Brands

Meaning and Value in Media Culture

Adam Arvidsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134277865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on rich empirical material, this revealing book builds up a critical theory, arguing that brands have become an important tool for transforming everyday life into economic value.

When branding lifestyles or value complexes onto their products, companies assume that consumers desire products for their ability to give meaning to their lives. Yet, brands also have a key function within managerial strategy. Examining the history of audience and market research, marketing thought and advertising strategy; the first part of this book traces the historical development of branding, whilst the second part evaluates new media, contemporary management and overall media economics to present the first systematic theory of brands: the brand as a key institution in information capitalism. It includes chapters on:

• consumption
• marketing
• brand management
• online branding
• the brand as informational capital.

Richly illustrated with case studies from market research, advertising, shop displays, mobile phones, the internet and virtual companies, this outstanding book is essential reading for students and researchers of the sociology of media, cultural studies, advertising and consumer studies and marketing.

1 Introduction

I’m wearing a lamb’s wool topcoat, a wool
jacket with wool flannel trousers, a cotton
shirt, a cashmere V-neck sweater and a silk
tie, all from Armani. Evelyn’s wearing a
cotton blouse by Dolce & Gabbana, suede
shoes by Yves Saint Laurent, a stencilled calf
skirt by Adrienne Landau with a suede belt
by Jill Stuart, Calvin Klein tights, Venetian
glass earrings by Frances Patiky Stein, and
clasped in her hand is a single white rose
that I bought at a Korean deli before Carruthers’
limousine picked me up. Carruthers is
wearing a lamb’s wool sport coat, a
cashmere/vicuña cardigan sweater, cavalry twill
trousers, a cotton shirt and a silk tie, all from
Hèrmes. (‘How tacky’, Evelyn whispered to me;
I silently agreed.)

(Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho,
New York; Vintage Books, 1991, p. 143)

I am an international student in Canada. I don’t have much in my room, besides an eMac sitting on my desk, and, this is just enough. My eMac is the only furniture and decoration I need in my room. I spend most of my time on my eMac to study and get connected with my friendsu [sic] back home. When the girls come into my room, the first thing they usually say is: ‘wow, you use Apple?’, and they automatically assume that I am a very cool guy that has great taste, and things just get better and better … Thank you, my eMac, for making my life so much more colorful and exciting!

(Chi, Canada, testimonial on ‘lovemarks’, 31 October, 2004)¹

I realized the other night that, with perhaps one or two exceptions, every guy that I’ve ever slept with and/or dated has been a total Apple fetishist. They all have iBooks (or sometimes PowerBooks), and iPods, and they use iTunes and iChat and iPhoto, and sometimes have been known to take trips to the famously sexy Apple Store in Soho. It’s not unusual for me to find myself in a bedroom conversation about why Macs are just so much better.

(Missmimesis, The Nerve Blog-a-log entry 29 January, 2005)

Bret Easton Ellis’ dystopian account of life among New York yuppies in the 1980s was arguably the first literary text where brand names played a prominent part. Ellis’ characters are defined by the branded items that they wear, use or otherwise endow themselves with, and the presence of one brand instead of another is often what defines a person or triggers a social situation. Throughout the novel, people remain anonymous and distant; brands speak for them, define them and make them into what they are. (And the main character, Patrick Bateman is often taken for a ‘Marcus Halberstam’, who allegedly wears the same kind of Brooks Brothers non-prescription glasses.)

