Marketing Brands

Abstract

Here we consider the way brands are marketed, the relation between socio-economic class and brands, how millennials relate to brands, the VALS (values and lifestyles) typology, which advertisers use to gain insights into their target audiences, and the role of marketing in consumer cultures. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the growth in the availability of objects to be consumed and with a discussion of “lifestyle” in contemporary consumer societies.

It is paramount to recognize that marketing works through more than just advertising messages. Marketing’s role encompasses management of the entire circulatory path from market research to product creation to distribution channel selection and management to pricing to advertising generation to media planning to point-of-sale promotion to merchandising to setting the terms of exchange to administrating sales and after-sales service and sometimes to supervising the discarding of the object (trade-ins, for example, or recycling) repurchase stimulation, and more.

Kalman Applbaum, The Marketing Era

In the second half of the twentieth century in Europe, or at any rate in France, there is nothing—whether object, individual, or social group—that is valued apart from its double, the image that advertises and sanctifies it. This image duplicates not only an object’s material, perceptible existence but desire and pleasure that it makes into fictions situating them in the land of make-believe, promising “happiness”—the happiness of being a consumer. Thus publicity [marketing and advertising] that was intended to promote consumption is the first of consumer goods; it creates myths—or since it can create nothing—it borrows existing myths, canalizing signifiers to a dual purpose: to offer them as such for general consumption and to stimulate the consumption of a specific object.

Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World

The average four-year-old American child can identify more than one hundred brands.

Paco Underhill, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping