The reality of brands: towards an ontology of marketing

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

Brand idealists share their belief in the mental origin of branded products with Searle's view that 'counting as' is the essence of all social reality. For Searle, rules of the form 'X counts as Y in context C' constitute the social rather in the way that the rules of chess define what it means to play chess (Searle, 1995: 28). The fact that a product X counts as a brand Y within a market C would then be all that is needed for branding.

Brand idealism is confronted with serious problems however. First, the language of marketing treats 'brand' and 'product' as intersubstitutible in many contexts and hence treats brands and products themselves as belonging to the same level of concreteness. The science of marketing studies brand choice behavior and assumes, for example, that products are subject to particular life cycles while brands are not. This indicates that, as a matter of fact, brands are treated as a special class of products, precisely as branded products.

Second, in the case of a commodity purchase such as bread or milk, there is typically little brand preference even where the products purchased are in fact branded, as in the case of the well-known Italian dairy producer Parmalat or its French competitor Danone.(4) Nor, as is shown by the case of Chiquita bananas or Perrier water, need brand strength be correlated with greater competitive advantage. High consumer awareness may coincide with a much weaker role of this awareness in determining purchase decisions, which calls into question the overriding role of awareness in determining the success of branding or in constituting brands in the first place.

Third, idealism cannot easily accommodate 'natural' (or 'category') brands such as champagne, cognac, Parma ham or Emmental cheese. In these cases, brand names did not arise through either individual branding or umbrella branding (i.e. by being placed under a corporate or a 'blanket' family name). Moreover, packaging or design is here not consistent and therefore not constitutive of the brand. In the case of champagne, brand idealism would imply that the fight marketing mix could persuade consumers to accept wines as champagnes that, as a matter of fact, do not come under the umbrella of this 'natural' brand. Rather, their belonging to a particular species of wines, a particular production process ('methode champagnoise') and their origin in a particular viticultural region characterize certain wines sufficiently to make them champagnes, regardless of the degree of awareness consumers may have of them and irrespective of any corporate brand name (Thode and Maskulka, 1998).

Fourth, products often retain a higher value even if they have become 'de-branded'. This explains the value of Lacoste shirts without the Lacoste label, or of Rolex watches stripped of the Rolex name: "They are worth more than counterfeit imitations, because the brand is present even when it cannot be seen. In contrast, though the brand may appear on an imitation, it is actually missing" (Kapferer, 1992: 10f.). This phenomenon can only be explained by assuming that even the former presence of a brand somehow transforms a product. But this precludes brands from being reduced to a simple external sign such as a name or label.(5)