Why do brands cause troubles?

WHY DO BRANDS CAUSE TROUBLES?

Brands are today under attack by an emerging counter-cultural movement. This study builds a dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding that explains the rise of this movement and its potential effects. Academic marketing theorizes away conflicts between marketing and consumers. Such conflicts result only when firms attend to their internal interests rather than seek to meet consumer wants and needs. The marketing concept declares that, with the marketing perspective as their guide, the interests of firms and consumers align. The most puzzling aspect of the anti branding movement from this vista is that it takes aim at the most successful and lauded companies, those that have taken the marketing concept to heart and industriously applied it. Nike and Coke and McDonald's and Microsoft and Starbucks-the success stories lauded in marketing courses worldwide-are the same brands that are relentlessly attacked by this new movement. It specifies the tensions that exist between how firms brand their products and how people consume.

Following are the details of five postmodern branding techniques that are premised upon the principle that brands are authentic cultural resources. Postmodern branding is now giving rise to new contradictions that have inflamed the anti branding sentiment sweeping Western countries. They are:

1.      THE CULTURAL AUTHORITY MODEL: refers to the dominant mode of consumption that is structured by the collective actions of firms in their marketing activities. To work properly, capitalism requires a symbiotic relationship between market prerogatives and the cultural frameworks that orient how people understand and interact with the market's offerings. The cultural structuring of consumption maintains political support for the market system, expands markets, and increases industry profits.

2.      THE COM-MODIFICATION OF PERSONAL SOVEREIGNTY: Case 1: How Reflexive Resistance Produces the Commercialization of Personal Sovereignty. Case 2: How Creative Resistance Produces the Commercialization of Personal Sovereignty.

                                                                

3.      CONSUMER CULTURE AND BRANDING: A DIALECTICAL HISTORY: Consumer culture is the ideological infrastructure that under girds what and how people consume and sets the ground rules for marketers' branding activities. The branding paradigm is the set of principles that structures how firms seek to build their brands. These principles work within the axiomatic assumptions of the extant consumer culture. As firms compete and experiment within the universe of possibilities defined by these principles, they derive a variety of branding techniques. As part of a tenuous consensus maintained by the collective actions of consumers and marketers, consumer culture deceptively connotes an equilibrium for what is actually a dynamic dialectical relationship.

4.      THE FUTURE OF BRANDING AND CONSUMER CULTURE: the techniques are grounded in a basic deceit, a denial that what the brand stands for is motivated by the profit motive, seems to especially infuriate her audience. In addition, the movement also attacks companies for building blissful meanings into their brands for consumers while treating non-consumers with much less regard.                                             

                                                                     

5.      CONSUMERS AND REVOLUTIONS: Today's critical academic accounts of consumer culture freeze history at the zenith of modem branding, when firms assumed that they had crate Blanche to push brands at consumers and shape their desires at will and when consumers often ceded this role.

GARIMA AGRAWAL

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