Brands are everywhere. Branding is central to political campaigns and
political protest movements; the alchemy of social media and
self-branding creates overnight celebrities; the self-proclaimed
"greening" of institutions and merchant goods is nearly universal. But
while the practice of branding is typically understood as a tool of
marketing, a method of attaching social meaning to a commodity as a way
to make it more personally resonant with consumers, Sarah Banet-Weiser
argues that in the contemporary era, brands are about culture as much as
they are about economics. That, in fact, we live in a brand culture.
Authentic(TM) maintains that branding has extended beyond a business
model to become both reliant on, and reflective of, our most basic
social and cultural relations. Further, these types of brand
relationships have become cultural contexts for everyday living,
individual identity, and personal relationships--what Banet-Weiser
refers to as "brand cultures." Distinct brand cultures, that at times
overlap and compete with each other, are taken up in each chapter: the
normalization of a feminized "self-brand" in social media, the brand
culture of street art in urban spaces, religious brand cultures such as
"New Age Spirituality" and "Prosperity Christianity,"and the culture of
green branding and "shopping for change." In a culture where graffiti
artists loan their visions to both subway walls and department stores,
buying a cup of "fair-trade" coffee is a political statement, and
religion is mass-marketed on t-shirts, Banet-Weiser questions the
distinction between what we understand as the "authentic" and branding
practices. But brand cultures are also contradictory and potentially
rife with unexpected possibilities, leading Authentic(TM) to
articulate a politics of ambivalence, creating a lens through which we
can see potential political possibilities within the new consumerism.
