Branding the Nation, the Place, the Product

Ulrich Ermann, Klaus-Jürgen Hermanik, Ulrich Ermann, Klaus-Jürgen Hermanik

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315393247
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Naturwissenschaften
• Categoría: Geographie

Branding is a profoundly geographical type of commodification process. Many things become commodities that are compared and valuated on markets around the globe. Places such as cities or regions, countries and nations attempt to acquire visibility through branding. Geographical imaginations are evoked to brand goods and places as commodities in order to show or create connections and add value. Yet, not all that is branded was originally intended and created for markets.

This volume aims to broaden current understanding of branding through a series of contributions from geography, history, political studies, cultural, and media studies, offering insight into how ordinary places, objects and practices become commodities through branding. In so doing, the contributions also show how nation, place and product as targets of branding can be seen as intertwined. To discuss these forms of branding, book chapters refer to states, cities, holiday destinations, food malls, movies, dances, post stamps and other items that serve as brands and/or are branded.

The book will be of interest to students and scholars in geography, sociology, history, cultural studies and business studies who would like to gain an understanding of the intricate and surprising ways in which things, places, and cultural practices become brands.

1 Origination

The geographies of brands and branding

Andy Pike

Introduction

For US-based clothing company American Apparel, “Made in Downtown LA” is integral to its business ethos and brand, and this claim to origin and provenance is used to mark its products and retail outlets. Central to its differentiation strategy, the actors involved have constructed the brand as “Sweatshop-Free” and vertically integrated in the US in competition against the low-cost, vertically dis-integrated and international sub-contracted business models prevalent in the clothing industry. Integral to the brand’s value and meaning is its representation as an American-based “Industrial Revolution”. Seeking to buck the trend of international outsourcing, American Apparel has located its headquarters, R&D, marketing, and manufacturing activities in downtown Los Angeles. This home-grown narrative is articulated in the brand’s circulation, consumption in its retail outlets and regulation in its intellectual property. On the American Apparel website, visitors are invited to “Explore our Factory”. The actors involved in the brand and its branding have originated its clothing commodities in a nationally framed brand name (‘American Apparel’) and articulated a ‘Made in…’ claim that is located in specific territories at certain scales within a particular city and state – the downtown area of Los Angeles, California, in the US (Pike, 2015). Meaning and value is appropriated by the actors involved from geographical associations with the city of LA as a centre of innovation, style and buzz in global fashion circles with resonance amongst consumers in differing spatial and temporal contexts worldwide.

A financial crisis has engulfed American Apparel following the competitive rise of the ‘fast fashion’ retail groups – such as H&M, Uniqlo and Zara – focused upon low prices and highly responsive rapid stock turnaround (Gapper, 2015). Despite being organised on a vertically integrated manufacturing and retailing model based in the US, American Apparel’s supply chain had grown inefficient and slow to adapt in refreshing its inventory regularly enough for consumers in a market setting where innovation and speed has become more critical to competitiveness. It was claimed that:

American Apparel is a traditional enterprise. It made great play of manufacturing in the US, rather than outsourcing to China and other low-wage countries as Gap and other US speciality clothing retailers do. But it did not take advantage of this proximity – it was as slow-moving and conservative as any of them.

(Gapper, 2015: 1)

Disruptive shifts in the geographical and temporal market settings for American Apparel have been further reinforced by ongoing turbulence and contestation in its governance and ownership related to legal disputes with its founder and former shareholder Dov Charney. The financial meltdown has been manifest in a pre-tax loss of $44.8m, collapse in its share price to 11 cents, accumulated debts of $300m, downgrading of its credit rating into junk territory, and a cash flow and liquidity squeeze that culminated in American Apparel’s listing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2015 (Indap, 2015; Whipp, 2015; Felsted, 2015). Following the installation of new senior management, the turnaround plan for American Apparel seeks to reach $1bn in revenue from $600m in 2015, reduce annual costs by $30m through retail outlet closures and cutting jobs, improve its productivity, expand and double the number of outlets in its global retail network outside the US in new and expanding markets such as the Middle East, China and South Korea, refine its advertising messages and spend, and make its supply chain more responsive and agile to get faster changing ranges of popular products and collections into retail outlets more quickly and reducing dated inventory (Whipp, 2015). Specifically, American Apparel (2015: 26) has identified that “The current supply chain is not properly aligned to support the diverse business needs and increase flexibility and innovation”. In terms of production, the new and more global strategic orientation is leading to questions about American Apparel’s home grown US-based model given its view that:

