Branded Spaces. New Marketing

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Journal of Consumer Culture

DOI: 10.1177/1469540503003001929 2003; 3; 39 Journal of Consumer Culture

Elizabeth Moor Branded Spaces: The scope of 'new marketing'

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39

ARTICLE

Branded SpacesThe scope of ‘new marketing’ ELIZABETH MOORGoldsmiths College, University of London

Abstract. This article comprises a series of critical reflections on some current directionsin marketing,with reference to empirical material from a case study of the promotion ofa series of live music events. In particular, it highlights a key theme in contemporarymarketing: the attempt to approach consumers in an expanded range of everyday spaces.This, in turn, is related to a heightened emphasis on branding,which derives from acomplex of factors including a perceived fragmentation and diversification of mediaaudiences and new ideas about the best ways of structuring and stabilizing markets.Within this scenario, the case study is presented as an example of ‘experientialmarketing’: one of a range of possible strategic choices in the attempt to insinuatemarketing practices more deeply into the lives of consumers. In addition, the case studyshows how these spatial practices may be connected to electronic marketingtechnologies, such as databases, consumer websites and ‘viral marketing’ campaigns, in anattempt to extend the scope of emotional or affective bonds forged between consumersand brands.The article concludes by arguing that whilst such strategies may not alwayssucceed in their stated aims, their emergence should nonetheless be taken seriously as animportant development in the mediation of production and consumption.

Key wordsaffect ● branding ● experience ● experiential economy ● experiential marketing ●

material culture

INTRODUCTIONSociological and cultural studies of the mediation of production and con-sumption have usually taken the realm of ‘advertising’ as their empirical

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object, focusing either on advertising texts, or the advertising industry itself.Although most of these studies acknowledge the existence of a broadermarketing environment that includes commercial sponsorship, event-basedmarketing, public relations and sales promotion as well as advertising, these‘other’ marketing functions have remained largely unexplored. One of thepremises of this article is that, for a number of specific socio-economic andcultural reasons, such functions have recently taken on a renewed signifi-cance,1 and that this new ‘marketing mix’ (which is always also a spatial mix)can be tracked in industry journals, business publications, interviews withmarketing professionals and in instances of actual marketing practice. Inaddition, although newer versions of the ‘marketing mix’ often contain very‘old’ techniques, such as in-store displays, event-based marketing and spon-sorship, such techniques are currently theorized less as a cost-effectivealternative to advertising for increasing sales in the short term (although thisis still sometimes important), but more as a set of uniquely advantageousstrategies in building longer-term relationships between consumers andbrands. My aim here, then, is both to call for greater attention to below-the-line marketing strategies of all kinds,2 and also to show what is dis-tinctive about current attempts to approach consumers in an expandedrange of everyday spaces,which in turn are often organized around the pro-motion of brands rather than specific products or services.

To do this, I employ two main research strategies: readings of market-ing texts and conversations with professionals working in branding andadvertising. These derive primarily, but in neither case exclusively, from acase study in which a number of non-advertising marketing techniqueswere deliberately employed. The first part of this article describes the casestudy (the development of a series of music-based promotional events forGuinness) in more detail, and locates it in relation to a range of contem-porary themes in British and American marketing. It draws attention tosome of the underlying factors shaping the development of such ‘experi-ential marketing’ and branding activities, and introduces branding as a set ofstrategies that are primarily concerned with the shaping of markets, butwhich in practice often work through an attempt to shape the spaces ofmarketing and promotion in a more expanded and systematized way thanis the case in conventional media advertising.

In the next two sections, I consider the role of various spatial andmaterial properties in the promotional events, arguing that both the func-tion and temporality of certain objects shift in relation to their explicit pro-duction as branded memorabilia.

I then turn to a consideration of web-based promotion and data

Journal of Consumer Culture 3(1)

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collection to show how Guinness attempts to hold the disparate times andspaces of its promotional events together by creating a ‘space of proximity’for its consumers. Here I problematize some of the more ambitious aspectsof the strategy, using consumer feedback to demonstrate how consumersuse the marketing device for their own ends, and may in fact remain rela-tively ‘unknowable’ despite the large amounts of information that theiractivities generate. Finally, I consider the specific role of music in event-based marketing, and describe some of the possible ‘futures’ and problemsfor marketing strategies such as these.

The case study material that structures this article concerns thedevelopment of a music-based ‘sister brand’ for Guinness by the marketingdepartment of Guinness Ireland in collaboration with the music depart-ment of a (London-based) international marketing agency, KLP EuroRSCG.3 Although this project is unusual in some respects (and the decisionto pursue it at this particular time and place relates to a complex range offactors, many of which cannot be explored here), it is also, as I show,illustrative of a broader range of tendencies in marketing, and here I beginto unpack some of the conditions under which these and other ‘spatial’strategies may be chosen from a range of possible marketing options. Itshould also be noted at this stage that my concern in this article is not toassess the ‘effectiveness’ of the campaign (and indeed the difficulty ofmeasuring ‘effects’, either commercially or critically, will be touched uponin due course), but rather to think it through as an instance of strategy andpractice within a particular context. Whilst it is too early to make strongassertions about the longer-term significance or implications of suchstrategies for contemporary cultural–economic relations, it should beremembered that marketing strategies of all kinds have a considerablecapacity for travel, through such vehicles as the international circulation ofboth texts and practitioners, and through the international market ambitionsof clients themselves.4

