Brands: Interdisciplinary Perspectives(Routledge Interpretive Marketing Research)

Branding has emerged as a cornerstone of marketing practice and corporate strategy, as well as a central cultural practice. In this book, Jonathan Schroeder brings together a curated selection of the most influential and thought-provoking papers on brands and branding from Consumption Markets and Culture, accompanied by new contributions from leading brand scholars Giana Eckhardt, John F. Sherry, Jr., Sidney Levy and Morris Holbrook. Organised into four perspectives – cultural, corporate, consumer, critical - these papers are chosen to highlight the complexities of contemporary branding through leading consumer brands such as Disney, eBay, Guinness, McDonalds, Nike, and Starbucks. They address key topics such as celebrity branding, corporate branding, place branding, and retail branding and critique the complexities of contemporary brands to provide a rich trove of interdisciplinary research insights into the function of brands as ethical, ideological and political objects. This thought-provoking collection will be of interest to all scholars of marketing, consumer behaviour, anthropology and sociology, and anyone interested in the powerful roles brands play in consumer’s lives and cultural discourse.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Part I : Cultural Perspectives 2. Brand Culture and Branded Workers: Service work and aesthetic labour in fashion retail 3. Packaging as Vehicle for Mythologizing the Brand 4. Just doing it: A visual ethnographic study of spectacular consumption behavior at Nike Town 5. Commentary: The cultural approach to branding Part II: Corporate Perspectives 6. Transnational Organization and Symbolic Production: Creating and managing a global brand 7. Retail Stores as Brands: Performances, theatre and space 8. Learning to say g'day to the World: The development of Australia's marketable image in the 1980s 9. The Technology of Branding Part III: Consumer Perspectives 10. Consumer–Brand Assemblages in Advertising: An analysis of skin, identity, and tattoos in ads 11. Consumer Multiculturation: Consequences of multi-cultural identification for brand knowledge 12. The Role of Commodified Celebrities in Children’s Moral Development: The case of David Beckham 13. Limits of the McDonaldization Thesis: eBayization and ascendant trends in post- industrial consumer culture 14. Commentary: The consumer perspective in branding Part IV: Critical Perspectives 15. Aesthetics Awry: The Painter of Light™ and the commodification of artistic values 16. Consuming the "World": Reflexivity, aesthetics, and authenticity at Disney World’s EPCOT Center 17. Consuming Caffeine: The discourse of Starbucks and coffee 18. A Compr(om)ising Commodities in Consumer Culture: Fetishism, aesthetics and authenticity

About the Author :
Jonathan Schroeder is the William A. Kern Professor of Communications at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. He is the author of Visual Consumption (2002), co-author of From Chinese Brand Culture to Global Brands (2013), editor of Conversations on Consumption (2013), and co-editor of Brand Culture (2006), the Routledge Companion to Visual Organization (2014), as well as a special issue on "Being Branded" for the Scandinavian Journal of Management (June 2013). He is editor in chief of the interdisciplinary journal Consumption Markets & Culture. He has held visiting appointments at Wesleyan University, Göteborg University Sweden, University of Auckland, New Zealand, Bocconi University in Milan, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, and the Shanghai International Business and Economics University.

Review :
'Brands applies cultural studies to brand building in a rigorous but accessible way. Putting a creative, often frustrated, and always active consumer at the heart of brand consumption, the authors offer a range of valuable insights from around the globe for creating more meaningful brands.' - Michael Beverland, Professor, University of Bath, UK 'Schroeder has a talent for detecting insights that challenge conventional wisdom and offer new opportunities. The thought-provoking contributions in this curated volume consider brands not as economic signals or managerial assets, but as complex cultural artifacts with ethical and political implications. If you need to be informed about building brands in contemporary culture, read this book.' - Susan Fournier, Professor, Boston University, USA 'By gathering the international who-is-who of brand culture analysts through this magnificent must-read volume, Jonathan Schroeder has created the new obligatory passage point for everyone interested in studying how brands shape (and are shaped by) consumption, markets, and culture.' - Markus Giesler, Associate Professor, York University, Canada,