Brands and the City

Entanglements and Implications for Urban Life

Sonia Bookman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367332976
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317172680
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

From commercial retail environments to branded urban villages, brands are now a salient feature of contemporary cityscapes and are deeply entwined in people's everyday lives. Drawing on extensive empirical material and recent theoretical developments in the sociology of brands, this book explores the complex relationship between brands, consumption and urban life. Covering a range of brands and branding in the city, from themed retail stores to branded cultural quarters, it considers how brands provide new ways of mediating identities, lifestyles and social relations. At the same time, the book reveals how brands are bound up with forms of socio-spatial division and exclusion in the city, defining what kinds of practices, images or attitudes are acceptable in a particular place, constituting cultural boundaries that keep certain people and activities out. With attention throughout to the social and cultural implications of the presence of brands in urban space, Brands and the City examines how people engage with brands, and how brands shape urbanites' experiences and sense of self, society and space. An extensive exploration of the processes through which brands are integrated into cities, their effects on everyday experiences and their role in the policing and governance of urban space, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in urban studies, consumption and branding.

1 Introduction

Introduction

Brands have long been part of the urban environment; however, their presence in the city has intensified in recent decades with the development of retail brandscapes, corporately sponsored leisure spaces, and the branding of urban villages. Skateparks and sports arenas carry the names of media conglomerates and popular sportswear brands. Cultural quarters are branded by cities in a competitive quest for visitors and further investment. Meanwhile, flagship stores designed by well-known architects aim to attract the attention of affluent consumers and design enthusiasts alike. Brands are now taken for granted features of the contemporary city and everyday urban life; urbanites routinely encounter a range of brands as they stroll through their neighborhoods, wait on the platforms of subway stations, and run errands on ordinary shopping streets.

In her influential book, No Logo, Canadian activist and cultural critic Naomi Klein (2000) drew widespread attention to the rise of brands in the global economy. Although brands have long been involved in the mediation of production and consumption, from the 1980s, Klein argues, the making and marketing of brands became a central focus of corporations based on the business mantra that “successful corporations must primarily produce brands, as opposed to products” (Klein 2000: 3). The growing prominence of brands over the past few decades has been documented in an emerging sociology of brands and branding, in which writers attribute the rise of brands to a range of influences, from developments in design and marketing to the establishment of branding consultancies and brand management, for example (see Holt 2004; Lury 2004; Arvidsson 2006; Moor 2007; Aronczyk and Powers 2010; Banet-Weiser 2012). As indicated by this literature, brands have developed as powerful market cultural forms that play vital roles in the management, organization, and articulation of consumption and production. At the same time, brands have become central elements of the social and cultural fabric, mediating the construction and performance of identities, shared experiences, and “common social world[s]” (Arvidsson 2006: 3). Indeed, as branding scholar Kornberger (2010: 23) argues, “brands might well be the most ubiquitous and pervasive cultural form in our society.”

The rise of brands can be seen in contemporary cities, where they now dominate the urban landscape. This is related to a complex of factors, including developments in marketing that emphasize the role of physical space in the creation of branded environments, the use of commercial brand strategies to delineate urban areas and market city identities, and the growing involvement of brands and branding in the cultivation of cities’ consumer cultures (Hannigan 1998; Hetherington and Cronin 2008; Lury 2004; Harris 2011). Although brands are now part of the urban milieu and consumerist mix in cities worldwide, they are especially pronounced in postindustrial cities, where they signal a growing emphasis on the symbolic economy—associated with “finance, fashion, food, and art,” and of course, consumerism, as well as a concern with urban image (Hetherington and Cronin 2008; Zukin 2008: xi).

Various writers have commented on the rise of brands and branding in the orchestration of new spaces for consumption, from the establishment of themed parks to the development of “urban entertainment destination” projects (UEDs) (Hannigan 1998: 1; also see Zukin 2004; Hetherington and Cronin 2008; Miles 2010). Others have considered the trend in branding urban neighborhoods, which are designed to convey a distinctive image and cultural experience for visitors as well as the new professional, service, and middle-class city dwellers (Bell and Jayne 2004; Binnie et al. 2006; Donald et al. 2009). Analysts have also flagged the acceleration in branding public space, as entrepreneurial cities turn to the market to fund previously publicly subsidized events and infrastructure—from arts festivals to sports stadia (Hannigan 1998; Klein 2000; Jayne 2006). Further, there is a growing body of work on issues related to city branding, which Zukin (2008) describes as a “necessary cultural strategy” of image enhancement against a background of competition for investment, tourists, and affluent consumers (also see Mommaas 2002; Greenberg 2008).