The new brand – Witnness – was developed as a marketing strategy forengaging with 18–24-year-old Irish consumers who, unlike their counter-parts in Britain, were constituting an ever-decreasing proportion of Guinnessdrinkers in Ireland. Guinness Ireland decided (for reasons explored later)that they wanted to develop a marketing strategy based around music, andso approached a specialist music marketing company (KLP Euro RSCG),who responded to the brief by suggesting that Guinness should, over aperiod of three years, host a summer music festival and a series of musicevents. These events, it was argued, should not be presented under theGuinness name (even though they were being used to promote Guinness),

Moor / Branded spaces

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but should have a separate brand identity, which could metonymically rep-resent the Guinness brand, whilst simultaneously losing – so it was hoped– its (negative) product-specific connotations. Moreover, as a brand ratherthan specific product or event, Witnness would retain the option ofdeveloping its activities in new directions at a later stage.

Local strategic marketing decisions such as these are more amenable tocritical analysis when seen from the perspective of certain current market-ing themes and preoccupations. For example, the choice of event-basedmarketing (as opposed, say, to an advertising campaign targeted at youngpeople) reveals something about Guinness and KLP’s understanding of thecontext in which they were operating, and indeed the context in whichtheir target market ‘operates’. Despite the vast number of academic andother critiques of advertising ‘effects’, advertisers themselves have come tosee conventional television and press advertising as a fairly unpredictablemarketing tool, as indeed have many of their clients (see Nixon, 2002).There are a range of reasons for this, including uncertainty about whataudiences actually do with advertisements, perceived consumer cynicismabout advertising, and the fragmentation of audiences that results frommedia pluralization. These problems were compounded by the recession ofthe early 1990s, which forced potential advertising clients to think morecarefully about how to spend their marketing budgets, and in many casesto opt for cheaper ‘below-the-line’ options.

This, in turn, was occurring at a time when advertising agencies werebeginning to face competition from a range of other symbolic inter-mediaries, including management consultants and ‘media independents’ (seeNixon, 2002) but, most importantly for my purposes here, branding con-sultants. This latter group constitute a significant rival to advertisingagencies, since what they purport to offer is a total communications package(rather than simply the making and placing of adverts), based on a blend ofbusiness strategy, design expertise and marketing advice, that allows them tointervene in the brand across a much broader range of sites. As MichelleSutton, a freelance branding consultant, told me, branding consultancies,unlike advertising agencies, are able to ‘think about the brand wherever it is’(emphasis added). There is virtually unlimited scope to such a project, sinceall spaces in which the brand appears (from company uniforms and retaildesign to actual objects-in-use) become either potential communicationsmedia or materializations of strategic business and design strategy, or both.

Moreover, for many marketing professionals, consumer experience itselfis increasingly both the object and the medium of brand activity. Thecombination of uncertainty about what consumers do with adverts and an


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expanding range of media channels has led marketing theorists and pro-fessionals to seek new ways of engaging with consumers which place amuch greater emphasis on ‘getting up close and personal’ (see Grant, 1999)and which, correlatively, expand the spaces of marketing activity. There isnow, for example, a substantial commercial literature dedicated to theoriz-ing a hypothetical ‘experience economy’ (see Pine and Gilmore, 1999;Schmitt, 1999) in which commercial competitiveness is argued to emergefrom the addition of a marketing (or ‘experiential’) component at all levelsof a company’s activity. This includes a ‘powering-up’ of the spatial andexperiential dimensions of marketing (hence the move towards event-basedcampaigns like Witnness, and examples such as Nike fun-runs, Playstationclub nights and art events in Prada stores), but also involves a new empha-sis on the internal culture of organizations, and on the ‘experientialization’of both retail (e.g. Niketown) and service industries (e.g. Hard Rock Café).Implicit in all this is the perception of a problematic space of uncertaintyat the heart of the relationship between producers and consumers, deriv-ing, perhaps, from the temporal and spatial separation of the production andconsumption of adverts.

What experiential marketing seeks to do, in response, is to recast thisspace as a space of (real time) marketing. Of course, such ‘live’ strategieshave characterized a large part of the history of marketing, particularly intimes and places where televisual marketing was either unsuitable, un-affordable or impossible. That such strategies are now being elaboratedaround brands and markets in which such restrictions do not apply (or notto the same extent) reflects, I think, a systematic re-consideration of whatsuch strategies might contribute to the marketing mix in themselves.

Finally, a point that also relates to the Witnness campaign, is that suchshifts of emphasis need to be understood in the context of the renewedsignificance of branding across all areas of marketing activity. One of themost important changes in the function of branding between the begin-ning of the 20th century and the current time is that, where it was onceintended to mark a relationship between producer and products to guaran-tee certain levels of quality to the consumer, it increasingly functions as themark of a relationship between products (see Lury, 2002). As such, it is notso much advertising as branding – ‘the forging of links of image and per-ception between a range of products’ (Lury, 1993: 87) – that forms the basisfor launching new products, and therefore for capturing markets. AlthoughWitnness is, in the long term, essentially a marketing device for expandingthe market for a particular product (Guinness) in a particular place (Ireland),it is also a brand, and as such may facilitate ‘a set of possible or legitimate


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transformations’ (Lury, 2002: 318). There are, in fact, a number of contin-gent factors that may prevent such a transformation occurring (which Iexplore in the final section), but there are nonetheless very good reasonswhy Guinness, and its parent company Diageo, should be interested indeveloping a brand with the capacity to transform itself into a provider ofmusic or other events. As Shilen Patel (2001),marketing manager for Guin-ness Ireland at the time of these events, explained:

Diageo will effectively in about a year to two years’ time be adrinks company, a big drinks company. But they are quicklyrealizing that actually you can’t think of drinks as just drinks,you need to think of drinks as part of leisure, and you need tobe thinking about how drinks compete with cinema, with goingout, with eating, with all sorts of other stuff.

This approach is consistent with the commercial literature on brand-ing, which argues that the strongest brands (e.g. Virgin) are increasinglythose built around ‘values and beliefs’ rather than product-specific qualities,because such affective connections and connotations can be made useful inthe launching of products or services in areas quite different from theiroriginal or main markets (see Hart and Murphy, 1998). This in turn relatesto a point made by Slater (2002), that ‘marketing strategy is not – in thefirst instance – a matter of competition within market structures; rather it isa matter of competition over the structure of markets’ (p. 68).

Witnness, then, is illustrative of a wider commercial tendency towardsthe development of brands with the capacity to transform and controlmarkets and competition. It is, at the same time, an example of an ‘experi-ential’ brand – not just (or even) a sign of quality, but rather an attempt tobecome ‘a rich source of sensory, affective, and cognitive associations thatresult in memorable . . . brand experiences’ (Schmitt, 1999: 21). In the nexttwo sections, I outline some of the spatial and material strategies employedby Witnness in its attempt to provide such sensual and memorable brandexperiences.

COMMERCIAL COMMUNICATIONSIn the first year of its existence, a great deal of effort was put into devisingnon-traditional ways of marketing Witnness to consumers. The perceptionof consumer cynicism about advertising (assumed to be particularly markedamong the target market of young consumers) described earlier led, in thiscase, to a considerably reduced role for traditional media advertising and amuch greater emphasis on ‘ambient’ communications, such as graffiti and


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street stunts. These ‘stunts’ (or mini events) included actors dressed as‘escaped convicts’ distributing microfilm details of the festival in major citiesand towns, the chalking of graffiti on pavements and cordoning off areas oftown centres with Witnness tape. According to one of the project man-agers, it was hoped that ‘because they [consumers] found out somethingabout the plans in their own environment’, they would perceive the eventas ‘relevant to them’ (Musselbrook, 2000). Thus Witnness staff (partiallyrecruited from student unions in Ireland) were encouraged to spreadrumours and ask questions about Witnness in internet chat rooms, and totalk about Witnness (‘loudly so people overhear’, ‘let something slip intoconversation’) in bars and clubs where it was hoped that ‘credible con-sumers’ (a term loaded with connotations of cultural capital) would con-gregate. Furthermore, it was intended that those consumers who had been‘touched’ by the brand’s marketing would pass on information aboutWitnness to their friends and members of their social networks. As ShilenPatel (2001) told me:

You give someone a piece of information and . . . let the personyou’ve already told tell other people. And if you give them theright piece of information that has meaning for them, they willtell 10 other people.

The careful spatial planning and live, event-based nature of most of thepromotion of Witnness should, I think, be viewed as a strategy to makeWitnness more experiential and therefore more memorable, but it also indi-cates a shift in both the perception and practice of what constitutes amarketing ‘space’. Ambient marketing seeks to achieve a much more prox-imal relationship between consumer bodies and brands, and, as theorists ofthe ‘experience economy’put it,‘the more effectively an experience engagesthe senses, the more memorable it will be’ (Pine and Gilmore, 1999: 59).Such invocations can, in turn, be related to a much broader set of changesthat I have outlined earlier. The persistent uncertainty about what con-sumers actually do with advertisements, combined with the pluralization ofmedia, has led to a much greater emphasis within advertising on carefulmedia planning and buying (see Lash and Urry, 1994; Nixon, 2002) but alsoa tendency among certain figures within advertising towards a more radicalconceptualization of ‘media’ itself. As Adam Lury (2001), a former direc-tor of advertising agency HHCL, told me, ‘everything is unpaid media ifyou want to use it in that kind of way’. Insights such as these have led tothe development of ‘ambient advertising’, a close relative of experientialmarketing, in which ‘adverts’ are placed in everyday spaces rather than


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conventional advertising media. Thus, although proponents of the ‘experi-ence economy’ tend to rationalize their emphasis on providing ‘experiences’in terms of a particular understanding of consumers (e.g. that consumers now‘need’ more experiences because they take service for granted), from acritical point of view it is more useful to see it as emerging from new under-standings (and new structures) of media. In the Witnness campaign, then,the use of micro-media (flyers, microfilm, branded tape) and ‘public space’can be understood as an instance of both experiential marketing and areconceptualized version of marketing ‘media’ derived from branding.Experiential marketing, then, is one of a number of ways in whichmarketers are currently exploring what might count as marketing mediaand, through this, what kinds of spaces they might be able to build aroundtheir brands.

