Brand
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The brand is typically understood as the cultural and emotional domain of a commercial product, or the cultural expression of a company or corporation (and increasingly of traditionally noncommercial entities, such as religious and nonprofit organizations). The brand is the recognizable, regularized, and standardized “message” of a company, the result of a complex “branding strategy” (often called marketing). The success of a brand often depends on its stability, and ability to maintain over time a coherent narrative and recognizable expression. In more economic terms, the brand is a way for a company or corporation to distinguish itself from the competition, a way of standing out in a clutter of advertising, marketing, and products. In the contemporary cultural context, branding is not limited to products, but ideologies, feelings, and the self are also branded (Banet-Weiser 2012). While the brand is often associated with the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of mass production and mass consumption, branding was an important part of earlier forms of commerce and exchange (Moor 2007). Before the brand signified a particular signature of a company, it was seen to denote ownership of property. In the United States of the eighteenth century, branding was the process of creating...
This essay may be found on page 24 of the printed volume.