Brand Society: How Brands Transform Management and Lifestyle

"This is by Martin Kornberger, who is a branding practitioner as well as an academic. What I like about his book is that most books on branding still talk about it as a way of influencing consumers. But that is only half the story and the fact that we’re spending two-thirds of our time working with employees is the other half of the story. What Kornberger does is give equal weight to the two halves. So yes, branding is about influencing consumption, but it’s also about influencing production. It’s about consumers, but it’s also about employees. It’s about lifestyle in the outside world and it’s also about management inside organisations. He very deftly operates in both of those worlds while all the time bringing in references to everybody from Nietzsche to Banksy in a very engaging, affable way. He’s a collector of ideas and maybe that’s one of the reasons the book appeals to me. It’s very much about the power of ideas in consumer society and in the management of organisations, and for me that’s part of the excitement of branding—that it has those two roles. Maybe he almost thinks that. Brand Society as a title doesn’t quite convey the internal/external thing. Maybe it’s not the ideal title and, also, it makes it sound like it’s a sociology book. It has sociology in it, but it’s much more than that, it’s much more readable…Can I tell you a bad joke about sociologists? —What happens if you cross a gangster with a sociologist? —He’ll make you an offer you can’t understand. So this book is not the kind of sociology you can’t understand. It’s very interesting the way that he defines branding as a phenomenon that links and reorganises the two spheres of consumption and production. That’s an unusually sophisticated way of thinking about branding and a really good corrective to some of the more one-dimensional books on the subject. If you work for Google, you’re very, very conscious of the Google brand, and you’re very conscious of the level of detail, perfection and precision that you’ve got to live up to. So Google doesn’t have to manage its people to constantly play their best game day, after day, after day. They just know that they have to because the brand is out there setting a standard for them. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Another example would be John Lewis, consistently voted Britain’s favourite retailer. There’s a John Lewis brand out in the world, which we all know and love, which guides the people inside John Lewis in terms of how they should behave with customers. They don’t have to be told. It just becomes a natural thing. IKEA is about making good design affordable to the many. The whole spirit is about being frugal. Nobody would ever dream of booking a business class flight, but nobody has to be told that. So the brand creates a spirit that is more powerful than traditional command-and-control management inside organisations."