Part of what I do for a living involves a lot of brand management. Ensuring the consistency of the brand’s usage, making sure all future projects and endeavors incorporate and also ensure the integrity of the identity, and so forth. Needless to say, I think I know a little something about branding.
So despite the fact that it’s a fictional universe, Capcom has gone through some pretty impressive lengths to ensure that the brand of the Umbrella Corporation is impressively strong. Dare I say it, but I’d venture a statement that Umbrella is the strongest brand in fiction.
It started in 1996 in the very first Resident Evil / Bio Hazard game, in which we are all introduced into this multi-million dollar pharmaceutical company with an evil agenda. Experimentation with humans, chemicals, and viruses, and before we know it, a mansion, and all it’s hidden laboratories an inner workings are infested with zombies, zombie dogs, zombie crows, Hunters, and gigantic spiders. As you the player make your way through the mansion and into the labs does the Umbrella identity really begin to manifest, with the iconic red and white Umbrella logo showing up on damn near everything. Every door, on the floor to remind the scientists just whom owns them, and all the pieces of equipment. But the most impressive thing to me was the fact that Umbrella had their very own computer operating system, the ROPLS Umbrella OS. Granted their employees’ choice of passwords weren’t exactly concrete (JOHN, ADA), but if a company really wanted to saturate their brand and identity, they were going at it full-steam ahead, to the point of drowning their own employees in it.
There were plenty of examples in Resident Evil 2, but since I can’t seem to find any visuals, we’re skipping to 2000’s Resident Evil: Code Veronica. In the mostly Claire Redfield adventure, Claire runs across more computers, now showing the new and updated Umbrella OS, complete with the logo emblzoned on the background of the screen so that users know who the fuck really runs the place.
And just so I have an excuse to post a gratuitous ass-shot of Claire’s, the OS can be faintly visible on the upper-left quadrant of the monitor in the 2009 remake of Code Veronica, from the Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles rail-shooter that was released on the Wii. Needless to say, if there was space to put a logo on it, Umbrella was damn good at capitalizing on it.
As evidenced by such, this tactical machine gun is also ensured to establish the Umbrella brand, and if it were possible to see the actual ammunition used on it, I’d have to fathom that the bottom of the slugs are shown with four vertical lines intersecting to at least form the shape of the Umbrella logo, if not in actual full red and white.
The strength of the Umbrella brand even carried into the series of Resident Evil films, even if all of them after the first one really did kind of stink. But in live action, the brand was established even further, as the Umbrella logo was slapped onto everything from license plate covers, to the Chevy Yukons themselves, all over lab walls, floors, operating systems, and I swear to god I looked for it, but in Afterlife, there really was an octagonal coffee table in Wesker’s initial hideout, that was in the shape of the Umbrella logo in full red and white.
If zombies didn’t take over the world in the Resident Evil universe, it’s safe to say that Umbrella would have stores like Target, where there would be no text, but just an Umbrella logo on top of a big structure. Or like Demolition Man, there would be fast food restaurants that were all just Umbrella, since they were the only ones to survive. The Umbrella corporation more or less aspired to have its hands in pretty much everything, so it’s hard to say that such a reality would be a stretch in this fictional universe. But if not for those god damn zombies. Regardless, considering how much destruction there was, and the fly-by-night re-construction of labs and hideouts, Umbrella spared no expense at despite the time-sensitive nature in which security should have taken priority, they made sure that their brand was incorporated into everything still. That’s what good brands do.