Ellis’ novel depicts a period in which the brand in its present form made its entry on the social scene. In the United States, yuppies, a relatively small but culturally significant elite, had cast off the last remains of the progressive heritage of the 1960s and 1970s, to devote themselves to consumption in the pursuit of life-style and self-realization (Bonner and du Gay, 1992; Ehrenreich, 1990; Featherstone, 1991). In marketing brand management became the new paradigm, and advertising went through its second ‘creative revolution’ to put a renewed focus on the construction of image (Mort, 1996; Nixon, 1996, 2003; cf. Seguela, 1982). In the 1980s, the present wave of brand extensions began, building on new possibilities to out-source production. A number of luxury brands like Armani and Polo Ralph Lauren added on a wide range of new products – like soap, perfume, home appliances and, in the case of Ralph Lauren, paint – to end up selling paraphernalia for a more or less complete life-style (Twitchell, 1996). Some of these, like Pierre Cardin, over-extended themselves, effectively devaluing the brand name. Logos acquired a new visibility, and knowledge about brands, what they signified and how they differed became a central component of the middle class habitus. Significantly, the rise of brands did not only affect consumer culture; the world of work was also taken in. In the 1980s, management discovered the importance of ‘organizational identity’ (later ‘organizational branding’) as a way to give direction and coherence to complex, transnational organizations, too flexible and adaptive for the old bureaucratic style of command (Heelas, 2002). It now became important to ‘sell’ the organization, its values and goals to employees, to make them embrace its culture and make it their own (du Gay, 1996; Olins, 2000). Finally, the 1980s saw the efforts of the Reagan administration to privatize and de-regulate media, public space and public institutions. This facilitated the contemporary omnipresence of brands in schools, art museums and across the lived cityscape in general. It also enabled the media mergers and acquisitions that by now have produced the common media culture that makes global branding feasible (Mattelart, 1991; McChesney, 1999).

Although brands have a long history as a commercial institution, reaching as far back as the eighteenth century (see Chapter 5), their position as central components of the social fabric was established in the 1980s. Brands now became something of an omnipresent tool by means of which identity, social relations and shared experiences (like spending a night in bed talking about Apple products) could be constructed. They were spun into the social fabric as a ubiquitous medium for the construction of a common social world.

During the twenty years or so that have passed since the New York of Pat Bateman (when Les Miserables were still hot and people carried huge cell phones in their briefcases), much has happened on this front. Advertising budgets have grown steadily (apart from a slight setback in the early 1990s). The branding of public space has accelerated with corporate sponsorship replacing state subsidies for a wide range of institutions within education and the arts. ‘Liberalization’ of national media markets, combined with new, or more widely accessible technologies like VCRs, cable, satellite, home computers and the internet have made possible a commercial media culture capable of reaching into, appropriating and recycling styles and influences from areas that used to lie beyond the frontiers of consumer culture, such as China, Africa, India and the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, integrating them into a ‘commercial ecumene’ of well-nigh global dimensions (Fuglesang, 1994; Davies ed., 2000; Rajagopal, 1999; Appadurai, 1996; Hannerz, 1996). Enabled by this world-wide opening up to consumer culture, new brands like Nike and Starbucks have emerged with a global focus, and old one’s like McDonald’s and Tesco have re-oriented their strategic focus to expand into the new markets of Asia, South America and the Middle East. Many of these global companies now make systematic use of their brands to manage their transnational organizations. Regardless of whether you work at Starbucks in New York, Istanbul or Bangkok, you are part of the same organizational culture, ideally sharing the same values, beliefs and strategies of personal self-presentation. (Generally this does not include the people employed in the out-sourced production of the material goods sold, like the under-paid US prison labour that manufactures Starbucks’ disposable paper cups.) Brands have established themselves as an important managerial tool that gives stability and coherence to the Globally Integrated Networks that structure the flows of today’s transnational economy (Urry, 2003; Franklin et al., 2000; Lury, 2004).

