Journal of Consumer Culture

Bottled water has become a pervasive global business, and bottled water consumption continues to increase rapidly, particularly in countries where clean potable tap water is available at very low or no cost. This article discusses the ways the rich cultural meanings of water are used in marketing and branding, and the forms of consumer resistance that oppose bottled water as a commodity. The contrast between tap water and bottled water can be seen as a reflection of a contest for authority and public trust between governments and corporations, in a context of heightened anxieties about risk and health. The article concludes that bottled water is a case where sound cultural logic leads to environmentally destructive behavior.

This article explores the contradictory cultural tendencies at play in the political economy of corporate brand values.Corporate brand values often serve mutually contradictory goals of capital accumulation and legitimation.Though competitive branding aims at distinguishing firms from one another, in the overall landscape of branding, the semiotics of branding contributes to tightly condensed, yet overarching, capitalist metanarratives.What additional contradictions evolve out of a branding process that indiscriminately mines culture for the purpose of boosting brand values?

Branding is often viewed as a form of ideological influence, but how brands impact ideology has not been carefully specified. I use a genealogical study of the emergence of Jack Daniel's whiskey as an iconic brand to specify the ideological role played by such brands in relation to other producers of ideological change, particularly the other culture industries. I demonstrate that brands play a distinctive role, quite different from that critics have described: brands act as parasites riding the coat-tails of other more powerful cultural forms, but then use their market power to proselytize these ideological revisions. Through ubiquity and repetition, brands transform emergent culture into dominant norms.

In our last issue, the Journal of Consumer Culture published two very different contributions to the debate around women's underwear. In order to develop the issues raised in the original articles, we invited the authors to engage in a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary exchange.This dialogue is the result.