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

to business, this is an approach which proposes that companies should
acknowledge their ‘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
wideranging 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?’
(ibid.: 213–214)
Outside business, it has involved a tendency for ‘non-business’
organisations such as universities, political parties, charities, football
clubs, voluntary and campaigning groups (see Szersynski, 1997) places,
and individual people to be presented as brands. 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. And certainly the figure of the customer, the consumer or the
user is central to many recent attempts to reconstruct institutions and
practices in both the public and the private sectors (Keat et al., 1994;
du Gay, 1996).
In this pursuit of the consumer, contemporary marketing makes use of
an ever-increasing set of approaches, including those developed in
anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and semiotics. Marketing and
advertising executives—with job titles such as ‘Experience
Officer’—are themselves increasingly drawn from those with
educational qualifications in these fields. The openness of the marketing
discipline to such approaches has been linked by Adam
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Arvidsson (forthcoming) to an analysis of the changing environment of
the brand, notably the intensification of processes of mediation and
re-mediation.5 This includes, most importantly, the continuing
expansion and differentiation of television culture, and the growing use
of home computers, video, computer games, the Internet and personal
stereos. In an article written just as television had taken over radio’s
position as the main marketing channel, Gardner and Levy (1955, cited
in Arvidsson) argued that marketers needed to invest more in
positioning brands within media culture and less in attempting directly
to persuade consumers to buy products. But it is only now, Arvidsson
argues that it is now widely accepted in marketing thought that sales are