At the same time, brands have become part of a global popular culture. The kind of knowledgeable, almost obsessive relation to brands that Ellis described among New York yuppies now seems to be extended to a wide range of different consumer groups. Among the Asian middle classes, for example brands have acquired a new importance: ‘Not so long ago China’s new rich left brand labels attached to the sleeve of their suit jackets, and their newly acquired Rolexes meant that fashion was to have your sleeves rolled up’ (French, 1998). Today, effigies of brands like Mercedes and Nokia are sometimes replacing the traditional paper money to be burnt at Chinese funerals. In Malaysia, rich young people form ‘Harley Davidson tribes’ (Talid, 2000). In the Philippines, less affluent lower middle class youth ‘spend hours sitting in strategic places, where they could be seen by all at McDonald’s or at Pizza Hut, drinking Coke or Milkshakes with a burger. They would then take the empty hamburger bags with them as they left the fast food restaurant, so that everybody in the street could see where they had their lunch or dinner. Students would share one Benetton sweater with two or three others’ (Gerke, 2000). In Bangkok, students from the countryside use strategies of ‘symbolic consumption’ mediated by brands to accommodate to the urban environment, and their richer peers deploy branded goods to flexibly adapt their self-presentations to the demands of the particular social situation, as they navigate between peer culture, parental expectations and professional life (Wattanasuwan, 2002a, 2002b).

It is true that people have commonly used consumption to mark off their transition from rural to urban environments, from a culture of relative deprivation to one of relative affluence. Italian sociologists Francesco Alberoni and Guido Baglioni’s 1965 study of migrants from the Italian South to the industrialized North is a classic in this respect. They showed how migrants viewed refrigerators, cars, washing machines, cosmetics and processed foods not just as conveniences but as tokens of belonging to an urban modernity to which they aspired. But it seems that today’s upwardly mobile Asian consumers are different. For them it is not the products as much as the brands that matter. Not so much the Hamburger as the McDonald’s Hamburger, not so much the watch as the Rolex watch, not so much the stylish handbag as the Prada handbag. It is the significance of the brand, itself articulated in a complex web of commercial intertextuality, that becomes the main use-value of the product: it allows a process positioning, or ‘negotiation’ of the self in relation to the shifting demands of everyday life. A similar importance of brands in the performance of selfhood and social relations has been noted among American high-school teenagers, particularly those who lack other qualities like athletic prowess or exceptional beauty. To the ‘slightly awkward’, the ‘overweight or not conventionally pretty’, savvy display of brands becomes a way of constructing a social position and a passable image (Quart, 2003: 31). While the branded teenage world that Quart describes can be taken as an extreme example, ordinary middle class Americans also take brands seriously. Recent research has shown how people engage in ‘brand communities’. They communicate (often over the internet), socialize and create shared friendships and animosities around brands like Saab and Macintosh (Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001). Overall, recent consumer research has come to emphasize that brands – and not just products – are important ‘cultural resources’ that people relate to as significant components of their own identities and overall life world (Elliott and Wattanasuwan, 1998; Fourier, 1998; Holt, 2002). Some go as far as to claim that, at least in the United States, brands now provide a source of meaning and ‘community’ capable of replacing those supposedly lost in the modernization process. People may ‘bowl alone’, but they socialize around brands (Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001; Firat and Venkatesh, 1995; cf. Putnam, 2000). Brands are part of the mundane context of action within which we become subjects.

But this new importance of brands to social life is only one part of the equation. The other part, frequently neglected by academic marketing, popular branding discourse and cultural studies alike, is economic. Parallel to the rise of the brand as a social institution – as something that mediates social life – there has been a clear increase in the financial significance of brand values. Since the 1980s the number of companies capitalizing on their brands have increased, and brand value has acquired a growing weight in financial decisions (Goodchild and Callow, 2001; Wild and Scicluna, 1997). While it is difficult to give exact figures for this development, estimates claim that during the mergers and acquisitions wave of the 1980s about 20 per cent of most bid prices were motivated by the value of brands. During the dot.com boom of the mid-1990s that figure was closer to 70 per cent in some sectors. Comprehensively Jan Lindemann (2003) of the Interbrand consultancy group estimates that the economic weight of tangible assets in nonfinancial businesses has decreased from slightly over 70 per cent in 1980 to slightly over 50 per cent in 2000. The corresponding increase in intangible assets includes things like patents and intellectual property rights, but since the relative weight of brands versus other intangibles has increased in the same period a substantial share of this increase is attributable to the growing economic weight of brand values. In parallel to this, there has been a movement in trademark legislation towards a recognition of the brand, not only as a symbol of something else – the quality of a product or the identity of the producer – but as an object of property in its own right. Lury calls this a movement from a definition of trademark infringement as ‘confusion’ (where the law protects the trademark owner from confusion as to the identity of the product or service that the trademark represent) to ‘dilution’, where the law protects the very identity of the trademark itself:

