Hello. My name's Jim and this is my wife Debbie. We met on the Honda Highway of Love.

Costumer Loyalty. Get people hooked (psychologically) on a product and provide them with "exit barriers" so that they can never abandon their product, and watch the bottom line get fatter. Like almost everything in our consumer society, I find "brandfests" (apparently, the most successfull "Brand Equity" ploy conceived of to date) to be both pitiable and laudable. They provide a major social event that has the potential to change people's lives, but that event is in the name of addicting that person to a brand, a corporation, and its attendant image, and those friends and discoveries you've made while taking your Jeep off-road are nothing but devices engineered to keep you coming back to your welcoming local Jeep showroom.

But that's the culture in which we live. It makes sense that humans in a consumerist culture would "find themselves" and forge life-long friendships at a fetishistic gathering meant to further entrench their consumerist way of life. Social networks are fuelled by common experiences that bind certain groups together, but when those experiences are hollow, contrived, produced by ulterior motives, then how strong can that social group really become?

Kurt Vonnegut referred to such groups as "granfalloons" in his novel Cat's Cradle. "If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon" (Vonnegut). A granfalloon is any proud society or group who's existence is based on a shared identity or purpose that is actually meaningless. Vonnegut cites "the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows - and any nation anytime, anywhere." I would argue that social structures created at Jeep Week, Nike Town, or any commercial piece of our culture would fit into this category.

But then, what social group isn't a granfalloon? In our society EVERY piece of shared identity or purpose has been commercialized and effectively evactuated of any real substance. So where does meaning in our interpersonal relationships come from? I don't have the answer, and (I'm pretty sure) Nike doesn't have it either.