The emergence of the brand

By the 1980s and 1990s there was a rapid increase not only in the branding of services but also in corporate branding, that is, the branding of a company rather than particular products.

being in the shipbuilding and banking industries. Similarly, the Virgin brand includes air and rail travel services, a music company, financial services, fashion and drinks. Indeed, the commercial success of the marketing management model outlined above has been such that the brand has been extended beyond business through the invention of social marketing. This term refers to both marketing applied to non-business organisations (including political parties, charities and campaigning groups; see Szersynski 1997), places (towns, regions and countries) and to an approach which proposes that business should acknowledge its ‘strong social influence on a society’s sense of purpose, direction and economic growth’ (Hart 1998: 213).

Since brands play such a fundamental role in society, we believe it is the responsibility of brand owners to begin to ask themselves more wide-ranging and searching questions: rather than ask a straightforward question such as ‘Will it sell?’ they must ask a series of more complex questions: ‘Will it make a contribution to our customer’s success?’ ‘Will it improve the customer’s and society’s well-being?’ ‘Does it add to our country’s cultural stock or bring pride to our nation?’

(Hart 1998: 213-14)

As Cochoy (1998) notes, social marketing is oriented towards fundamental research, towards the study of the consumer for his or her own sake as it were, rather than towards the study of the consumer for the optimisation of markets.

In this pursuit of the consumer, contemporary marketing makes use of an ever­increasing set of approaches including anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and semiotics (and marketing and advertising executives - with job titles such as ‘Experience Officer’ - are themselves increasingly drawn from those with educa­tional qualifications in these fields). The use of ‘cultural’ approaches by not only brand management and design agencies but also the marketing personnel in large corporate firms contributes to a more situated model of the consumer, supple­menting and deepening previous constructions of the individuated, rational consumer. In seeking to develop their Vision of the Future (1996), for example, Philips makes use of practices of modelling or simulating everyday life. Multidisciplinary teams are brought together to develop ‘scenarios’, that is, ‘short stories describing a product concept and its use’. Such scenarios are then evaluated in relation to four ‘domains’ that ‘represent all aspects of everyday life’: ‘personal’, ‘domestic’, ‘public’ and ‘mobile’. New products are then proposed for production in the form of ‘tangible models, simulations of interfaces and short films’. The rise of social marketing also contributes to a devaluing of what has come pejoratively to be called rear-view marketing and the rise of the aspiration among marketers to be

The objectivity of the brand 191 able to provide future knowledge of consumer behaviour. Companies such as the Future Laboratory seek to present information about the future to clients such as the BBC, Proctor & Gamble, and Marks and Spencer. It provides information about changes in consumer and lifestyle trends, edits a magazine called Viewpoint that ‘offers a more directional look at a single trend set to impact on the culture over the coming year and beyond’, and uses video-makers, photographers and ‘guerrilla researchers’ to produce custom-made reports for clients.

The development of a more situated model of the consumer has also been fed by the development of retail management and retail design, ‘theming’, event-based and ambient-marketing sub-disciplines, in all of which the brand is staged as a performance or event of some kind. Niketowns provide an obvious example. Another is Original Levi’s Stores which are said to provide ‘an invaluable test-bed for new ideas, such as powerful point-of-sale strategies related to our advertising campaigns’ (Holloway 1999: 76). Similarly, Sony showrooms located in global cities including Tokyo, New York and Paris are furnished with ‘lifestyle settings’ such as bedrooms, offices and lounges, and consumers are encouraged to play with Sony products.

Their behaviour and preferences are closely monitored by Sony staff. The showroom thus becomes a laboratory for analysing consumer reactions to different products. This information is passed on to Sony headquarters which then feeds into subsequent product research and development.

(Julier 2000: 106)

In such marketing practices, the brand seeks to incorporate not only (aspects of) the consumer but also (aspects of) the context of use or wider environment, inserting itself into activities and entities that exceed the individual consumer. Or to reverse this point of view, points of access to the brand now include not simply the point of purchase and associated advertising and promotion, but also ‘special’ events.

Such events - openings, launches, visits, specially arranged performances and happenings - extend the openness of product-product and product-consumer relations. In these and other ways, the brand is presented as open-ended, as question­generating, in process and requiring completion (Knorr-Cetina 2000). Thus Phil Knight, for example, the Nike CEO, describes the consequences of the self­recognition of the company as a marketing company in terms of a re-evaluation of the product - in the Nike case, to a view of the product as a marketing tool (Willigan 1992).

information on consumption habits (Mackenzie 2002: 151). In Britain, the energy drink Red Bull was given away ‘free’ at clubs and dance music festivals before it was marketed or sold anywhere else. It appeared in the Play Station game Wipeout, and was available in chill-out rooms at these venues with a soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers. Only when the brand had become part of dance music culture, was it marketed - as a ‘cool’ drink - to the general public (Grant 1999 in Arvidsson, forthcoming). A similar shift in perspective was also made by Levi’s as illustrated by the Levi’s ‘Personal Pair’™ programme. This is a mass customisation pro­gramme, introduced in 1995, in which a consumer’s measurements are taken and entered into a computer. This information is sent directly to a factory and personally fitted jeans are produced and delivered on a pair-by-pair basis within two weeks, resulting in what Levi’s describe as ‘a genuine one-on-one relationship with our target consumers’. However:

The programme is also important for another reason: size, style and colour preference details of each consumer can be stored and accessed, giving the company a wealth of valuable information about each Personal Pair consumer. Since these individuals tend to be some of the most motivated and loyal Levi’s brand consumers, our ability to know who they are and what they want most provides us with a powerful way to ensure their continued engagement with the Levi’s brand today and in the future.

(Holloway 1999: 71)

Consumers are explicitly adopted as salespeople and as marketing tools. One much discussed example of this is the practice of cool-hunting as developed by so- called cool consultancies such as Sputnik, The L. Report and Bureau de Style, and ‘bro-ing’. The latter is the name given to the practice of ‘giving’ prototype shoes and clothing to selected individuals in black inner-city neighbourhoods in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago by Nike marketers in order to monitor their use and evaluate their likely success (Klein 2000: 72-5). In another case, in 1998, the Korean car manufacturer Daewoo hired 2,000 students on 200 US campuses ‘to talk up the cars to their friends’ (Klein 2000: 80); in another, some market researchers working for Nike asked schoolchildren to undertake research, by, for example, collecting and presenting evidence of ‘their favorite place to hang out’ (Klein 2000: 94). As Michael Dell (of Dell computers) puts it:

Our best customers aren’t necessarily the ones that are the largest, the ones that buy the most from us, or the ones that require little help or service.... Our best customers are those we learn the most from.

(quoted in Mitchell 2001: 230)

At the same time, with the intensification of consumerism and the development of hybrid forums (including consumer advice organisations), consumers are themselves acquiring greater knowledge of marketing and can increasingly position their own consumption choices in terms of marketing practices. As Callon says: The forum... the great divide between specialists and laypersons is redistributed. It creates material conditions for cooperation between laboratory research performed by experts and specialists, on the one hand, and research ‘in the wild’ that makes it possible for laypersons to be vigilant and sometimes prompts them to propose guidelines for new research.

(Callon et al., this volume)

This consumer reflexivity is sometimes described as what is called ‘co-training’, as, for example, when Amazon.com recommends books to a customer on the basis of previous purchases.