While such accounts point to the growing prevalence and significance of brands as constituent features of postindustrial cities’ consumptionscapes and symbolic economies, on the whole, the specificity of brands and the ways in which they shape experiences of urban life remain less well explored. This book sets out to contribute to a growing sociology of brands and branding by examining the social and cultural implications of brands and their manifestation in urban environments. It focuses less on the economic dimension of brands and branding than on the multiple ways in which brands are spun into people’s everyday lives and what this means for urbanites. While the economic aspects of brands and brand management matter, the foremost concern of this book is with the cultures of brands: How are brands bound up with expressions of identity or lifestyle, and articulations of urban sociality? What forms of urban culture surface on the platforms of brands in specific urban locations? To what extent, and in what ways, do brands inform people’s meanings and experiences of urban space and everyday life?

Instead of concentrating on one type of brand and branding in the city, such as urban branding, this book will consider three distinct modalities by which brands interface with city life: retail brandscapes, which refer to the dedicated environments of retail brands such as Urban Outfitters or Starbucks; urban branding, including branded neighborhoods or districts within a city as well as cities as a whole; and mobile brand strategies, encompassing the ways in which brands harness mobile technologies and marketing to engage individuals ‘on the go’. Each of these modalities will be explored in detail, using empirical case study material as well as numerous exising studies and examples to discuss some of the key ways in which brands are implicated in and shape urban life. In addition to offering some new analyses of retail brandscapes and urban brands, the book aims to expand the scope of sociological work on brands in the city through the inclusion of recent (and rapidly developing) forms of branding activity associated with mobile branding. My main concern throughout is the “entanglements” of brands with city dwellers and urban environments, and the social and cultural outcomes of these processes.

Brands and urban life

In order to explore these themes, it is important to posit a preliminary definition of the brand. There are many perspectives on brands, including the view of brands as logos or names that establish meaning for consumer goods, approaches that consider brands as mechanisms for the management of markets, as well as the idea that brands are complex social phenomena. As Kornberger (2010: 30) indicates, “there is no single definition of the notion ‘brand’ that researchers and practitioners agree on.” The difficulty of defining the brand is further compounded by the diversity of brands, which range from large, corporate entities, such as General Electric (G.E.), to city brands, such as Edinburgh, to local service sector brands, such as the many new artisinal cafés with names like Fools & Horses or Thom Bargen. In addition, brands and branding principles are applied to an ever-expanding array of events, organizations, and phenomenon including universities, nations, charity runs, hospitals, political parties, sports teams, and non-profit organizations such as Oxfam (Aronczyk and Powers 2010; Brown 2016). As Moor (2007: 7) observes, the uses of branding and brand practices vary according to different institutional frameworks: “[B]randing is assembled or ‘put together’ differently in these different contexts, where it makes use of different forms of representation, different techniques and technologies and different kinds of relationships for different kinds of strategic purpose.” Branding is moreover applied in different ways depending on who is doing the branding, for what purposes, and with what kinds of resources.

This book forwards a multidimensional approach to brands and branding, drawing from branding theory advanced in the fields of sociology, urban studies, and geography. Primarily, I look to theoretical developments in the sociology of brands that move beyond conventional notions of the brand as mainly an image or idea, and instead propose a view of the brand as a form of new media and “frame of action” (Arvidsson 2006; also see Lury 2004; Moor 2007). Brands, in this view, are not only defined by their symbolic elements, but operate more akin to platforms for the coordination and management of production and consumption activity and interaction. I will elaborate on such theoretical developments (along with other key approaches to brands and branding) in Chapter 3. For now, I wish to emphasize a few central ideas that inform my approach to brands.

