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| 19 Part One Brand, Culture, Action The titles are revealing: Love Marks; Emotional Branding; Citizen Brand. All are books written in the past several years meant to guide marketers and advertisers on how to navigate the increasingly blurred relationships between advertising, branding, emotion, and politics. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, it became clear that advertising and brand managers were developing new strategies to capture the attention of ever-more-savvy consumers by appealing to affect, emotion, and social responsibility. Indeed, the definition of the contemporary “consumer” does not simply point to what kinds of purchases one might make; more than that, the “consumer” is a political category. And, consumption itself is part of what one is, part of the complex framework that constitutes identity. In the contemporary terrain of global, national, and narrow-scale marketing, brands have begun to assume increasingly complex sets of political and activist functions. Within the multidimensional contexts of branding, marketers are increasingly turning to campaigns that encourage consumers toward highly cathected and deeply emotional relationships to brands, so that products bear what is called, in market-speak, “love marks.” The chapters in this part explore, from different vantage points, the contradictions that characterize the contemporary relationship of consumer culture, the commodity activist, and branding. Neoliberalism and the technological and cultural apparatuses that support and validate this political economy have hastened critical transformations in the interrelations between the consuming subject and political culture. As such, in order to theorize who, and what, the “consumer” is in the current era of neoliberalism and branding, we need different conceptualizations for key terms like “participation,” “activism,” “mainstream,” “authenticity,” “consumer,” and “producer.” Moreover, as our definitions of what constitutes the “political” shift under the impact of “new” media convergence and mobilized forms of cultural production and circulation, we need new analytics for understanding the contemporary activist subject and the ways in which this subject both creates and experiences “social activism.” 20 | Brand, Culture, Action The authors in this part thus ask questions such as: What does it mean to “be” a consumer activist? How do we craft identities within the context of branding and marketing? What are some of the tensions between consumption behavior and political action within these contexts? The chapters do not arrive at the same set of answers for these questions, and indeed engage in provocative debate about what, and who, a “commodity activist” is: Is she a girl who participates in a Dove Soap–sponsored workshop on “self-esteem”? Should our conception of “commodity activist” include media conglomerates like ABC and its efforts to “build community”? How do we situate “green branding” within the context of commodity activism? Indeed, is the “commodity activist” a brand in and of itself? The chapters in this part explore these questions by analyzing a series of examples of contemporary commodity activism. To begin, Alison Hearn theorizes the subject position of the “branded self” in contemporary consumer culture to make the argument that within neoliberal modes of governmentality and the symbolic and discursive logics of flexible accumulation and post-Fordism, self-branding emphasizes the instrumental crafting of a notable self-image. Such branded versions of subjectivity, collapsing and fusing with capitalist processes of production and consumption, Hearn argues, produce a “self” that is always already interpellated as highly individuated, competitive, self-interested, and image-oriented. This is a “self,” in other words, that effectively undermines any claims to community activism and solidarity. Exploring tensions between these modes of hyperpromotionalism and collective affiliation as they emerge on and through the youth websites “Ecorazzi: the latest in green gossip” and “Ecostilleto,” as well as the Disneyowned , green initiative “Friends for Change,” Hearn’s essay probes the consequences of the emergence of the neoliberal branded self for youth culture and community activism, specifically environmentalism. Next, Sarah Banet-Weiser looks at the ways in which contemporary neoliberal capitalism offers a new, market-inspired definition of “self-esteem” for young girls and women through the lens of the Dove Real Beauty campaign . Critics of this campaign frame their concerns within the discourse of hypocrisy; it seems, on the face of it, phony or duplicitous to launch a social activism campaign that targets the beauty industry by using—and thus promoting —Dove beauty products, a key player in the global beauty industry. However, Banet-Weiser argues that within neoliberal capitalism, this kind of strategy makes perfect sense: in a context in which distinctions between “authentic” and “commercial” politics are blurred through the retraction of...

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