Of course, such spatial and experiential interventions must be carefullyplanned to ensure that the ‘right’ people (the ‘credible consumers’ referredto earlier) get the right kind of experience. This in turn means knowingwhere to find them. Here the spatial knowledge (which is intimately boundup with social and symbolic capital) of those involved in the planning andimplementation of the marketing strategy becomes central.These actors areby no means representative of Irish youth (not all of them were Irish, andmany did not fall in the target age range), but this does not – in the eyes oftheir clients, at least – diminish their value (or capacity to add value) to theproject. Indeed, what I want to suggest is that the implied ‘credible con-sumer’ of the marketing plan emerges, in part at least, as a reflection of thelived experience of its makers. Although the client (Guinness) had con-ducted extensive research among its target market to find out, for example,where they prefer to spend their free time,or why they do not like Guinness,it was the role of the marketing agency to provide ‘expertise’ about thechoice of music, venues and ‘key urban sites’ for promotion. In this respect,the ability of such a campaign to attract ‘credible’ consumers depends almostsolely upon the perceived credibility of the marketing agency. As ShilenPatel told me:

What KLP have is a very special expertise in understandingenough about marketing and consumers to know what peoplewant from brands and music experiences, and . . . enoughcredibility with artists and artists’ management. (emphasis added)

The decisions to place flyers in certain record shops, to put Witnnessgraffiti on walls around Dublin, and to host promotional events withLondon-based DJs like Talvin Singh do not, then, necessarily reflect


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knowledge about consumers gained from market research, but rather reflectthe tastes and (consumer) culture of specialist producers,most of whom werewhite, university educated, and living and working in London (althoughsome of the Guinness staff were based in Dublin). These tastes are assumed– correctly or incorrectly – to be congruent with those of a (partly imagin-ary) ‘credible consumer’ from Dublin.There is, in fact, an implicit attempt totransmit meanings and (brand) values from the ‘experts’ (KLP, based inLondon) to the ‘credible consumers’ (a particular,but unspecified, fraction ofIrish youth) to a much broader ‘target market’ (all Irish youth).

BRANDING THE EXPERIENCEPromotion of the Witnness brand does not stop once the ‘event’ starts.Indeed the significance of branding, as opposed to advertising, is preciselythat the distinction between products and their representations in advertis-ing fades. As Celia Lury (2000) has argued, ‘the brand is a multiply medi-ated set of referrals between products, in which one product refers toanother – through a set of highly charged, intensive associations – across adiscontinuous time and space’ (p. 318). From this perspective, the ostensiblemoment of consumption can in fact be considered as just one of apotentially endless series of experiences with a brand, which, on eachoccasion, refer both backwards and forwards, in time as well as space. In thissection, I develop a more speculative analysis based upon the official visualdocumentation of the Witnness events5 in order to show some of the waysin which spectacular marketing ‘events’ like Witnness attempt to achievetheir territorial ambitions of forging durable affective connections betweenconsumer and brand across time and space.

First, however, I want to draw attention to the fact that events such asthese – as instances of the brand – are also learning experiences for theircreators. Many of the activities I am about to describe – and the spatial andobject use upon which they heavily depend – were not (and perhaps nevercould be) explicitly theorized in the planning of the festival. These ‘unin-tended consequences’ do, however, have further consequences of their ownand, insofar as they are theorized and elaborated on after the event, maycontribute to the development of the brand over time. Indeed this may beone of the ways in which new practices, and eventually new paradigms,emerge in marketing. Many marketing professionals describe their work as‘creative’ and, even more frequently, as ‘intuitive’. They cannot alwaysdescribe what they are doing, or indeed why they are doing it, but they dosee themselves as learning from their practices, including their mistakes. AsAdam Lury told me:


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[Some companies] will be intuitive exponents of it, becausethey’re learning by doing . . . I think that branding . . . isfundamentally a creative act, and therefore there are someexamples of people who have done it almost accidentally . . .and those people very often aren’t going to analyse it orarticulate it very well because they live it and do it . . . that’sbecause it is a making thing. It doesn’t sit very well with analysis. . . it’s a very difficult process for analysis to understand, if yousee what I mean, in the sense that it’s a bit like analysing anartist’s work.

None of this is to deny the substantial and prolonged rational planningthat goes into the making of such events. Rather it is simply to note thatsuch events are also partly ‘intuitive’ (i.e. not consciously or explicitlyformulated), and often laden with ‘accidents’ and unintended consequences,which may nonetheless have effects on future practices as they are re-thought and analysed in retrospect, and perhaps redeployed in other con-texts. In this respect, my own speculative analysis of the use of objects andartefacts at the Witnness festival is less wilful than it may appear, given thatsuch practices are, as I show, entirely consistent with current trends inmarketing and, as I have indicated, being made available for use in othernational markets.

Much of the photographic and video footage of the festival shows con-sumers wearing Witnness sun hats, lying under Witnness umbrellas, relax-ing in inflatable Witnness chairs, carrying or drinking from Witnness cups.Elsewhere, consumers can be seen making impromptu drinks containers byattaching the cups to their hats, making shawls from Witnness materialdesigned to cover tables in the bar, and decorating their heads, arms andfaces with Witnness stickers. Videos of the warm-up events for the festival6

show DJs wearing Witnness key chains around their necks and a large Guin-ness umbrella in the dancing crowd, moving around as it is incorporatedinto someone’s dance routine. Given that the producers of Witnness werekeen to avoid too much ‘obvious’ on-site branding (Musselbrook, 2000) inorder to distinguish their event from already existing forms of commercialsponsorship, this visual documentation may be taken to indicate that abodily and tactile engagement with the Witnness brand is considered –albeit in an untheorized, intuitive way – to be a commercially useful outcomeof Witnness events. Again, this would be consistent with contemporarymarketing’s emphasis on getting ‘up close and personal’ (see earlier).Writingabout Gap Khakis advertising, John Grant (1999) says:


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Communication is not through words and famous people, butthrough the exuberance of music, movement and dance.Managing to convey how something would feel if youskateboarded or jived it – basically talking directly to people’sbodies. (p. 28)

