Introduction

In this chapter, I want to develop the argument that the brand is a complex object or abstract thing. I will do this by focusing on the argument that what has come to define the brand¹ in the contemporary era is the organisation and functioning of a set of relations between products or services.

Before developing this argument in any detail though, let me first address the issue of how it is that something as abstract and intangible as a brand may be described as a thing or an object at all. To get at what is at issue here, consideration of something whose objectivity we take for granted may be helpful: a car. We are easily able to accept that a car is an object, although it typically comprises many thousands of parts or components. Moreover, while each of these parts is more or less essential to the capacity of the object to move its passengers from one place to another, none of the individual components has this capacity It is their relation to one another that makes the components of a car into a car. We also tend to think of the car as a discrete or closed object, but it is of course only a functioning car when it is in a controlled relation to elements of its environment: the atmosphere, the driver and roads.

To understand the peculiarity of the objectivity at issue here, I draw (implicitly) on a tradition in philosophy in which time is internal to the processes by which the (physical and social) world operates (Bergson 1991; Whitehead 1967, 1970; Deleuze 1986, 1989). This is an approach in which time is dynamic, where dynamism is not an activity of fixed objects moving through space, but rather a process of immanent or objective differentiation. In this view, no object is fixed or closed, but rather is a set of more or less self-organising processes in time. To explore what this might mean, let me return to the example of the car, an object that we more normally think of in terms of complicatedness rather than complexity. Thus, we tend to think of the components of the car as staying the same in time, or at least, as all ageing at the same rate; it is only when the car breaks down that we might acknowledge that one part has aged faster than another. But of course, some components of the car are designed to manage the temporality of the relations between the components themselves and their relation to the environment. That is, many of the parts have some kind of feedback mechanism, whose function is to manage change (that is, to organise temporal differentiation). Moreover, the number of these feedback elements in the car has increased enormously in recent years (Manzini 1989). As a consequence, the car is not simply complicated but also increasingly complex, that is, it is more open, more able to be responsive to change (for further discussion of complexity in relation to contemporary social sciences see Waldrop 1994; Thrift 1999; Urry 2003). And while the parts or products of the brand may not be in such close or proximate spatial relation to each other as in the case of the car, it is their complex relationality - like that of the car - which is at issue here in terms of its emerging objectivity. In what follows then, the focus will be on the peculiarity of the dynamic relations between the products that comprise the objectivity of the brand.