ABSTRACT
This book will claim that the brand is an object. What might this mean? An object, surely, is something that is external, fixed, closed; something solid that can be touched. The brand is none of these things. But the brand satisfies some other common dictionary definitions of objects. It is some-thing ‘to which some feeling or action is directed’; it is an object-ive in that it is the object of ‘a purpose or intention’, or even a whole series of purposes; and it is also ‘a noun or its equivalent acted upon by a transitive verb or by a preposition’. Put somewhat differently, the brand is the outcome of object-ives, it is produced in the tests and trials of object-ivity, and it is, sometimes, a matter of objection. It both is an object of information and objectifies information. But its objectivity also involves images, processes and products, and relations between products. Indeed, the preliminary definition of the brand adopted here is that it is a set of relations between products or services. Perhaps, then, while incorporeal or intangible (not something solid that can be touched), the brand is not immaterial. The suggestion to be developed here is that while the brand is not itself fixed in time or space in terms of presence or absence, it is a platform for the patterning of activity, a mode of organising activities in time and space. It is not simply either here or somewhere else, but rather is some-thing that emerges in parts. It will also be suggested that the brand is not a closed object, but is, rather, open, extending into-or better, implicating-social relations. It is some-thing that is identifiable in its doing, which is why the chapter title asks not just of Nike but of brands more generally, ‘Just do what?’. It is implicated in everyday life, and we aresometimes only just-implicated in it. Finally, it will be argued that the brand is not a matter of certainty, but is rather an object of possibility. These, then, are some of the things that should make the brand an object of interest to sociology.