Nigel Thrift (1997) has noted how an ‘embodied affective dialogicalpractice’ (p. 128) such as dance can be understood both as a form of spon-taneous play, but also as a practice that may be interwoven with commerce,or subverted by ‘powerful networks’ for their own ends. This subversion isprecisely what Guinness was trying to achieve by using music as a market-ing strategy, as I show in the final section of this article. However, it is notat all clear that they knew exactly how they could achieve this before theevent. What I want to suggest here is that it is in the interplay betweenbranded objects and consumer bodies (both of which have a relativelyopen-ended relationship with the ‘outside’) that the Witnness ‘space’ maybe embodied and made portable, perhaps inadvertently fulfilling one of thekey marketing aims: ‘to ensure that the Witnness concept spreads muchfurther than those who attend the festival’ (Musselbrook, 2000). This canbe understood better if the branded artefacts7 are considered as a form ofmemorabilia. Susan Stewart (1993) has noted the capacity of souvenirs andmementoes of various kinds to ‘domesticate’ experience and to make itportable, facilitating the movement of bodies and objects from one contextto another by miniaturizing the original site (through metonymy) andincorporating it within the individual life-narrative. Similarly, in temporalterms the souvenir ‘moves history into private time’ (p. 138). Notwith-standing the fact that this was not theorized in the planning stages of thefestival, it is no coincidence that so many of the artefacts above were pro-vided as free gifts for consumers attending the festival (T-shirts, stickers, hats,cups); their domestication and extension into a multiplicity of other spaceswill carry the brand experience beyond the ‘event’ and into everyday life(including, potentially, the lives of those who did not attend). Moreover,although this strategy (insofar as it is a strategy at all) may be read as the re-emergence of an old marketing technique of sales promotion (the freesample), it takes on a different emphasis when understood in terms ofbranding. Unlike the free sample, which is functionally the same as theproduct it promotes, this is about the promotion of the brand, and as suchimplies a subtle but important difference in the relationship betweenelements of a series (as I have indicated earlier in the discussion of brand-ing and new products). Consumers were not given T-shirts, stickers and key


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chains so that they could try them out and make repeated purchases; thesefree gifts are promotional in a different sense – they promote a remember-ing of the event and, more specifically, of the brand. This emphasis onmemorabilia is, again, consistent with an experiential approach to market-ing, in which the aim of mementoes is not just to promote individualremembrance, but also ‘to “socialize” the experience, to transmit parts of itto others’ (Giussani, quoted in Pine and Gilmore, 1999: 57).

This ‘socialization’ of experience and memory is also, I think, a spatial-ization. One of the key marketing aims for Witnness was, according to oneof the project managers, that in every instance (every event) consumersshould either feel ‘I was there!’ or ‘I wish I was there!’ (Musselbrook, 2000:emphasis added). Witnness artefacts are interesting, then, because of whattheir movement might achieve in terms of a reconstitution of the brand inanother context. Thus, although the context of origin for an object like theWitnness sun hat would appear to be highly specific (the festival), once itpasses beyond this point the only trace of this specificity is the Witnnesslogo itself, and because the brand exists not only at the festival, but alsoappears periodically in various music venues around Ireland, the brand orlogo has an ongoing capacity to invoke a whole network of Witnness timesand places, and indeed to link these with the private narratives of the con-sumer. As I suggest later, this capacity is augmented through its connectionwith music, perhaps the most portable and simultaneously the most affect-laden of all cultural products. In the next section, however, I show howWitnness’s attempt to further extend its brand by capitalizing upon con-sumer feedback and the use of ‘viral communication’highlights some of theambiguities associated with experiential marketing and the expanded spacesof branding.

EXTENDING THE BRANDWitnness made use of its website at an early stage in order to extend con-sumers’ experience of the festival and provide them with memories of theirown participation in it. It was also used to provide information about bothprevious and subsequent Witnness events, and as an additional form of‘experiential’ marketing. After the festival, consumers could use the websiteto look at photos taken at the festival (and indeed were invited to do so bye-mail) and send them to friends in the form of an ‘e-card’. This kind ofmarketing, in which consumers are invited to both have memories and toshare them with others, is possible precisely because of the large databaseof consumers now established as a result of ‘data capture’ at the festival andthrough other means. The website also contains a series of pages entitled


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‘Rant And Rave’, in which those visiting the site are invited to post mes-sages about ‘whatever you think about Witnness or life in general’. This isclearly intended to provide cheap,‘qualitative’ feedback that can be used byWitnness in the future, but is also a familiar ‘new marketing’ strategy, inwhich marketers are encouraged to ‘create communities of interest’ arounda brand (see Grant, 1999). From a marketing point of view, the creation of(online) ‘communities’ is useful because it is assumed to make a brand more‘valuable’ to consumers (and therefore harder to ‘give up’) and because it ischeaper to provide one’s own medium than to pay to use someone else’s.In addition, it allows a greater proportion of marketing communication tobe undertaken by consumers themselves. As Shilen Patel (2001) told me:

New media is just like a fantastic tool. It’s also, for me, perfectbecause it allows three-way communication for the first timeever. And I think brands need to think about three-waycommunication . . . one thing that brands have missed is thefact that actually they can communicate through consumer-to-consumer communication.

