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

trains as well as to literature and publicity. Employees were encouraged
to ‘earn’ a ‘silver swallow’ badge as part of a drive to raise standards
(Mollerup, 1997:46–47).
By the last decade of the twentieth century, brand management was no
longer the responsibility of the marketing department alone, but
permeated the organisation of companies more widely. In 2000, a
survey of 200 senior UK managers revealed that 73 per cent anticipated
restructuring their companies, building the working structure of the firm
around the brand (Manuelli, 2000, quoted in Julier, 2000:193). Indeed,
the role for the brand within a company has become increasingly
widespread, such that it is now claimed that ‘The 4 “P”s (product, price,
promotion and placement) are all replicable by competitors; the only
thing not replicable is the fifth P, the personality of the organization, or
its people’ (Kevin Thomas, President of MCA Communicates, quoted in
Webster, 2003). This of course makes brand management a problem of
management in general:
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How does the company make sure that there is a perfect match between
values and behaviour? Products, buildings and machines—even
ideas—can be copied, but the only unique elements in a company are its
people. They constitute the soul of the brand. The first step to creating
brand authenticity is therefore to ensure that its core values are clear
and have been fully internalised by those who work within the
company. That is not to say everyone has to be identical—that would
be impossible and undesirable. But there should be certain values that
they share as part of their own core values.
(Marzano, 2000:58; emphasis added)
In this regard, consider the ways in which the management of the brand
informs the organisation of the work process through the mobilisation of
constructions of the market in terms of information about the consumer
(as Bourdieu (1984) remarks, the act of classifying acts back on those
who classify). The point being made here is that the creation of market
hierarchies in terms of classifications of the consumer provides
resources for techniques of control in the management of the work
process, and the incorporation, marginalisation and exclusion of
particular social groups as producers or workers. This occurs as a
consequence of the ways in which organisations of the market in terms
of consumer characteristics, behaviours and tastes provide the resources
for the definition of jobs, the organisation of the work process, and
competition between groups of workers as well as that between
individual workers.