Thus, it used to be the case that trademark infringement would only be found where the use of a protected mark by someone (X) other than its owner (Y) was likely to cause consumers to be confused as to the origin of the product to which the mark was attached. This issue was whether consumers would think that X’s product actually came from Y. Now it is increasingly being suggested – with varying degrees of success – that if X’s use of Y’s signs on its product causes consumers to be reminded of Y on seeing X’s product, even while knowing that X and Y are distinct trades, infringement has occurred. In other words, creating associations between products is becoming established as the exclusive prerogative of the trademark owner; associations created by other producers can be legally prevented if they dilute the first mark.

(Lury, 2004: 108–9)

In absolute terms, the value of the world’s 100 most valuable brands was estimated to be $434 billion in 2001, roughly 4 per cent of US GDP (at $10,400 billion in 2002), and roughly three times total US advertising expenditure (at $132 billion in 2000). While the relative weight of brands in relation to other tangible and intangible assets naturally varies in different industries, there is no doubt that brand equity represents very substantial values on today’s financial markets. To some extent these brand values build on old styled salaried labour. Brands like amazon.com or heavily branded retailers like Tesco or Sainsbury’s employ an army of packaging, transport and call-centre workers to produce the particular relation to consumers that the brand embodies. But the substance of brand value lies in consumer attention. It is what consumers think off or do with the brand that is the source of its value; it is ‘what resides in the minds of customers’ (Keller, 2001: 14) that makes up the most important component of what the managerial discourse calls brand equity (that is, the capacity of a brand to generate value). And this attention devoted to the brand is also what brand valuation instruments base their measurements on (see Chapter 6 for a more detailed discussion of brand valuation). To some extent, consumer attention can be produced by means of advertising, design and brand management in general. But it is generally recognized (not least by brand managers themselves, see Chapter 4) that, in the end, valuable consumer attention is the outcome of a social communication process which retains a degree of autonomy. Hence, as Chapter 4 will show, brand management is mainly about managing a productive process which is external to the brand-owning organization, and which cannot be controlled in its entirety. Brands are thus a good illustration of how, as Gabriel Tarde (1901, 1904) suggested long ago, more or less autonomous public communication has become a direct source of economic value. This principle – the reliance on autonomously produced externalities as a source of surplus value and profits – makes the brand a paradigmatic embodiment of the logic of informational capitalism.

Brands and informational capitalism

Brands are a form of immaterial capital; a form of ‘crystallized knowledge’ (or conaissance cristallisé), to use André Gorz’s (2003: 33) term. As such they embody the fusion of the attention and the production economy, of aesthetics and economics more generally, long underway in the transition away from Fordism (Jameson, 1991; Harvey, 1991; Lash and Urry, 1994). But brands are more than that. As a sort of virtual real estate (Schiller, 1999) they occupy a valuable position in the life-world (or to use marketing terminology, the ‘minds’) of consumers. That position is valuable insofar as it enables a brand to subsume and appropriate what consumers do with the brand in mind as source of surplus value and profits. Consequently brands work as a kind of ubiquitous managerial devices by means of which everyday life is managed, or perhaps better, programmed, so that it evolves in ways that can potentially generate the right kind of attention (and hence, brand value). As Lury (1999, 2004) argues, the brand works as a kind of platform that anticipates certain kinds of actions and attachments. Nike’s efforts to make its logo condense a complex web of meanings and intensities have the effect that with a swosh certain actions come to assume distinct and particular meanings. The brand, Lury argues, pre-structures the action; it enters in between consciousness and the act, so to say. What brand owners own is a particular predetermined frame of action, a particular relation between ‘action and semiosis’ (ibid.: 514), between what consumers do and what their actions mean to them. Rob Shields paints a similar picture, if in more general terms. Brands, he argues, are virtual goods. With ‘virtual’ he means ‘something that does not have the tangibility of the actual but that clearly exists none the less’ (Shields, 2003: 177; see also Levy, 1998). The brand name – Nike, Rolex, Armani – anticipates future experiences and attachments. Both Lury and Shields are on to something very fundamental about the brand today: brands do not so much stand for products, as much as they provide a part of the context in which products are used. This is the core component of the use-value that brands provide consumers with. With a particular brand I can act, feel and be in a particular way. With a Macintosh computer I can become a particular kind of person, and form particular kinds of relations to others. A brand is thus nothing less than the propertied ‘frame of action’, to use Erving Goffman’s (1974) term. This context becomes valuable in economic terms, it acquires brand equity, when it is able to reliably produce certain forms of attention, through the subsumption or (which is the same thing) management of essentially autonomous communicative processes. But contrary to our standard image of management (or the capitalist subsumption of labour as such) this process does not primarily work by means of discipline. Rather, brands work by enabling consumers, by empowering them in particular directions. This is different from Fordist advertising (see Chapter 3) which was primarily directed at imposing a particular structure of needs and tastes on consumers. Brands rather embrace the general principle of what Nicolas Rose (1999) has called ‘advanced liberal governance’ – they work with the freedom of consumers, they say not ‘You Must!’ but ‘You May!’ (Barry, 2001; Zizek, 1999).

This enabling logic is connected to the productive condition of what I will call ‘informational capitalism’ (Dyer-Withford, 1999; other common terms are ‘digital’ [Schiller, 1999] or ‘cognitive’ [Moulier-Boutang, 2002] capitalism). Debates around the possibility of a new form of capitalism centred primarily on immaterial, informational production, rather than industrial production, have been long and complex, and are far from concluded. However, it seems that two central principles are emerging. First, the concept of ‘informational capitalism’ indicates a blurring of the distinction between ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ or ‘circulation’, that was central to theories of industrial society. This is visible in a wide variety of phenomena, such as the blurring of work and leisure that marks the lived reality of the new ‘symbol analytical’ professional classes, for whom the ‘network sociality’ of social events and the pursuit of ‘culturally mobile’ forms of consumption have come to feed directly into the ‘entrepreneurial’ production of a professional self with an attractive market position (Hage and Powers, 1992; Reich, 1991; Wittel, 1999). It is visible in aspects of the ‘online economy’ like dating sites or MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), where play, flirtation and other forms of user interaction is what actually produces the attractive content to which the sites in question sell access (see Chapter 6). It is visible in the growing importance of lottery games and pyramid schemes, and new forms of direct valorization of the faith and religious belief, like the prosperity gospels or the other forms of ‘money magic’ that have become an important aspect of ‘Millennial Capitalism’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000). It is visible in the new strategic importance of intellectual property rights and the present tendency towards the appropriation and privatization of common resources, like genetic information or biodiversity. All of these instances illustrate how, as Comaroff and Comaroff (2000) put it, ‘the workplace can no longer be privileged as the place for the production of value’. Rather, the production process now relies on and appropriates as a source of value, wealth that derives from a series of activities – playing, worshipping, wining and dining, or just looking (Beller, 2002; Lee and LiPuma, 2002) – that used to be considered part of the wasteful realm of consumption. In all of these instances, the most important source of value becomes the ability to appropriate an externality: in Morris- Suzuki’s words, ‘the direct exploitation of labour is becoming less important as a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Consumption
• 3 Marketing
• 4 Brand Management
• 5 Online Branding
• 6 The Brand as Informational Capital
• Notes
• References