Again, it is cheaper to use consumer-to-consumer communication as amedium than to pay to use ‘official’ advertising media. At the same time(and perhaps more importantly) this strategy is viewed by marketers as away of circumventing some of the problems that arise in relation to con-sumer cynicism:

Consumers tend to trust people that are close to them, ratherthan people who are different. There’s a great piece of researchdone by the Henley Centre . . . and I think it was eighty-twopercent of people said they trust information that their partnergives them [whereas] fourteen percent said they trustinformation that’s given to them through an advert. (Patel, 2001)

From a sociological point of view, this kind of strategy demonstrateshow internet technologies potentially enhance the capacity of brands tolearn both about themselves and their consumers in an ongoing fashion,and to integrate such consumer feedback into a process of ‘brand becom-ing’. It also suggests that recent marketing strategies explicitly attempt tobring the work of consumption and the work of production (or at leastmediation) into ever closer proximity. In this respect, consumers’ engage-ment with both the Witnness website and the material culture of the festivalmight be considered in terms of what Hardt and Negri (2000: 292) call‘affective labour’; that is, work that is corporeal, somatic, concerned with


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‘the creation and manipulation of affect’ and productive of social networksand forms of community. The significance of this kind of work is that itsforms of co-operation and interaction are immanent to human activity andtherefore do not have to be imposed or activated by capital. However,because affective labour is usually only considered as a function of ‘pro-duction’, it becomes difficult to posit its ‘effects’ in terms other than ‘thereal subsumption of society under capital’ (p. 365).This is problematic, sincethe ‘effects’ of affect must always be actualized or made sense of ‘locally’ (seeMassumi, 1996).

If, on the other hand, we consider affective labour in terms of the pro-ductive aspects of consumption then we may find that the ‘labour’ involvedmay be directed in any number of ways which, whilst not necessarily chal-lenging an existing political economy, are quite adept at evading it. WhilstI do not want to discuss consumer responses in any great detail here, a selec-tion of postings from the website provide some indication of the sheervariety of concerns that are ‘worked’ upon under the auspices of this com-mercial device:

Last year was cool! Especially The Undertones. One day for mywife . . . one day for me! Cos we were told no kids! this year weshould have a creche facility . . . we’d even help run it!! Greatline up . . . Stereo MC’s and Fun lovin’ Criminals will rock dahouse!! Red Hot Chillis would be cool! Free tickets for a fewhours running the creche?????

I know this isn’t the place or time, but I want to express mydisgust with Ticketmaster. They won’t sell camping tickets toanyone within 50 miles of Fairyhouse [the venue]. I live in oneof the most marginalised rural communities in the country,without access to a credit card, and what am I to do? We haveno bus service. All I can do is sleep rough and hope for the best.You could learn a lot from Reading or Glastonbury.

I don’t think this year’s line-up is any where near as good anddiverse as last year’s, that’s not to say I’m not looking forward toit but in my own little fantasy world the following would be afew of many to make up my ideal 2 Day festival: Leftfield,Faithless, Les Rhythmes Digitales, Massive Attack, Archive, IanPooley, Groove Armada, Dimitri from Paris, Daft Punk (andthat’s just the dance tent). Throw in Coldplay, RHCP, Roni Size,KRS 1, Metallica, Beastie Boys and FLC, ah you get the idea . . .


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So there’s no possible chance of meeting Kelly Jones, GrantNicholas or Cerys Matthews? How dare u deflate me like that!!I ordered my tickets the first day they came out and have beenlooking forward to this since xmas!!! plus I had to take thecrappest job ever to finance it all!!!

At the time of writing, there were approximately 250 postings on thewebsite and, whilst these were mostly related to music (the festival, othergigs in Ireland, requests for information about bands, discussions of newalbums), they also included discussions of the World Cup, conversationsabout study and careers, and a range of other concerns (such as those justquoted) that are difficult to describe, let alone categorize. Whilst this pro-vides Witnness with an enormous amount of information about its con-sumers, these consumer ‘fragments’ may, at the same time, create as manyproblems as they solve. On the one hand, there is simply too much infor-mation – in order to ‘process’ some pieces of information about consumers,it would be necessary to exclude any number of others, such that someinformation can never be (or can escape being) re-contextualized as ‘knowl-edge’. On the other hand, this type of information simultaneously providesboth too much and too little context, and in translating this contextualinformation from one site to another it may be difficult, as MarilynStrathern (1995) has observed, to preserve the sense of scale – the differ-ence between what applies under narrowly defined definitions and whatapplies under general ones. Thus although the Witnness website attemptsto provide a point of connection between disparate events (and consumers)by bringing them into a flattened space of proximity (the screen), and assuch potentially allows the brand (and consumer) to move back and forthin time, this spatial and temporal flattening means that the ‘real’ consumer(and their ‘real’ context) is endlessly deferred. Rather than seeing the workof marketing as an example of the subsumption of society under capital, itmay be more accurate to describe it as the attempt to co-create diffuse andlargely immaterial affective territories, which may or may not becomeexchange-value,8 and which may be more or less successful in mappingconsumer space.

MAKING A MUSICAL SPACEI want to conclude with some reflections on the specific role of music inthe creation of Witnness as a set of branded events and experiences, andon why music may be a particularly suitable activity for branding. Guinnessexplicitly focused its youth marketing strategy on music because it


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presumed that music was an arena of cultural life in which all young con-sumers would be interested. It was thought that ‘everyone has some sort oftouching of experience with music’ (Patel,2000) and,perhaps more import-antly, that these experiences were not just ‘about’ music, but also linked toother ‘youth’ concerns with friendships, sexual relationships and drugs. Inthis way, music would provide a means of connecting with a much broaderrange of sentiments or experiences that were assumed to matter to the targetaudience, without having to refer to these explicitly. This interest in values,beliefs, feelings and sentiments is, as I have shown, characteristic of spatialand experiential marketing strategies.

