Global Brands

There are, as any marketing person will tell you, very few truly ‘global’ brands, in the sense of brands that are known and sold in every country in the world. There are, however, many brands that are international, and still more that are trying to become so, often by employing agencies and techniques that are themselves international in scope. Such efforts have long exercised academics in media and cultural studies, although their concerns have often been split between, on the one hand, the cultural effects of such efforts and, on the other, the political and economic consequences of what have so far been predominantly Western attempts to turn the rest of the world into a market for its products. Three new books explore the ways in which branding – as a means of imbuing goods with symbolic or aesthetic content, and then using the laws of intellectual property to control their circulation – brings these issues together, and is linked in turn to broader shifts in the structure and regulation of international trade and the continued prioritization of marketing concerns within business. In doing this, each raises important questions about what happens to ‘culture’ when it is imagined as a series of distinctive properties whose circulation can be controlled, and seen as central to both the continued dominance of established economic players and the emergence of new ones