The reality of brands: towards an ontology of marketing

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, April, 1999 by Wolfgang Grassl

III

The Reality of Brands

If brands have an ontological reality, the exact nature of this reality remains yet to be clarified. The realist account does not imply a purely physicalist demarcation of brands from other products nor does it imply the view that products become branded at the behest of processes of perception or cognition. Such a view would presuppose a Cartesian dualism between res cogitans and res extensa which has long ago become obsolete in cognitive science. Much along the lines of Gibson's ecological model of perception, brand realism treats the structures of our cognitive apparatus as part of the same reality to which products belong (Gibson, 1982). The salient question, then, is what kinds of products can be branded at all, given the characteristics of our cognitive system.

The conditions for branding need not even reside in presently perceived or existing properties of products: "every product has more attributes than meet the eye" (MacMillan and McGrath, 1996: 58). Branding strategies cannot be based only on the particular taste, shape, consistency or perceived quality of a product but they must relate also to real (or de re) possibilities - to the dispositional properties - of products to enable certain uses or to permit certain transformations that have not yet been undertaken. Gibson referred to such possibilities as 'affordances,' in the sense that a chair affords sitting, fire affords warmth or products of the same category afford the same use while one product may afford multiple usage. The affordance of an object is a certain invariant of the environment. It is independent of any of the needs and dispositions of an observer and can therefore not be influenced. Affordances do not cause behavior but rather constrain or control it. They are not the outcomes of perceptual processes, as 'meanings' are often held to be (Gibson, 1982: 411). Affordances, sets of potentials or capacities of products, exist objectively, as part of product space, though they may not yet have been realized or acted upon. In the context of marketing, they define the necessary but not yet sufficient conditions for successful branding.(21)

Because of the relational character of affordances, we need to tie them to the action repertoire of agents. A television set no more affords viewing (but only listening) to a blind person than a hammer affords hitting to a creature without manipulators. Moreover, the affordances of an object are context-dependent. A television set does not afford viewing when enclosed in a box; a hammer does not afford hitting in a room without agents that might use it (Kirsh, 1995). Affordances are therefore context-sensitive, which is an unproblematic assumption for the realist.

Product engineering has long used affordances to describe the potential of products to assume certain functions. Physical properties of objects are designed to constrain certain actions - car boot lids and engine bonnets are obvious examples - or to suggest a range of possible actions (Norman, 1988). A button with a concave surface invites pressing, while a cylindrical knob suggests grasping and rotation. Flashing hold buttons on telephones afford attention. Well-designed products contain visible cues for use.(22) In this sense, information is in the world, to be picked up by users, in the sense in which Gibson understood the process of perception (Smith, 1999a). In branding we utilize the affordances of objects to provide signals about special functions, higher quality, uniqueness, or value.