swansea University to encourage students to munch a 2020 diet on our Best Food Forward project has been a wake-up call on our changing relationships with brands. Social network marketing is weaving ever-closer emotional connections between us and the stuff we buy, and is tapping in to our confidence in each other to generate demand (see Social Media Revolution). In unequal Britain where we trust each other less and less this is opening up new, social spaces for consumption and exciting new opportunities to shift our buying habits from a ‘stuff-intensive’ to a ‘stuff-lite’ version of consumerism, centred on product-service-systems.

As soon as you imagine a life where our life-style needs are met through product service systems you realise how important trust is to making ‘stuff-lite’ consumerism work: trust in each other, trust in brands, trust in services to not let us down. You take a leap of faith to believe a peer-to-peer car leasing service like WhipCar will get a functioning car to you just in time for a camping trip, for example. And the lender has to rate you pretty highly to believe you’d get the car back in a Monday-ready state.

Life is too busy and our spare time too precious to risk that other people won’t deliver on their promises in a service situation. Let’s face it, getting the boiler or washing machine fixed, organising home insulation, getting sound financial advice or getting to Paddington Station on time is often a hair-pulling experience involving a lot of waiting around, misinformation and missed connections. What we’ve got now is hardly a service-centred consumer culture of cooperation and mutuality. Our experiences shout at us to hang on to control and reduce our reliance on other people, to keep things simple.

Diesel Island doesn’t just reach into residents’ social networks and use their influence to advertise the brand. No, it invites us to live a social life through the Diesel brand – which shifts the relationship completely. When you visit Diesel Island, you’re invited to join a virtual land and group identity that has absolutely nothing to do with jeans and everything to do with philosophy of life. Anyone can take up residence – through Facebook – and help create a hedonistic ‘Land of Stupid Home of the Brave’ that mirrors the location and geography of a real island in the Caribbean. Diesel has set up an ethos and mantra to drive immigration and is leaving it up to the Island community to pick their camping spots, decide the Island’s laws (it’s illegal for residents to work before 11am) and what happens next (a beach party).

The focus on community and escapism could open up new possibilities for the way Island residents consume Diesel because it’s encouraging like-minded people to socialise and collaborate by being the brand rather than by buying it. Virtual Island beach parties could become real ones. And if Diesel offered inconspicuous product services, residents that would have chosen to fork out eighty quid to sport a new pair of jeans might see the alternatives in a new light if others are doing it on the Island. We could see a rainforest version of Street Bank, a second-hand clothes market where you can get to know previous owners before you buy or a ‘redesigning’ coconut shack where you can team up with other residents to personalise previous seasons’ gear.

If the consumer pull for sustainability is about building trust and social relationships, brands like Diesel are opening up new social worlds that have the potential to shape consumerism. The point is that we’re increasingly coming together to live out shared experiences through shared brand ‘philosophies’ – like residents can do on Diesel Island. The question is how will brands use these new relationships.