How, then, might the musical experience affect consumers, and to whatextent is Witnness constitutive of this experience for them? In an articleabout the use of music in film, Simon Frith (1988) provides some cluesabout the links between public listening and private feeling when he arguesthat ‘one of the central uses of popular music in this century [is] to concealthe furtive pleasure of indulging in private fantasies in public places.’ Hegoes on to say, in reference to the use of music at the end of films, that‘theme songs often seem to have a built-in sense of sadness or nostalgia: thefilm is over, we have to withdraw from its experience, get “back to reality”’(pp. 129–30, original emphasis). Whatever the particular place of listeningto music, it is suggested, the experience of listening is also one of creatinga musical space – a space of ‘private fantasies’ and the imagination – and thisspace has a complex relation to ‘reality’. Outside of the cinema, music hasa more literally proximate relation to ‘the everyday’, insofar as we can listento music whilst performing mundane tasks (the radio in the kitchen) ortravelling from place to place (the walkman, the car stereo). Even here,however, the addition of music to the mundane can move us beyond thehere-and-now into a space of private fantasy or nostalgia; like the branditself, it can move us backwards or forwards in time,co-ordinating the activi-ties of the present with those of an imagined past or future.

The complexity of this relation between now/here and then/there hasbeen theorized in explicitly musical terms by Deleuze and Guattari (1988),for whom music is simultaneously the most ‘territorializing’ and the most‘deterritorializing’ of forces.The musical refrain is territorial, since it createsa ‘milieu’ through ‘periodic repetition’, but the effect of this repetition isultimately ‘to produce a difference by which the milieu passes into anothermilieu’ (p. 314). That is, although the musical ‘territory’ may be consoli-dated and take on ‘consistency’ through the development of ‘motifs andcounterpoints’, and this may have the effect of ‘reorganizing functions andgathering forces’, these forces may in turn be gathered in order to go beyond


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the milieu, to move into, or to create, another space. In a similar vein,Grossberg (1997) has argued that music locates us in the world by con-structing ‘the rhythms of our stopping and going’ (p. 96). This providespeople with temporary moments of stability to engage in ‘whatever activi-ties are necessary’, but also the ability to then move on in ways that werenot possible before. This simultaneous capacity of music to provide a safeplace and a ‘line of flight’ to somewhere else is what makes life ‘navigableand hence, liveable’ (p. 97).

I have argued in this article that it is precisely at this level of the attemptto create new affective spaces that events like Witnness may be argued tohave ‘effects’. The brand provides a musical space (and indeed a place)outside of the rhythms of ‘everyday life’, where consumers are free to play,to ‘gather forces’ and to create new ‘lines of flight’ which reconfigure therhythms of their own ‘everyday life’. However, the ‘power of music’ shouldnot, as Grossberg (1997) himself suggests, be understood only as a power‘in itself ’, but rather is significant precisely because of its dispersal amongother, perhaps more important, ‘mattering maps’ – such as sexuality, thefamily, and so on. The organizers of Witnness intuitively recognize thisrelational aspect of music; their involvement with music is premised on itsconnectedness to other domains of affective investment, and their own risky‘investment’ is that they may be able to brand this movement in and out ofthe everyday lives of consumers. Such an investment is risky because thereis no particular reason why the power of a musical experience shouldremain connected to the brand in the lives of consumers once they haveleft the musical space, or even when they are in it. However,Witnness does,of course, have strategies in place to try to manage this problem. In the firstinstance, by its very positioning of itself as an ‘experience’,Witnness invitespeople to memorialize it as an ‘event’, as something out of the ordinary.Taking photographs of oneself and one’s friends, for example, or takinghome mementoes of various kinds, would be entirely consistent with suchan event, particularly given that it lasts two days and is therefore also some-thing like a ‘holiday’ (in this respect, the consumer quoted earlier, who saysshe has been looking forward to the festival since Christmas, is especiallyinteresting). Various ‘memorial artefacts’ were provided both as free giftsand as commodities at the festival, and these may exist as a lingeringpresence in the lives of consumers. In fact, the music performed at thefestival might itself be considered as a memorial artefact, since the livemusical performance is a ‘one off ’, or unique event, that is intended to bememorable in relation to its more mundane repetitions elsewhere (the carstereo, the bedroom, the student union, etc.). In both its memorability and


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its portability, then, music is intended to function as a vehicle for the trans-lation of a ‘branded experience’ from one context to another.

Beyond music, however, Witnness seeks to make itself memorablethrough various techniques of ‘anticipation’ (Lury, 1993). A central tech-nique here is market research, which seeks to know as much as possibleabout the lifestyles, priorities and ‘mattering maps’ of consumers, andindeed about the whole process of growing up, in order to be better ableto predict the limits and possibilities for inserting the brand into these.However, such knowledge is also facilitated by the fact that so many ofthe people working on the Witnness project (and indeed in the culturalindustries more generally) are of a similar age to that of the target audi-ence, and are themselves consumers as well as ‘producers’ of musical events(see McRobbie, 1999, for a consideration of ‘producer–consumers’ in thecultural industries, and Miller, 1997, for a discussion of this phenomenonspecifically within the advertising industry). Their insights were clearlyuseful in the marketing of Witnness to both consumers and the media,not least in their ability to draw upon their own sense of what constitutesa meaningful or exciting experience with music. However, this symbolicpower to define experience is not without its problems. The work thatgoes into defining ‘credibility’ is inevitably based on certain exclusions and‘blind spots’, and these may cause problems for the brand, particularly incases where the ‘mattering maps’ of producers do not match those of con-sumers (it would appear from the consumer quotes earlier in this article,for example, that producers did not anticipate young consumers havingchildren, or having very little money, or simply having different tastes tothemselves).

