Blowing up the brand: Critical perspectives on promotional culture

In the decade since Naomi Klein's groundbreaking No Logo, media scholars have tried to add to a continuum of scholarship on branding. However, notions of branding had, for the most part, focused on how corporations used branding as a means of cultivating consumption and building identities in global consumption markets. Branding, at least in media scholarship, has been inextricably tied to the increased studies of globalization and its impact. Much of today's scholarship builds off the works of Klein and Andrew Wernick's Promotional Culture, which 20 years after its publication continues to heavily influence critical scholarship of media industries. But in Blowing Up The Brand, a collection of essays largely from a NYU symposium of the same name, editors Melissa Aronczyk and Devon Powers expand the discourse of branding and what it means for both producers and consumers of culture. No longer confined to cultural and corporate industries to be consumed by masses, branding takes place in almost every nook of global society, as these essays attempt to articulate.