ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a basic social model of brands. It is a model with meaning creation at its center. Brand attitude work emerged just after WWII. Foundational to post–World War II psychology were promises of early attitude theorists that now seem outlandish. For example, psychologists Cooper and Jahoda describe social psychology’s giddy plan to rid the world of racial bigotry once and for all, really. Even the mighty marketer rarely if ever begins tabula rasa. Marketers are themselves products of social production. Tide is manufactured by Procter & Gamble. Procter & Gamble is itself socially formed by various stakeholders, partners, biases, traditions, cultures, social memory, laws, customs, and real and imagined competitors. More often than not, as O’Guinn and Muniz underscore with their Social Construction Model of Brands, a line from a marketing plan to a brand’s meaning in the real world is curved rather than straight.
