(International Library of Sociology) Celia Lury - Brands_ The Logos of the Global Economy-Routledge (2004)

is of major importance in the brand’s relation to consumers, since
personalisation is what underpins the affective relations between brands
and consumers, which typically include some degree of trust, respect
and loyalty but may also include playfulness, scepticism and dislike. It is
nurtured
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in the marketing practices that build brand relationships and brand
loyalty (Chapters 2 and 6).
But ‘idents’ or logos are not simply the visible faces of the brand. They
are also marks of flow or shifters. They are ‘markers of the edge of
between the aesthetic space of an image or text and the institutional
space of a regime of value which frames and organizes aesthetic space’
(Frow, 2002:71). As noted on pp. 9–11, at the same time that the
management of the response interval of interactivity enables a sequence
of products to be made visible, these intervals are organised to produce
branded products as the same (the guarantee of consistent quality), or as
different, as authentic, fashionable, collectable or new. Indeed, in most
cases the brand has no single temporality, but rather coordinates
multiple temporalities. So, for example, Swatch is organised through the
temporalities of both fashion and collecting, while the chocolate bar
Twix has a limited edition (an orange chocolate-flavoured version that
appears and then disappears) running alongside the everyday,
ubiquitous temporality of its standard version. In the case of eBay, an
Internet brand, a complex unity emerges from the co-ordination of the
multiple temporalities of buying and selling between individuals, for
whom time is a key variable. Thus, buying and selling are organised by
eBay as an auction in which information not only about the product but
also about the highest bid at any one time is set alongside information
about how much longer the auction will be open. This may be a few
months or only a few minutes. Price and time are here inter-related or
mediated by the brand. The buyer is also evaluated in terms of a record
of the opinions of those to whom he or she has previously sold
something. This record typically includes comments not only about the
accuracy of the buyer’s descriptions of their goods, but also the speed
with which goods were dispatched in the past. In co-ordinating the
series of products that comprise the brand in these different ways, then,
logos are markers of the multiple temporalities that contribute to the
flows of disjuncture and difference that characterise the global economy
(Appadurai, 1996). They are markers of the multiple logics of global
flows.
The brand as an object of law