Branding strategies and the marketing studies that inform them are increasingly taking into account the rules and conventions that shape consumer attention.
According to the New York Times, in a forthcoming article, “The Power of Strangers,” (to be published in The Journal of Consumer Research) Rosellina Ferraro, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Maryland, and her colleagues have found that the efficacy of a brand depends, to a certain extent, on the subject’s relative state of attention. In one study of what they call “incidental brand-consumer encounters”,
each subject was shown 20 photographs of people in various situations and instructed to focus on facial expressions. Afterward, each subject was offered a bottle of water from a selection of four brands. The experiment had nothing to do with facial expressions and everything to do with which kind of water they chose: the subjects had been divided into groups, based on how many of the photos they viewed incidentally included a bottle of Dasani water. Among those who looked at Dasani-free pictures, about 17 percent chose that brand. But about 40 percent of those who viewed a group of pictures that included 12 with a Dasani presence made the brand their pick. Since subjects who actually noticed the brand in the pictures were eliminated from the results, that spike in popularity evidently came from exposure that the subjects weren’t even aware of. “In essence,” Ferraro says, “we have these brief social encounters fairly regularly, and they may have an impact on our choices.”
The importance of conditions of attention - with brand saturation on one end, and inattentive absorption on the other - to consumer perceptions and purchasing habits is one good reason to oppose studies like Ferraro’s to the wave of recent scholarship that favors a more ahistorical view of the efficacy of brands.
On the latter end of the spectrum, David Wengrow’s recent Current Anthropology article “Prehistories of Commodity Branding”, which made some noise amongst the poststructuralist-weary liberal academic left, makes the argument (which I am in fact otherwise partial to) that commodity branding is hardly exclusive to late capitalism. On the contrary,
comparisons between recent forms of branding and much earlier modes of commodity marking associated with the Urban Revolution of the fourth millennium BC suggest that systems of branding address a paradox common to all economies of scale and are therefore likely to arise (and to have arisen) under a wide range of ideological and institutional conditions, including those of sacred hierarchies and stratified states.
The argument then proceeds to examine the “material and cognitive properties of sealing practices” in the ancient world; but, again, Wengrow seems to overlook the importance of brand saturation, mass distribution, and the resultant conditions of consumer attention that, in my opinion, more suggest a break with premodernity than continuation with it.
The conspicuous absence of this line of thought perhaps explains Wengrow’s distaste for the poststructuralist theories that seem to too freely dispose of “choice” and “freedom” on its account.
A possible objection to a more catholic approach to commodity branding—one which steps outside the framework of wage-labor capitalism—is that commerce (along with, by extension, consumer choice) was tangential to the organization of pre-modern economies (Polanyi 1957). For adherents of this view some tyranny or other can always be invoked to explain the uniqueness of modern consumption patterns: the tyranny of gift exchange, of sacred economics, or of the hierarchical state. Yet there are many reasons to doubt this evolutionary scenario, some of which arise from the recent experience of mass consumerism itself. The intractable consumer who rejects choice in favor of conformity, who chooses brand loyalty over brand novelty, is an undeniable part of the modern scene (Miller 2001). Frederic Jameson (1991, 266) goes so far as to suggest that “market as a concept rarely has anything to do with choice or freedom, since those are all determined for us in advance”; we select among commodities, “but we can scarcely be said to have a say in actually choosing any of them.” (8)
While Jameson does go too far in claiming consumers’ choices are “determined for us in advance”, Ferraro’s study shows just how erroneous it would be to underestimate the importance of prior states of distraction and inattention to present, seemingly autonomous decisions.
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