CONCLUDING REMARKS
This first slug of the book has attempted to offer a broad, quick spin around a series of issues, histories and phenomena that we think combine to be important in this debate – important in understanding what brands can, and should, do in this increasingly connected and pro-social world.
Specifically, we’ve tried to capture the origins of brands and branding, and in the context of social capital, how they were initially profoundly useful for both the emerging consumer, as they travelled great distances to benefit from rapid industrialisation, and the firms that were offering these opportunities. Brands, we’ve argued, instinctively understood the importance of trying to replicate certain forms of social capital in order to maintain trust and appease the sense of ‘provenance costs’ for the new consumer. Social capital, then, was already emerging as a powerful force in allowing business to sustain itself, with brands aware of the fact that without any form of social capital, they could not exist. Social capital was – and is – oxygen for brands.
However, the combination of rational scientific approaches to consumer behaviour and brand communications, together with emerging hedonic needs as a result of new-found wealth amongst these new consumers, quickly led to consumers being overly taxed and tested in trying to make increasingly complex decisions by these arguably inappropriate criteria.
At the same time, as choice (or competition) exploded, so brands started to ...
