Branding, The Powerful Tool Against Stereotypes

Since the dawn of civilizations, humans have the nature or I prefer to call it the ‘hobby’ of categorizing things. Humans categorize time, creating January, February, 1900, Before Century, A.D., we categorize stars and creating constellations, solar system and of course we categorize living things on earth. Aristotle, one of the greatest Greek philosophers is famous of his keen interest in animal classification. At his time, it was very simple, 4-legged animals, 2-legged animal, bird, fish and so on. Fast forward to the modern time, the name Carolus Liannaus surfaced, continuing Aristotle’s legacy of animals and other living things classification. He later introduced the ‘binominal nomenclature’, a systematic and much more detailed system of living things classification. He then known as the Father of Taxonomy.

It's not just animals that humans are fond of categorizing, humans in fact fond of categorizing his own species. There’re various basis of this classification, namely races, religions, wealth, etc. When people do this classification, humans are separated into boxes and are ascribed as homogenous group of people based on certain criteria, while neglecting the rest. Because of this classification, every individual tends to have their personal favorite box of people –usually it’s the category he fall into—and the least favorite box or in some extreme cases, the one they hate the most. When someone hates a certain category and he got the will, the power, and knowledge on how to wield it, he’ll try to eliminate the said category or at least surpress them. Hitler is an exemplary example of this kind of people. He hated the Jews so much, which is one of the categories of humans based on race. He then tried to eliminate the Jews. Imagine if Hitler had won the war and hypotethically suceedded in eliminating all the Jews. Would he stop then? Well, probably not. As the Jews gone, the second most hated box of people will take the place and become the Hitler’s most hated people. This cycle could keep continuing, till the whole human population gets wiped out, leaving nothing but the pure-blooded Aryan race. But then, there’ll be another categorization, the Aryan born in German might consider himself better and there’ll be another extermination of the Aryan overseas. The cycle is continuing again.

A lot of people, at least those working in office or go to school hate Monday. The problem is Monday is just another human-made categorization. If we delete Monday from the calendar, we’ll have Tuesday next to Sunday and we’ll begin resenting Tuesday. You can keep deleting the days of the week till you’re left with nothing but Sunday. But then, there’ll be chaos and people will start categorizing days again!

Well, from these two examples I think you got my point. Categorization exists and we can just delete the category we dislike. Categorization exists to enable us having a much simpler way to understand the world, or the Universe if you prefer to see it in the larger picture. The problem is as the categorization exists, so does labeling. People from different category give label to each other. The wealthy labels the poor as the lazy ones, the poor calls the wealthy greedy capitalist, a group of so-called ‘religious group’ calls the others infidels, and the list could goes on. It looks ugly, but yet some of them are true, aren’t they? While what about the wrong ones? People might ascribe to the stereotypes, because it has never been proven otherwise.

I read this book once, I think is a textbook for my corporate communication class. It says: Don’t say no comment, because if you do so people will look for the information from other sources. Most of the time it’ll cause you more harm than good. The same goes in cases of race stereotypes, religion stereotypes, country stereotypes, and other group stereotypes. If we don’t want to be labelled, we can not just sit here passively, while people are incessantly judging. No, we are not supposed to just sit here! But, fighting back by throwing another word of disdain to the opposite side is not a solution either. To avoid stereotype, we must act not react. We’ve to say and show the world what we want people to think and see about us. If you want to be seen as friendly person, let’s showcase the friendliness, if you want people to think about you as the generous one, then be generous, if you want people to think you as a ruthless leader, be ruthless and don’t show mercy. The bottomline is you’ve to actively shape your own image, or work together to show your group image, whatever it is you want the public to see. Once the branding is done right, gradually the stereotypes will be eroded.