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The Corporate Brand: Toward an Anthropology of Branding

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Enterprise as an Instrument of Civilization

Part of the book series: Translational Systems Sciences ((TSS,volume 4))

Abstract

This chapter summarizes and discusses some of the key themes in academic writing on branding since the 1990s, with a particular focus on anthropological approaches to the topic. Beginning with a brief overview of the historical background and recent transformations of the brand, it then goes on to look at branding in relation to community and identity, followed by a consideration of the politics of the brand and questions of resistance, subversion, piracy, and parody. The chapter concludes with a look at some possible definitions of contemporary branding and asks the questions: what can anthropology contribute to the understanding of branding, and why is branding of interest to anthropology?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Nakano Hitori, credited as the author of Train Man, is a pseudonym denoting the authors of the posts on the Internet message board, an edited version of which forms the text of the book.

  2. 2.

    Anthropological perspectives on the brand owe a great deal to anthropological work on consumption and the understanding of goods and material objects. Some key works here are Douglas and Isherwood (1979), Appadurai (1986), Kopytoff (1986), Miller (1987, 1995, 1998b), and Moeran (1996).

  3. 3.

    The distinction between artist and designer is often somewhat arbitrary in this context – Moor (2007: 19) notes, for example, that “both Dali and Magritte had designed perfume bottles.”

  4. 4.

    An early example of this was Britain’s “New Labour,” launched in 1994.

  5. 5.

    See, e.g., Reader (2014: 169–193) on “the consumer rebranding of modern pilgrimage” in Spain and Japan. In the UK, the Church of England has also actively encouraged churches to consider branding as a way of getting noticed (https://www.churchofengland.org/media/2006539/infocusjuly14.pdf accessed August 2014), and a number of Church of England cathedrals have either already rebranded themselves or have branding projects in hand – for one interesting example, see the brand guidelines for Norwich Cathedral, made available online in the tongue in cheek form of a digital “brand bible” (http://www.theclickdesign.com/project/norwich-cathedrals-brand-guidelines/ accessed August 2014).

  6. 6.

    For more on the measurement of brand value and its increase since the 1980s, see Arvidsson (2005: 238).

  7. 7.

    The branding of the environment is discussed in more detail in Matsunaga (2009).

  8. 8.

    Marlon Brando, the star, rides a Triumph rather than a Harley in the film, but it was still a significant contribution to the development of the American outlaw biker myth, which, as Holt (2004: 157) argues, was later “stitched…to the Harley bikes.”

  9. 9.

    The religious vocabulary is not accidental: Schouten and McAlexander (1995: 50) argue that “So strong is the Harley-Davidson motorcycle as an organizing symbol for the biker ethos that it has become, if effect, a religious icon around which an entire ideology of consumption is articulated.”

  10. 10.

    For example, “greeting rituals” of Saab drivers, where they beep or flash their headlights at other Saab drivers that they encounter on the road, stories recounting Saab’s early history manufacturing airplanes, or stories recounting eventful journeys in Saabs or serious accidents from which the driver walked away unscathed (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001: 421–423).

  11. 11.

    Accounts of both the English chavs and the Japanese kogyaru also mention the use of other well-known luxury fashion brands, but the Burberry brand achieved a special status as symbolic of chav street style and was also closely associated with the kogyaru.

  12. 12.

    Ironically, in view of the event that prompted the protest, the logo in question was originally intended to “evoke natural forms and energy that represent, respectively, BP’s position as an environmental leader and its goal of moving beyond the petroleum sector” (Landor Associates 2010, http://landor.com/#!/work/case-studies/bp/ accessed August 2014).

  13. 13.

    Waitrose is a high-end food retailer in the United Kingdom.

  14. 14.

    See Moore (2003) for a firsthand account of the use of ethnographic research in a branding agency and the incorporation of anthropologists into the branding team. In a slightly different vein, a leading branding executive voices his enthusiasm for (biological) anthropology as a source of insight for branding in an article in the journal Brand Management entitled “Anthropology and the Brand” (Ryder 2004).

  15. 15.

    Scott (drawing on Foucault) developed his idea of legibility with reference to the state, but it seems to me that this concept can also be usefully applied to branding.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Sciences, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

    Louella Matsunaga

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  1. Louella Matsunaga
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Correspondence to Louella Matsunaga .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Suita City Museum, Suita, Osaka, Japan

    Hirochika Nakamaki

  2. Faculty of Business Administration, Tottori University of Environmental Studies, Tottori, Japan

    Koichiro Hioki

  3. College of Economics, Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan

    Izumi Mitsui

  4. Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan

    Yoshiyuki Takeuchi

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Matsunaga, L. (2016). The Corporate Brand: Toward an Anthropology of Branding. In: Nakamaki, H., Hioki, K., Mitsui, I., Takeuchi, Y. (eds) Enterprise as an Instrument of Civilization. Translational Systems Sciences, vol 4. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54916-1_15

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