We’re not a total fashion house. We don’t have to follow every trend. We have the wind at our back because there is a lot of logo fatigue out there. We have the basics, which is what everybody needs. What you can’t do is manufacture in the US and be one of the more expensive manufacturers and be slow.

(Paula Schneider, Chief Executive, American Apparel, quoted in Indap, 2015: 1)

The new production strategy aims to “Develop proper manufacturing balance” to service the needs of its distribution channels and customers in retail, e-commerce and wholesale in more innovative and responsive ways in the wake of rapidly shifting fashion trends (American Apparel, 2015: 26). What implications this evolving strategy will have upon its manufacturing in downtown LA and the strong geographical associations this spatial reference has in the meaning and value of the brand and its branding remains to be seen.

As this instance of a brand and its actors grappling with geographical associations demonstrates, where branded goods and services commodities are from and are associated with is integral to their meaning and value. Brand and branding actors – producers, circulators, consumers and regulators – are constantly wrestling with issues of origin(s), provenance and authenticity. Longstanding research in marketing, though, has been fixated with the ‘country of origin’ effect on consumer behaviour. Less attention has been given to thinking about how the geographies of brands and branding include and extend beyond the national frame. Brands and branding geographies are an under-researched area. What constitutes their value and meaning? How do they relate to their geographical associations and dynamics in spatial circuits of combined and uneven development?

Addressing the relatively neglected geographies of brands and branding, this contribution defines what is meant by brands and branding, explains their geographies, and accounts for the roles of inter-related actors – producers, circulators, consumers and regulators – in spatial circuits of meaning and value. The idea of origination is introduced to explain the geographical associations constructed by actors in spatial circuits in their efforts to cohere and stabilise meaning and value in goods and services commodities brands and their branding in the times and spaces of particular market settings.

Addressing David Harvey’s (1990: 422) call to “get behind the veil, the fetishism of the market and the commodity, in order to tell the full story of social reproduction”, origination provides a way of lifting the “mystical veils” (Greenberg, 2008: 31) woven around branded goods and services commodities by the increasingly sophisticated activities of the actors involved. The strategies, techniques and practices of actors seek carefully to create, manage, rework and sometimes hide where goods are made and/or services are delivered from, and the economic, social, political, cultural and ecological conditions where and under which they are organised.

What are brands and what is branding?

In the socially and spatially uneven transition from a producer to a consumer-dominated economy, society, culture, ecology and polity, the brands and branding of goods and services commodities have proliferated dramatically (Arvidsson, 2006; Lury, 2004; Moor, 2007). Some claim the emergence of a “brand society” wherein brands are “the most ubiquitous and pervasive cultural form” and are “rapidly becoming one of the most powerful of the phenomena transforming the way we manage organizations and live our lives” (Kornberger, 2010: xi–xii, 23). This rapid growth, evolving sophistication and widespread use of the term brand has been accompanied by an increase in the sheer number of definitions from academic, business, consulting and practitioner sources. Such endeavours have fragmented rather than integrated understanding and explanation. There is no single or generally accepted model of the tangible (e.g., design, function, quality) and increasingly important intangible (e.g., feel, look, style) attributes and characteristics of brands and their relative importance and relationships. One important view sees the brand as the characteristic kind of a particular good or service (de Chernatony, 2010). A more developed and enduring account utilises the concept of ‘brand equity’, defined as the “set of assets (and liabilities) linked to a brand’s name and symbol that adds to (or subtracts from) the value provided by a product or service to a firm and/or to a firm’s customers” (Aaker, 1996: 7). In this view, brand equity is constituted by the tangible and intangible assets of brand loyalty, awareness, perceived quality, associations and other proprietary resources. Together these assets provide meaning and value through their creation, articulation and enhancement by brand and branding actors. Such elements include associations (e.g., with particular people, periods and places), identities (e.g., image, look, style), origins (e.g., where it is designed, made, connected with or perceived to come from), qualities (e.g., feel, form, function) and values (e.g., efficiency, reliability, reputation). Remedying the longstanding focus upon consumers, actors comprise those involved in the production, circulation, consumption and regulation of brands and branding in spatial circuits of meaning and value (Table 1.1). This social and spatial approach to brand equity addresses the critique of Aaker’s (1996) “managerial” approach and its focus upon corporate brand ownership and control by producers rather than consumers, its relative neglect of the social construction and consumption of brands by multiple actors, and the inherent inter-relations between meaning and value (Kornberger, 2010: 35).

Understanding the brand as the object, branding can be interpreted as the process of adding value to goods and services commodities by providing meaning. Branding ensures that goods and services are defined by their “symbolic powers and associations” (Kornberger, 2010: 13) rather than just their material basis and functionality. However, branding too suffers from the same proliferation and diversity of definitions and conceptualisations from different kinds of sources that make defining the brand complicated. For Peter Jackson et al. (2011: 59) branding is the “manufacture of meaning”. It is the work that actors do in attempts meaningfully to articulate, enhance and represent the facets and cues of the assets and liabilities in brands in ways that create value in particular temporal and spatial market settings. As a process branding is used by actors in their efforts to construct consumer trust and goodwill. It is designed to create distinctive associations in the brand – such as authenticity, quality and style – that directly and positively influence the purchasing decisions of consumers (de Chernatony, 2010). Compared to and in distinction from more commodified or generic goods and services, actors seeking configurations of product/image and price differentiation utilise the object of the brand and the process of branding.

Table 1.1 Brand and branding actors

Actor	Examples
Producere	Brand owners, designers, manufacturers, ‘place-makers!’, residents
Circulators	Advertisers, bloggers, journalists, marketers, media
Consumers	Shoppers, residents, tourists, users, visitors
Regulators	Government departments, trademark authorities, local councils, export agencies, intellectual property advisers, business associations

Source: Adapted from Pike (2015)

What’s geographical about brands and branding?

Brands and branding are geographical in at least three inter-related ways (Pike, 2015). Conceptualised as an identifiable kind of good or service commodity, the brand is made up of characteristics that intertwine to differing degrees and in varying ways with geographical connections and connotations. Brands have an “inherent spatiality” (Power & Hauge, 2008: 138). Elements of brand equity – such as loyalty, awareness, perceived quality, attributes and associations – are inextricably connected with geographically inflected considerations of who makes the good or delivers the service and from where, as well as their particular identities, histories and other socio-spatial markers. The commercial value and meaning of brands emerged amidst the industrialisation and mass production in advanced economies in the late 19th century: “Through industrialization the production of many household items, such as soap, moved from local production to centralized factories. As the distance between buyer and supplier widened the communication of origin and quality became more important” (Lindemann, 2010: 3). In common with brands, branding too is similarly wrapped up in geographical associations and contexts. Actors often seek to articulate such attributes and characteristics in brands in meaningful and valuable ways within wider spatial circuits of production, circulation, consumption and regulation. Such actors utilise the meaning-making of branding to identify, articulate and represent the signs and symbols that are inescapably associated with the geographical contexts and connotations of particular goods and services brands.

Second, brands and branding are geographical because their utilisation by actors serves to (re)produce spatial differentiation over space and time. Adapting Michael Watts’ (2005: 527) claim for the more deeply branded world of contemporary “cognitive-cultural capitalism” (Scott, 2007: 1466): “The life of the [branded] commodity typically involves movement through space and time, during which it ad...