Critical Perspectives on Brand Management

Brand management is no longer just the business of brand managers. The diffusion of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, together with the growing importance of an everyday culture of publicity, has made brand management a feature of everyday life for a large and growing number of people. People use social media such as Instagram and Facebook to build personal brands in order to gain popularity and fame. Some hope to make money this way, by promoting their own micro-businesses or by attracting commercial sponsorship and transforming their social media pages into venues for bottom-up corporate branding. Self-branding is particularly necessary for the growing mass of people whose careers and livelihoods no longer depend on the organizational structures of industrial modernity. Examples are the expanding range of freelance workers in the knowledge and creative industries, or the many ‘platform labourers’ who make a living (or part of it) by driving for Uber or renting out at Airbnb. For this new ‘precariat’, personal brands have become the key asset to guarantee the kinds of reputation and trust on which success depends. This is true not only for the Northern heartland of modernity but increasingly across the ‘Global South’, as smartphones and internet connectivity, together with global consumer culture, are spreading across the world. Across Asia and Africa, young people in particular invest resources in managing social media in order to build personal brands either for themselves or for the small business by which they hope to gain a livelihood ( Lincoln & Robards, 2015 ). This is particularly relevant for the expanding ‘hipster economy’, composed of food trucks and artisan coffee houses, in which traditional forms of street vending are combined with sophisticated brand management techniques. In short, brand management has become mainstream, perhaps even a default way of relating to one’s self and to others. This shift challenges our established ways of thinking about brands and brand management.