ABSTRACT
The present volume on Brands: Interdisciplinary Perspectives recognizes and celebrates the indubitable fact that the practice and study of branding has worked its way into every corner of our society. At the cultural level, brands provide some of the meanings that permeate social customs and the ethos of our times. At the corporate level, brands serve as tools whereby marketdriven organizations manipulate promotional messages to create profits that maximize shareholder equity. At the consumer level, brands contribute cognitive-affective-and-behavioral influences that shape and enhance the fantasies-feelings-and-fun of consumption experiences. And at the critical level, various excesses in our cultural, corporate, and consumptive devotion to brands invite critiques that question the commercialistic, capitalistic, and materialistic nature of our commodified worldviews, free-enterprise economic systems, and self-interested personal lifestyles.
