AD_Post

Camping outside a new Apple store the night before it opens, wearing only Nike, dressing up a car in a Red Bull outfit. The universal language of love also includes brands. Consumerism has led to instances in which the brand-consumer relationship reaches high points of fanaticism.

But perhaps nothing compares with perpetuating the name of your favorite brand on your skin. In the most extreme cases, brand loyalty leads a person to pay tribute, offering their own body as a voluntary screen, receiving in return nothing but the pride in being tattooed. Each one with their history.

But in some cases, the practice may be beneficial. Let’s start by mentioning the latest fashion in Japanese marketing: using young women’s thighs to paste stickers of a particular brand. But let´s start at the end because they are not real tattoos, and therefore should be excluded from the analysis. However, the strategy has cruder and more primitive precedents, though equally commercial.

The owner of Rapid Realty Company, established in New York, offered a 15% salary increment to all employees who had the logo of the company tattooed. A lot of the staff responded, but probably more for money than love. However, the initiative was not the boss´s, but an employee’s who took the tattoo of his own accord and received an unexpected pay rise.

More dramatic is the case of Billy Gibby, a young amateur boxer, a native of Alaska, who in the face of economic difficulties decided to tattoo the logo of an online casino on his back, in exchange for $10,000. And as they say, when you get one tattoo then you want more. The same with money. Now “Brandling Gibby” has more than 38 tattoos of different brands, 20 of them on his face, but none of the operations has secured him the money to remove even the ones that have ceased their trading activities.

The “skinvertising” is among the new ways of marketing, but still lacks studies that would define its costs and benefits. Meanwhile, tattooing a logo will continue to respond to brand fanaticism. That said, if you want to tattoo the logo of your favorite brand, keep in mind that some logos have a more aesthetic sense than others. That is, a tattoo is a motif on your skin, and certainly you will want it to be a nice ornament. Also, if you’re going to get a tattoo because you like the brand ideologically, you must be willing to take the values of that mark on your skin. Even if one day you find out that the brand of clothes you tattooed exploits children in Bangladesh.

Getting a tattoo is always a difficult decision, but, as we see, having a logo tattooed is even more complicated. As a final tip, we can apply the same as for getting any tattoo: get it done with a good tattooist. Just as a bad logo is a cross for any brand, the frustrated attempt of a tattoo that seems like the logo of Nike can calmly head the list of sins of Self-Marketing.