Why Do Brands Cause Trouble A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding on JSTORBrands are today under attack by an emerging countercultural movement. This study builds a dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding that explains the rise of this movement and its potential effects. Results of an interpretive study challenge existing theories of consumer resistance. To develop an alternative model, I first trace the rise of the modern cultural engineering paradigm of branding, premised upon a consumer culture that granted marketers cultural authority. Intrinsic contradictions erased its efficacy. Next I describe the current postmodern consumer culture, which is premised upon the pursuit of personal sovereignty through brands. I detail 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 antibranding sentiment sweeping Western countries. I detail these contradictions and project that they will give rise to a new postpostmodern branding paradigm premised upon brands as citizenartists. Keywords Brand Loyalty, Critical Theory, Cultural Theories and Analysis, PostmodernismPoststructuralism, Historical Analysis. Kalle Lasns 2. 00. A counterculture is forming around the idea that the branding efforts of global consumer goods companies have spawned a societally destructive consumer culture. In North America, the burgeoning influence of Lasns muckraking magazine Adbusters http www. Free Program Baudrillard The Mirror Of Production Pdf ConverterLove is a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes that ranges from interpersonal affection I love my mother to pleasure I loved that meal. Aanalizzando le foto di due miliziani si pu sostenere che abbiano posato per Robert Capa. Kilauea Mount Etna Mount Yasur Mount Nyiragongo and Nyamuragira Piton de la Fournaise Erta Ale. Eflux is a publishing platform and archive, artist project, curatorial platform, and enterprise which was founded in 1998. Marxism encompasses various schools of thought associated with the philosophical, sociological, political and economic theories of 19th century German revolutionary. By Aron 1935 Sociologie allemande contemporaine PUF German Sociology The Free Press 1944 LHomme contre les tyrans Editions de la Maison franaise. The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction action film written and directed by The Wachowskis, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, CarrieAnne Moss, Hugo Weaving. Tom Franks books 1. Baffler http www. Eric Schlossers bestselling Fast Food Nation 2. Center for a New American Dream http www. Utne Reader together suggest that the antibranding movement is quickly becoming a dominant chromosome in the DNA of Americas counterculture. In particular, Naomi Kleins book No Logo Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies 1. Standing in opposition to brands is no longer merely an antiestablishment badge for youth it is a fullfledged social movement Economist. Why do brands cause trouble Viewed from within the confines of the discipline of marketing, this potent new movement is inexplicable. Free Program Baudrillard The Mirror Of Production Pdf' title='Free Program Baudrillard The Mirror Of Production Pdf' />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 antibranding 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 Mc. Donalds and Microsoft and Starbucksthe success stories lauded in marketing courses worldwideare the same brands that are relentlessly attacked by this new movement. The goal of this article is to develop a theory of consumer culture and branding that explains why current branding practices have provoked such a vigorous response. I want to specify the tensions that exist between how firms brand their products and how people consume. I begin with an empirical examination of the one research stream in marketing that has considered this question. The second section builds an alternative dialectical model of branding and consumer culture that explains how contemporary branding principles have evolved historically. Finally, I circle back to the emerging antibranding movement to understand tensions between the current branding paradigm and consumer culture to speculate on their future directions. The Cultural Authority Model. A variety of social sciences and humanities disciplines outside of business schools routinely examine the tensions between how firms market and how people consume. These critical accounts of marketing have long argued that, collectively, firms branding efforts shape consumer desires and actions. The concept consumer culture 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 markets offerings. The cultural structuring of consumption maintains political support for the market system, expands markets, and increases industry profits. These accounts are dominated by the cultural authority narrative. Marketers are portrayed as cultural engineers, organizing how people think and feel through branded commercial products. Omnipotent corporations use sophisticated marketing techniques to seduce consumers to participate in a system of commodified meanings embedded in brands. Likewise, consumer culture is organized around the principle of obeisance to the cultural authority of marketers. People who have internalized the consumer culture implicitly grant firms the authority to organize their tastes. Horkheimer and Adornos 1. They assert that the system of mass cultural production, a set of techniques for rationalizing culture as commodity, is the ideological glue that maintains broad consensual participation in advanced capitalist society. By the time they wrote this chapter, Horkheimer and Adorno 1. Instead, they set out to explain how consumer culture defanged political opposition by restructuring it as taste. They aimed their argument specifically at the mass culture industries that blossomed after World War II television, consumer goods, music, film, and advertising. The modern era of consumer capitalism was the first to rely upon the ideological premise that social identities are best realized through commodities. Challenges to capitalist interests, which regularly surfaced in early industrial capitalism in the form of labor conflict and radical political challenges, were smoothed over by the new mass culture industries. This commodified mode of subjectivity provided an extraordinary alliance between potentially antagonistic positions it facilitated market interests in expanding profit while at the same time it provided people with identities that satisfied or at least deflected their demands for greater participation in the economy and polity. Horkheimer and Adorno 1. Market segmentation is inherently a technology of domination. Segmentation is about classifying, organizing, and labeling consumers Horkheimer and Adorno 1. Product differences are quantitative, mechanical. The technologies of marketingmarket research, segmentation, targeting, mass advertisinglead to a channeling of culture that erases idiosyncrasies. The logic of mass marketing leads to least common denominator goods that produce a conformity of style, marginalize risk taking, and close down interpretation. Today, Stuart Ewen e. George Ritzer e. Horkheimer and Adornos 1. Football Online Games Espn. Another marxist tradition, influenced by the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, presents a more optimistic spin on the same thesis. While most people fall prey to these marketing techniques, some are able to resist and take control of the meanings and uses of commodities. Against marketings coercive cultural authority, individuals and groups fight back by investing commodities with more particularized meanings and using them in idiosyncratic ways. Michel de Certeau 1. John Fiske e. g., 1.