Ive found a really interesting blog of an American academic and writer called Henry Jenkins who explores amongst other things Brands and Culture. He is Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.
He recently interviewed a fellow academic Sarah Banet-Weiser about her thoughts on Brand Cultures.
An overview of her book Authentic The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture published in November 2012
Brands are everywhere. Branding is central to political campaigns and political protest movements; the alchemy of social media and self-branding creates overnight celebrities; the self-proclaimed "greening" of institutions and merchant goods is nearly universal. But while the practice of branding is typically understood as a tool of marketing, a method of attaching social meaning to a commodity as a way to make it more personally resonant with consumers, Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that in the contemporary era, brands are about culture as much as they are about economics. That, in fact, we live in a brand culture. Authentic' maintains that branding has extended beyond a business model to become both reliant on, and reflective of, our most basic social and cultural relations. Further, these types of brand relationships have become cultural contexts for everyday living, individual identity, and personal relationships - what Banet-Weiser refers to as "brand cultures." Distinct brand cultures, that at times overlap and compete with each other, are taken up in each chapter: the normalization of a feminized "self-brand" in social media, the brand culture of street art in urban spaces, religious brand cultures such as "New Age Spirituality" and "Prosperity Christianity," and the culture of green branding and "shopping for change." In a culture where graffiti artists loan their visions to both subway walls and department stores, buying a cup of "fair-trade" coffee is a political statement, and religion is mass-marketed on t-shirts, Banet-Weiser questions the distinction between what we understand as the "authentic" and branding practices. But brand cultures are also contradictory and potentially rife with unexpected possibilities, leading Authentic' to articulate a politics of ambivalence, creating a lens through which we can see potential political possibilities within the new consumerism.
This is taken from the Blog interview
Well, as you say, it is somewhat easier to describe what consumers “lose” within brand culture, so I’ll address that first. I describe in the book how, in the current moment, brands, and branding strategies, have expanded beyond selling actual products or companies, and are an integral part of culture. We are witnessing the expansion of brand language and logic to our personal selves, where individuals often feel obliged to not only construct, but to understand themselves as brands. This is a problem, I think, because branding is, at the end of the day, about selling and marketing things. So, for instance, when we create a self-brand, we embark on a process that packages, designs, and markets us—human beings—just like other products and commodities. To think of ourselves as things or commodities devalues the self.
Another thing I think consumers “lose” when we are not critical of, or do not challenge the normalization of self-branding, and brand culture more generally, relates to the economies of visibility that support and validate branding. Branding, and self-branding in particular, is about making the self visible (through a variety of media platforms), and I think we need to be critical of not only cultural imperatives to be visible, but also the structural inequalities that organize visibility in the first place: who can be visible? Who is seen as “worthy” of visibility? How does visibility work in different ways depending on gender, race, class? Within this context, brand culture, as both an economic and cultural formation and dynamic of power authorizes some things as “brandable,” while others are unbrandable, or are in excess of the brand, or remain in search of “brandability” if they want to be visible.
Now, what do consumers potentially “gain” within the neoliberal context? While I’m critical of many brand cultures in the book, the cultures and practices I examine are only a small element of broader brand culture. There are historical ways in which, for example, making the self visible through consumer and brand culture has been linked to a politics of freedom and emanicipation, and I think we need to pay attention to those histories. This is a contradictory formation: brand culture provides the context for struggles over visibility and recognition. Yet it simultaneously provides the context for the commodification of people as visual objects. The contradictory spaces of brand culture provide opportunities for acting on these contradictions, and thus potentially locating political possibility and critique within brand culture.
But brand culture, or any kind of culture for that matter, is not an either/or context, where it is either liberatory or oppressive, because the production of meaning is always collective and contingent. Certainly the kinds of access and disruptions of power we witness in, say, social media contexts, can lead to a more democratic idea of resistance and identity, and dynamics of power can be re-contextualized in ways that offer space for shifting norms.
What I trace in the book, and this is particularly true when we are talking about gender norms and practices, is that these media platforms may be disrupting conventions of power in some ways while also relying on familiar scripts and narratives that have proven successful in capitalism.
I think that a great deal of scholarship approaches consumer and popular culture within the framework of a familiar binary: it is either authentic or commercial, it is about real politics or corporate appropriation. For me, brand culture is neither a historical inevitability, nor is it uncontested. Rather, brand cultures emerge from the deeply interrelated discourses and practices of capitalism, history, culture, technology, and individual identity formation. Because brands form culture, they are—like culture itself—often unstable and precarious. The argument I’m making in the book is that consumer capitalism is a nuanced, multi-layered context for identity formation—as such, it is an explicitly cultural space. And, because I’m writing about culture, I think we need to carefully attend to the ways in which the production and consumption of culture within the logic of branding involves not only those practices that are easily branded, but also those who are left out of brand culture because they are not easily branded. So, we need to think about why certain politics or lifestyles are incorporated into brand culture, as well as why others not immediately amenable to branding are left out.
She goes on to talk about Commodity Activism
A case study she describes is the Unilever Dove,the RealBeauty campaign, it is the case that the company encouraged a sort of “co-production” with consumers, and did call attention to the exclusionary (and often racist and classist) norms of beauty culture.
It also has a history of helping to create that very same beauty culture. One doesn’t cancel the other out, nor is this a simple case of hypocrisy. Rather, this kind of contradiction defines brand culture, and also defines how consumer culture can be the site for a kind of activism
This campaign has proved controversial as in the US Unilever drive contradictory messages across another Brand "AXE'
An interesting review of not only the Authentic book but also contextualising Brands, Graphic Design and Culture in a bigger way
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