The brand – beyond phenomenology

Citation

(2010), "The brand – beyond phenomenology", Qualitative Market Research, Vol. 13 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/qmr.2010.21613dab.002

The brand – beyond phenomenology

Article Type: Practitioner perspectives From: Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, Volume 13, Issue 4

Marketing professionals are not renowned for their philosophical inclinations. They work in a highly commercial environment which is focussed on practical outcomes. The professionals working in the agencies that provide services for marketing departments are, likewise, very focussed on the bottom line.

It comes as some surprise, therefore, to realise that such practitioners regularly, if somewhat unwittingly, adopt philosophical stances in relation to brands that are actually quite radical in their perspective. This paper will argue that marketing culture, in fact, contains such thinking. This is not because of any inherent philosophical disposition on the part of practitioners. It has emerged simply as a result of the profit driven desire to think about brands in terms that work.

Phenomenology and marketing

Phenomenology is a well recognised body of theory in the Western philosophical tradition. It emerged in the early twentieth century with the writings of Husserl (1940) and its effects have been considerable in the social sciences. As with any philosophical tradition, phenomenology has spawned a variety of offshoots, but a common theme has always been present; it elevates a subjective stance over any claim that we can know the outside world “objectively”.

Phenomenology puts forward the view that we “construct” the world and the resulting outcome is, effectively, what “reality” is to us. The emphasis placed on the role of subjectivity means that, in many ways, this account of human experience could almost be described as “super-subjective”. It heightens the importance we ascribe to the subjective pole of the subjective vs objective divide and effectively collapses the latter into the former. We encounter this approach in social constructivism. The main proponents of this approach have been writers such as Berger and Luckmann (1966, pp. 33-4) and even they admit quite openly that their position is not that philosophical: Our purpose is not to engage in philosophy […]. The phenomenological analysis of everyday life, or rather of the subjective experience of everyday life, refrains from any causal or genetic hypothesis, as well as from assertions about the ontological status of the phenomena analysed.

This constructivist approach is evident in many books and papers written in the academic realms of marketing and market research. Examples are common (Trotman, 2006; Kenyon, 2004) and these phenomenological approaches are often employed at a methodological level – they provide academic researchers with a way of analysing qualitative research data.

In the world of marketing and market research practitioners, one will not find very many mentions of phenomenology, or even of social constructivism, but I would contend that almost all commercial qualitative market researchers are familiar with the key tenets of this thinking. The difference is that such theorising is not expressed in overtly academic terms. Practising qualitative researchers tend to talk more in terms of “understanding the consumer in their own terms” or accepting that “consumer views are reality”. Even at the most practical level, the overriding urge of commercial qualitative researchers is to find ways of empathising with the consumer, sharing their perspectives and understanding how they see their world. This can involve living with them, sharing specific experiences with them or immersing ourselves in the minutiae of their fridges or their weekly shopping baskets.

Thus, although commercial qualitative researchers do not often have any formal background in the theories of phenomenology, its key insights are deeply engrained in commercial qualitative research practice. As one leading commercial qualitative researcher has put it: Meaning is a construction and it is the only reality that matters, in market research at least (Glen, 1996, p. 130).

Beyond phenomenology?

But philosophy can go much further than this constructivist approach. There are far more radical interpretations of human experience. These involve a more fundamental overturning of the subjective/objective dichotomy which phenomenology, for all of its apparent radicalism, still tends to work within. There are philosophies that question the very validity of the twin poles themselves. Whilst constructivist phenomenological positions tend simply to collapse the objective into the subjective and to argue that everything is a “social construction”, these other approaches posit the notion that reality might exist in neither the subjective nor the objective realms and that it might exist between them (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Beyond phenomenology?

This position attacks the notion of subjectivity as much as it attacks the idea of objectivity. This way of thinking is arguably present in the thinking of Husserl, but its roots stretch back much further in the history of philosophy. Because it questions the modern creation of a world neatly divided, in Cartesian style, between the subjective and the objective, it finds parallels in the thinking of Berkeley at the beginning of the eighteenth century and, some commentators would argue, as far back as the writings of Aristotle and Plato. These more ancient philosophers were putting forward a view of reality that is pre-modern and, therefore, pre-Cartesian in orientation.

This more radical way of thinking has relatively few proponents in the academic world of market research theory. Whilst the notion that we “construct” the world frequently finds adherents, it seems far too radical to assert that consumers are dealing with a type of reality that is “transcendental” and which is neither “subjective” nor “objective”. Such a position starts to look like a form of “metaphysics” and seems to have little place in the world of commercial marketing – even within the more academic parts of it.

This not to say that such an interpretation of reality has not got distinguished (and mainly French) supporters in other parts of the academic world. We have, for example, Levi Strauss (1985, p. 118) arguing as follows: Instead of opposing the ideal and the real, abstract and concrete […] one will recognise that the immediate data of perception cannot be reduced to any of these terms but lies betwixt and between: that is, already encoded by the sense organs, as well as the by the brain, in the manner of a text.

And Latour takes a similar position with his theory of “quasi-objects” which occupy the same central ground, in metaphysical terms, as the form of reality shown in Figure 1 above (in particular, see Latour, 1993, the chart on p. 52).

Significantly, both Levi Strauss and Latour are deemed, in academic literature, to be “anti-phenomenologist” in disposition because they refuse to accept the view that we “construct” reality. Levi Strauss and Latour are much closer, in many respects, to the earlier pre-modern positions that we have touched upon above and Latour, for instance, can find much support for his position in the writings of Leibniz. Indeed, the very title of Latour’s masterpiece puts the case most clearly for the links which exist between himself and a pre-modern view – “we have never been modern” simply because modernity has never succeeded in its vain attempt to separate the twin poles of the subjective and the objective.

