Abstract
Liz Moor's The Rise of Brands is the latest addition to the small but growing field of social theory that focuses directly on brands and branding. The book is really a double feature: it has two parts that could very well stand alone as small books in their own right. The first part (chapters 2 and 3) traces the historical evolution of branding. It makes an important contribution by focusing on design, rather than advertising as an important predecessor of modern branding techniques. The second part consists in three chapters that look at, respectively, non-commercial forms of branding; the relation between brands and intellectual property rights; that between brands and global and national culture, and recent forms of ethical consumerism. The overall argument that the book wants to push is that brands and branding should not be considered uniquely as a form of commodification (rather, as the author points out, brands tends to develop in already commodified areas: in already existing markets). Instead these phenomena are more properly considered under the heading of what Scott Lash (2002) and others have called ‘informationalization’. That is, brands are a form of governance particular to the information society. They ‘operate to meaningfully pattern units of information and link them across spaces’ (p. 9); and this form of governance also applies in non commercial contexts.
Against that background chapter 2, ‘The brand in history’ traces the evolution of brands, from their original ‘status as indicators of origin’ to their present wider function of (citing Celia Lury, 2004) ‘a medium for the co-construction of supply and demand’ (p. 37). The story begins by briefly mentioning the role of brands in ancient civilizations, and the significance of the branding of slaves, to focus on the links between the early development of branding in the late 19th century, and the growth of new forms of mass production and distribution. The chapter illustrates how the discipline of industrial design evolved from focusing on the design of products, to the designer becoming a symbolic intermediary between consumption and production. This conception of design was particularly prevalent within the American tradition of product design that strengthened its influence in Europe in the post-War years.
Moor traces links between this tradition of product design and modern branding by showing how the new kinds of brand consultancies that were emerging in the late 1970s no longer saw the brand as a mere symbol of a company or organization. Instead they were deeply influenced by a conception of branding as design, as the construction and assemblage of an interface between a diversity of social processes. She refers to branding-guru Wally Olins early bible on (what we today would call) corporate branding: The Corporate Personality, from 1978:
Indeed Olins' vision of the modern corporation was one in which teams of product designers, environmental designers, architects, management consultants and public relations experts would work alongside experts from ‘anthropology, sociology, economics, marketing and other “non-design subjects” [..]in the service of corporations that they would not only promote but also, to a significant degree, assemble (pp. 32–3).
The business of brand consultancies expanded during the 1980s as neo-liberal governments spurred a range of mergers and acquisitions and through the privatization of the service sector.
Chapter 3 continues the history of branding and brand consultancies by looking at the change in the media environment of the 1990, the emergence of a new importance of ambient media and the concomitant affirmation of the concept of ‘experience’ and in particular spatially based experiences as an important dimension of consumption. The result of these developments is that the role of the brand consultancy further expands. Brand consultancies come to propose a total or ‘3-D’ communications package, encompassing not just advertising but, increasingly, the design, of products, spaces and even processes. At the same time the brand consultant proposes herself as an intermediary between consumption and production, capable of representing the point of view of the consumer by relying not only on research and data, but also on a good measure of ‘creativity’. This development has lead to a significant expansion of design as a technology of government: within the context of ‘an enduring understanding of media as immersive and experiential’ [that] has rendered a far greater range objects, spaces and surfaces as intentionally symbolic and communicative sites' (pp. 63–4).
The second part consists in three chapters. Chapter four charts the expansion of branding beyond the commercial sphere, looking at its use within sport clubs, cities, charities and ultimately the state. The main argument here is that branding is on its way to becoming a general mechanism of government in the information society, where it works as a way of ‘patterning flows of information affect an experiences’: a sort of concrete intervention where a new kind of reality is constructed. The author cites Nicolas Rose o the extent that ‘the branded spaces created by these techniques are not simply designed to be attractive or profitable, but increasingly to ‘make new kinds of experience possible, produce new modes of perception, invest percepts with affects… . [such that] through certain technical means, a new way of seeing is constructed’ (p. 89, Rose, 1999: 32) – a politics by design, in effect.
Chapter 5 recounts the history of intellectual property rights form the point of view of brands showing how the expansion and intensification of this form of property bears a direct relation to the growing commercial importance of branding. It goes on to hypothesize a relationship between the growth in counterfeiting and the ‘artificial scarcity’ created by ‘an increasingly strengthened intellectual property rights system’ (p. 114). Chapter 6 looks at the relation between globalization and branding, arguing that this is more complex than what a simple cultural homogenization thesis would imply, and points at persistent problems with ethical consumerism and the possible role that states could play in this field.
Liz Moor's book is well written and a pleasurable read. It engages with central issues around brands and branding in innovative and knowledgeable ways. I think it would work excellently as teaching material at the undergraduate level. Its main academic contribution resides in its stressing of the link between branding and design. While not exactly a novel argument, this link needed to be spelled out explicitly. The prevalence of design as a form of power is also linked to the information society as a particular social formation. Again this is not entirely new but has been pointed out by a number of observers. However the argument needed to be made once more and the detailed genealogy of design-as-governance, passing though the development of industrial design to its extended impact with the rise of brand consultancies and neo liberal deregulation makes a substantial contribution. What I do miss is a more coherent and integrated theoretical treatment of the role of design as a form of government in the information society. The book contains a number of remarks and insights, scattered throughout the text, but they are never brought together and discussed systematically. Such a systematic discussion of power in the information society form the point of view of branding and design would be highly interesting. I hope the author will provide us with this in the future.