According to multidimensional perspectives, brands do not simply function as labels or signs; rather, they provide individuals with particular contexts of action, or ambiances that enable certain kinds of encounter and engagement. As brand theorist Adam Arvidsson suggests, brands no longer stand in for products, but provide a framework for their use: “With a particular brand I can act, feel and be in a particular way” (Arvidsson 2006: 8). Designed to be open-ended, people are encouraged to engage with brands in ways that contribute to the emergence of brand identity and value, on the one hand, while using brands as resources to construct identities, social relations, and meanings, on the other hand. Brands, in this sense, are understood as processual objects; they emerge through complex entanglements of people, products, information, and images, and through specific performances and practices of cultural production and consumption.

This conceptualization of the brand has significant implications for understanding the relationship between brands, consumption, and urban life. First, it gives brand audiences an active role in the performance and production of brands, based on a conceptualization of consumers as co-creators of brand experiences, qualities, and value. Brands as frames of action are, moreover, not only media messages, as suggested in conventional theories of brands and branding; rather, they are configured as material and immaterial systems of action (also see Callon et al. 2002) that engage individuals in forms of symbolic, virtual, and embodied performance. Branding, in this sense, relies on a notion of culture as “architectural” rather than representational: “We live in the world with immaterial and material cultural objects” (Lash 2002: 148). As Lash (2002) notes, individuals encounter brands as users, rather than audiences or readers. This contributes to a blurring of boundaries between production and consumption, which are not separate, but are entangled in branding processes and the surfacing of brand identity. While this is a joint effort, it does not mean that consumers as “prosumers” (Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010) are necessarily on equal footing with brand engineers. Branding efforts powerfully shape and manage consumption contexts using significant economic, informational, and cultural resources to guide consumer activity in the “right” direction—toward the creation of brand value (Arvidsson 2006). Moreover, although individuals are called on to help realize brand identity and create brand value through their involvement with brands, they are excluded from profits, which accrue to the companies who own the brands and their shareholders (Lash 2002; Lury 2004).

Second, processes of brand performance and the construction of brand identity are interdependent with practices of cultural consumption and the construction of identities, lifestyles, and cultures (see Banet-Weiser 2012). In short, the becoming of brands and the becoming of social worlds are bound up in mutually constitutive performances. This implies that brands and branded places such as urban cultural quarters are as not simply the product of a top-down imposition of a hegemonic vision by branding agencies and agents. Rather, they surface through a complex, dynamic interplay involving multiple actors and auspices in the performance and co-creation of a range of experiences, meanings, and cultures associated to the brand. While such actors and auspices are deeply entangled with brands, this does not mean that they straightforwardly acquiesce to suggestions for brand engagement and use. Brand management does not fully control just what people do with brands. Indeed, individuals or social groups may use brands in unintended ways, or in ways that have unintended effects, which can lead to forms of brand reappropriation, reworking, and even resistance.

Emphasizing the relational, participatory nature of brands and branding, multidimensional approaches have inspired innovative, critical work in the sociology of brands and the study of brands and branding more broadly, including analyses of the appropriation of consumers’ labor and communicative capacity by brands (for example, Rantisi and Leslie 2006; Denegri-Knott and Zwick 2012; Ritzer et al. 2012; Cova et al. 2015) and the operation of brands as platforms for accumulation in the context of informational capitalism—a new form of capitalism centered on “immaterial and informational production, rather than industrial production” (Arvidsson 2006: 8) and in which the lines between production and consumption are increasingly blurred (for example, Arvidsson 2006; Lury and Moor 2010; Arvidsson 2011). In this book, however, I am centrally concerned with the social and cultural implications of people’s involvement with brands. What kinds of meanings, social relations, and forms of life are co-created on the platforms of brands? More specifically, I am interested in the ways in which these dynamic processes of cultural consumption unfold in relation to brands in the city.

To be sure, branding activity has become increasingly sophisticated in terms of its involvement with, and usage of, urban space to create specific environments for consumption. This includes more established brand strategies such as the sponsorship of public spaces and institutions by corporations that prominently display their logos on building structures and integrate them into a wide range of events (such as sporting events, music concerts, and cultural festivals). More recently, however, an ever-expanding array of brandscapes have proliferated in the city, varying from new, interactive retail environments to themed restaurants. Urban neighborhoods are made more creative with the entrepreneurial branding activity of graffiti artists (Banet-Weiser 2012). Furthermore, the adaption of current mobile marketing strategies enables a diversity of brands to engage consumers “en route” to branded outlets and tourist destinations, as well as to stage branded entertainment in public urban space.