Beyond phenomenology – branding?

So what of marketing practitioners? It would indeed be surprising, if not extraordinary, to find them adopting this more radical and through-going position. The practical considerations of modern marketing practice would seem, overwhelmingly, to undermine the more metaphysical tendencies of this approach.

However, when we consider day-to-day marketing terminology and the constructs that marketing professionals use, we find that this is precisely what is happening in many commercial marketing departments. For the contemporary notion of the brand captures, this radical position in the familiar idea of the brand concept.

It is true, of course, that many marketing professionals use the term “brand concept” in such a way that it often amounts to little more than an alternative way of talking about the brand itself. As we have already noted, marketers are not philosophers by their very nature. But when we explore the precise usage of the term “brand concept”, we find that it possesses some surprising and intriguing characteristics. In particular, marketers often use the term in such a way that it clearly stretches beyond the purely “mental” – it straddles both aspects of the Cartesian divide – the outer and the inner worlds of the objective and the subjective. For instance, when they talk about a new restaurant “concept” or a new hotel “concept”, they clearly mean the physical structure that consumers can walk into and also the experience itself. The term seems to include both the idea of the new outlet and the physical manifestation of it. This also happens in other non-retail markets. The Renault Scenic was seen as a new concept in car design – it was not just a new car (i.e. a product). Equally, a Müller Corner is a very particular concept in the yogurt market; but despite sounding like a mental construct, we find it sitting on supermarket shelves.

We would all accept that concepts are meant to be purely “mental” constructs, but marketers seem quite willing to talk about them in a manner that nonchalantly traverses the Cartesian divide. Concepts seem to be “real” and marketers, despite all of their commercial hard-headedness, are playing with metaphysics in a way that would please radical modern philosophers such as Latour or, indeed, more ancient ones such as Aristotle. In addition, the effect of this is far reaching in marketing terms. For it is, fundamentally, the cause of the often observed precedence that consumers (and marketers) now give to the concept of the brand over the product itself. Even if the product is still accepted as a key component of the mix and it is viewed as an access point to the brand, it is clear, in many corporations, that the primary concern is the maintenance of the brand itself. The product is now deemed to be of secondary consideration. As Firat and Venkatesh (1993, p. 244) explain:

Contrary to conventional (modernist) beliefs, the post modern consumer appreciates that value is not a property of the product, the thing, but a property of the image; that the image does not represent the product, but that the product represents the image.

So why is this happening? The answer lies in another piece of terminology that is frequently espoused in marketing departments – that of “essence”. Marketers know that the process of building brands is fundamentally about the creation and subsequent maintenance of a brand essence. It is this which creates the “je ne sais quoi” that gives a brand an advantage over competitive offerings (which often deliver very similar products). The brand is the element that is differentiating and enables a manufacturer to charge more for it. In the commercial (and profit driven) world of marketing, this is, of course, called “added value”, but it amounts to an intangible quality that is, in fact, the brand essence. This is the “metaphysical” part of the brand which encourages, and permits, the idea of the “brand concept” that we have noted above.

With the concept of essence, however, we have come full circle. In the pre-modern thought of Plato and Aristotle, the middle ground in Figure 1 was occupied by the concept of “essence”. It was the Cartesian revolution in the seventeenth century that tore this middle ground apart by insisting that all experiences of the outside world must be classified as either “objective” or “subjective” in nature. In the writings of Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology, we find the same demand to reconstruct this middle ground that we saw with Levi Strauss and Latour. He writes, explaining how, in our modern world, we perceive essences all of the time and yet our modern inclination to insist on a division between the “subjective” and the “objective” means that we completely miss this obvious status:

The truth is that everyone sees ideas’, essences’ and sees them, so to speak, continuously; they operate with them in their thinking and they also make judgements about them. It is only that, from their theoretical standpoint, people interpret them away (Husserl, 1940, p. 14).

In the discourse of modern marketing and commercial market research, it is thus possible to see a widespread acceptance and usage of what seem to be quite esoteric and philosophical ideas. Both the ideas of “brand concept” and “brand essence” are examples of this. Such thinking, of course, is not couched in philosophical terms and when professionals use the notion of “brand concept”, they do not realise that they are being as radical as, in fact, they are. This does not mean, however, that this is not what is happening. Underneath the commercial exterior of contemporary marketing, we find radical theory evolving because of the need to explain the ways in which brands work in real life. This is seldom recognised by the practitioners themselves – but it is understood by some outsiders looking at the widespread effects that marketers have created. Let us leave the last word with Klein (2000, p. 21), writing in No Logo about the almost metaphysical qualities of the brand:

The old paradigm had it that all marketing was selling a product. In the new model, however, the product always takes a back seat to the real product, the brand, and the selling of the brand acquired an extra component that can only be described as spiritual. Advertising is about hawking a product. Branding, in its truest and most advanced incarnations, is about corporate transcendence.

Chris Barnham

Chris Barnham Research and Strategy, Kingston Business Centre, Kingston UK

About the author

Chris Barnham runs his own qualitative research consultancy, Chris Barnham research and Strategy, and has done so for the past 14 years. He conducts projects in the UK, Western Europe, North America and the Far East. He began his research career on the client side at Whitbread PLC and then worked in a number of research agencies, including the Strategic Research Group. He read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford and has been researching a part time PHD at London University on the philosophical pre-conditions that led to the seventeenth century emergence of quantitative science. He has published a number of papers on the ways in which pre-modern views on essence can inform modern marketing theory. Chris Barnham can be contacted at: chrisbarnh@aol.com