Banet-Weiser's current book project, Identity TM: Brand Culture and Political
Possibility, was the impetus for the creation of the BrandSpace group, which will share work in progress over the next two years before publishing an edited volume. Banet-Weiser's book project investigates politics, consumer culture and the formation of identity . . . especially how and if spaces within capitalism can provide a productive context for political subjectivity. Are certain possibilities foreclosed? Or made possible?

At a recent meeting of the working group, Banet-Weiser offered a short history of brand culture. She described three overlapping phases, each defined by its own historical, political and consumer moment.

• Phase 1 (19th - early 20th century) was characterized by the "therapeutic ethos," in which advertising offered gratification and fulfillment through the consumption of commodities. The Unique Selling Proposition was developed in the 1940s and Freudian psychoanalysis was popularized. Consumers were considered insecure but rational. The goal of ads was clear: create insecurity and offer resolutions.
• During Phase 2 (mid-late 20th century), consumers became less coherent - each one required a different type of messaging, resulting in niche marketing strategies. Brand culture and advertising started to reflect postmodern notions of culture. As consumers became more savvy about marketing ploys, advertisers created ironic, self-referential campaigns, knowing that target consumers would get the joke.
• Phase 3 (late 20th century to now) is the focus of Banet-Weiser's current research. Here, consumers have become even more slippery: they are not only fragmented and fraught with contradiction, they often craft multiple identities for themselves. They like to sample different identities and create hyphenated ones (as Annenberg Professor Chris Smith put it, someone can be Abercrombie meets Baby Phat.) Many have access to digital technology which allows them to re-shape themselves and the discourse around products that are sold to them. In short, the consumer has become a kind of producer. Branding campaigns take advantage of new media to pursue these customers and track their interests, their consumption and production patterns, and their engagement with the brand.

At its core, Identity TM is about brand culture and possibilities for political engagement. Among other things, Banet-Weiser's looking at lifestyle branding, including American Apparel, Shepard Fairey's guerilla marketing campaigns, Rick Warren's Saddleback Church and the Christian-themed mall shop C28. She recently wrote an article with Charlotte Lapsansky - "RED is the New Black: Brand Culture, Consumer Citizenship and Political Possibility" - about the RED campaign and the Chevy campaign, in which consumers created ironic video advertisements for the Tahoe SUV that featured pro-environmental protection and anti-SUV messages.

Banet-Weiser believes that many critics of neoliberalism have been too dismissive of the political possibilities within brand culture. She refutes the premise that any political action taken within a consumer context is automatically subsumed by a capitalist status quo (a popular position to take in academia). She wants to explore what possibilities now present themselves, particularly in light of new media tools and a digitally literate youth, who are gravitating away from passive consumption to a more active model of participation, which occasionally looks more like production than consumption. She hopes to dispense with nostalgic notions of a "subculture" that manages to remain pristine and uncommodified. She's also exploring how new notions of the "consumer citizen" may represent a convergence of feminist and neoliberal ideology: girls have been trained to be skilled consumers, well-positioned to succeed in a new economy dominated by lifestyle, marketing and image industries. In line with this, she's exploring the "feedback" platforms of new technologies, and questioning their role as "evidence" of the openness of Web 2.0 technology.

In exploring the intersection between culture, politics and economics, Banet-Weiser must do the dirty work of defining these unwieldy terms. For marketers like Hollingshead, it's not immediately apparent what Banet-Weiser means by "culture," particularly in the context of a conversation about brands. Banet-Weiser ventured a definition: a brand, she claimed, is an idea or a sentiment attached to a product, a corporation or a trademark. The brand isn't the product or the act of consumption. It's the idea attached to those things. The fact that brands thrive on narrative, myth and effective storytelling means that they are also cultural objects. Therefore, branding is not just a marketing strategy: it's a way of being, a way of acting, and consumers who purchase the products beneath its umbrella gain membership to a group that has its own unique culture . . . a brand culture.

So where are consumer-citizens in this framework? Usually, we like to create firm boundaries between commercialism and culture. These boundaries have always been problematic, but it's quite typical to think of the creation of "culture" as an authentic expression, one that often subverts the logic of capitalism and rationality, reason and objectivity. Creating culture is often perceived as something one does for love, not money, and its expression somehow reflects a person's true inner core, untouched by the taint of commercial brands. But, within brand space, culture and commercialism merge.

USC history professor Steve Ross invoked Clifford Geertz and described culture as "lived experience." By participating in a branded culture, consumers are self-consciously inserting themselves into a cultural milieu. The experience may be vicarious rather than lived, but the self-conscious aspect of it - which includes the act of marketing yourself as a member of a particular subculture - takes on its own kind of life, one that becomes part of the layers of lived experience, both for participant and audience.

So, when we talk about brand culture and brand space, are we really talking about lifestyle branding? Josh Kun, director of the Lear Center's Popular Music Project, suggested that brand culture actually generates a new definition of culture. What successful brands do is turn lived experience into virtual experience. Consumers who want to vicariously enjoy the biker lifestyle can buy a Von Dutch hat. One could argue that brands can change the very notion of what experience is.

Elizabeth Currid - USC Professor of Policy and Planning and director of the Lear Center's Star Maps project - questioned our knee-jerk temptation to dismiss the authenticity of branded experiences. Brands, Currid claimed, can offer a short hand, Cliff Notes version of subcultures created by graffiti artists and skaters, for instance. There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

In fact, I would argue that there's something very socially constructive about vicariously participating in other people's culture. Just as humanists argue that reading books generates a deeper sense of empathy for the situations of others, nicking the iconography of a foreign subculture puts the consumer in the position of advertising that subculture, endorsing its existence, and vicariously experiencing some aspect of that lived reality. The biggest danger, of course, is trivialization, which is always a risk when anything is translated into a representation.

Stay tuned for the next installment from BrandSpace . . .