The main argument presented in this book is that the intensification of brands in the city has significant implications for urban life. Overall, I maintain that brands are deeply entangled with, and emerge through a dynamic interplay with people and in place. I further propose that it is through such entanglements—which are also performative—that brands actively shape urban life, or people’s experiences and co-productions of urban space, self, and society in mundane, yet profound ways. Brands in the metropolis mediate aspects of identity, are used to construct and express social relations, and are deeply entwined in urban cultures. Moreover, I draw attention to the involvement of brands, through their spatialization in urban settings, in the production of various forms of socio-spatial and cultural division and processes of exclusion in the city. At the same time, I suggest that such entanglements and their outcomes are not straightforward, but are rather tentative, ambivalent, and paradoxical. Brands are not overdetermining of the urban spaces they use nor of the cultures that surface on their platforms. Indeed, this book will show how people use brands in multiple and unexpected ways that are not fully “captured” by brand management, with unintended, and at times ambivalent effects. As such, it cautions against attributing too much power to brands and instead emphasizes their unstable, contradictory, and contingent aspects.

Consumption: some considerations

A focus on people’s engagement with brands in the city necessarily implicates matters of consumption. In this book, consumption is approached as a process that is active and productive rather than something that is “derived unproblematically from production” (Featherstone 2007: 13). While often routine and banal—part of everyday life—consumption is bound up with complex cultural and social processes, including the construction and performance of identities and lifestyles, the cultivation of cultures, as well as forms of resistance, creative appropriation, and reworking of goods, meanings, and practices – all of which can occur on the platforms of brands. In order to understand how these processes unfold, I turn to key sociological accounts of consumption, identity, and lifestyle, as well as work on urban consumption and culture, which are briefly outlined below.

Cultural consumption: identities, lifestyles, neo-tribes

The idea of consumption as active and consumers as creative actors emerged with the growth of sustained work on consumption from the 1980s, especially in the field of Cultural Studies. Dick Hebdige, for example, delivered a pioneering analysis of the significance of consumption in the construction of meaning, identities, and belonging in his book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). In this text, Hebdige outlines how the identity of subcultures ranging from mods to punks was communicated through the use of goods and practices that were assembled into a coherent style. For example, the mods were a group of London-based young men of working-class background, who, unlike their parents, embraced fashion and spent money on clothes and music, and were identified by their taste for tailored suits, modern jazz music, and scooters (Hebdige 1979). This work has since inspired an expansive scholarship on consumption and its role in the constitution of identities, lifestyles, and social relations.

Contemporary sociological accounts of consumption maintain that consumer culture is an important arena in which identities are forged. Following Barker (2003: 442), the notion of identity can be understood as:

A temporary stabilization of meaning or description of ourselves with which we emotionally identify. Identity is a becoming rather than a fixed entity involving the suturing or stitching together of the discursive ‘outside’ with the ‘internal’ processes of subjectivity. Points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us.

As Barker further explains, identity involves an element of self-identity—a “mode of thinking about ourselves” (p. 222), which is an ongoing process and a project of sorts. At the same time, identities are utterly social and cultural—they emerge in relation to our positions within categories of class, gender, race, age, and so on, and are further constituted through our connections with others via shared interests, neighborhoods, languages, and more: “In sum, identity is about sameness and difference, about the personal and the social, ‘about what you have in common with some people and what differentiates you from others’” (Weeks 1990: 89 in Barker 2003: 223, italics in original).

In her text, Consumer Culture (2011), Celia Lury states that consumer culture both advances and enables identify formation, contributing to new kinds of stylized relation to one’s self and others:

… what it is to be middle or working class, to be a man or woman, to be black or white, or to be young or old is a particular kind of reflexive relation to self and this relation has been and is being transformed or reorganized by consumer culture. The view that emerges is thus that different kinds of relation to the self, enabled by consumer culture, inform specific kinds of belonging to the social grou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Cities, consumption, and brands
• 3 Understanding brands and branding
• 4 Brandscaped terrain
• 5 Branding urban space: Processes and paradox
• 6 Brands, mobilities, and urban life
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index