A further obstacle for strategies of this kind lies in the potential tensionbetween the marketing and business sides of companies like Guinness andDiageo. The overall aim of Witnness was not to sell more pints of Guin-ness, but rather to improve its customer ‘approval’ ratings (measured peri-odically by questionnaires) on the basis that such consumer ‘goodwill’wouldbe a necessary precursor to rebuilding a market. Although this aim has,apparently, been successfully achieved, it is still unclear precisely how, if atall, this will improve sales in the longer term. Similarly, where the setting-up of Witnness could have been an opportunity for increasing revenue bydiversifying Guinness’s portfolio of activities, this opportunity has beenmissed, simply because Guinness, in its contract with the official promotersof the festival, did not agree to take a cut of the profits. This would appearto have resulted from a rather conservative estimation of the brand on thepart of its owners. As Shilen Patel told me:


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For me,Witnness could be an extension of the Guinness brand. . . Can it make money out of other things? Yes, I believe it can.Do the parent company see that? Well, I think they’re justbeginning to see that. The trouble with big corporations is thatgenerally they’re quite traditional in their outlook about wherethey compete.

This traditional outlook (and the separation of marketing and businessfunctions) also means that the marketers’ emphasis on brands and brandingis not necessarily shared by either Guinness or its parent company Diageo:

. . . some more enlightened companies, when they do theirbalance sheets, will value their brand and stick that on theirbalance sheet, and put them on as assets . . . But Guinness still,on their balance sheet you’ll only see things like factories andbreweries and stuff like that, and the Guinness brand isn’t anasset on the balance sheet, which I find absolutely astounding.(Patel, 2001)

This constitutes a further problem for Guinness, because not only do theynot ‘value’ their brands, but additionally the Witnness brand (as trademark)is itself not solely owned by Guinness, but rather is jointly owned by them-selves and the Irish promotions company they employ to set up their musicevents. This will make it even harder for them to use Witnness as a profit-able brand extension in the future, and points to the fact that, under regimesof branding, intellectual property rights are crucial,not just to culture indus-tries (see Lash and Urry, 1994) but to companies of all kinds.

For the time being, then,Witnness is solely a marketing device, whosepotential for producing profit is limited both by the unpredictable desiresof its consumers and also by the failure of Guinness to integrate its market-ing and business sides such that it could successfully capitalize upon thesuccess of the Witnness (rather than the Guinness) brand. While the spacesof marketing continue to expand, through the experiential and affectivestrategies I have outlined in this article, and while we may expect to seemore of such activity for the reasons mentioned, the consolidation of suchbranded spaces as exchange-value (their re-territorialization, perhaps)remains a contingent and uncertain project.

CONCLUSIONI have suggested that recent directions in marketing theory and practicepose new challenges for the study of the mediation of production and


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consumption because they expand the ‘space’ of marketing beyond thetraditional sites for such activity (i.e. advertising), instead constituting theconsumer-body and its everyday movements as a potential ‘branded space’.I have connected these developments with contemporary theoretical con-cerns with the changing nature of work and the production of ‘value’,arguing that, in this scenario at least, the affective skills of both producersand consumers are enlisted as part of the transfer of ‘values’, in the fullyambiguous sense of the word (see Miller, 2000), and that in both cases the‘effects’of such labour are unpredictable.This unpredictability derives partlyfrom the fact that knowledge of consumers may remain elusive even in theface of a great deal of information about them, but also because marketersthemselves do not necessarily know in advance what kinds of work will‘work’, and because they can often only theorize ‘effectiveness’ after theevent (and even then, only in a temporary or contingent way). This createsa certain instability in the realm of ‘culture’ that is well captured by Deleuzeand Guattari’s (1988) territorial analysis. In placing such emphasis on insta-bility and movement, their terms allow us to understand both the problemsof producers in their attempts to capture consumers who are always on theirway somewhere else, always working on new projects and forming newallegiances, and the problem for the consumer-subjects who simultaneouslyneed (and want) the security of fixed territory in order to act and to for-mulate a sufficiently consistent identity, but who also desire escape andmovement in their aspiration to ‘move on’ and become something otherthan (they think) they are. Producers’ capacity for control is undoubtedlystrengthened by their use of new techniques of data tracking and the factthat consumers are unlikely to explicitly connect the affective power ofmusic to corporate ‘ideology’ (see Grossberg, 1997). On the other hand,there is also the unquantifiable risk that consumers may simply deemWitnness irrelevant to their projects, or may shed it from their lives withoutwarning. Indeed, even to the extent that consumers may incorporate someaffective link with Witnness into their lives, it is questionable whether thiswill ever be realized as a long-term profitable relationship for the brand,particularly when its owners have themselves (perhaps unintentionally)limited its capacity for profit-making. The relationship between consumerswho seek ‘experiences’ and the producers who seek to brand these experi-ences may best be thought of in terms of a constant movement, character-ized by moments of ‘escape’ and moments of ‘capture’. Producers seek tocontrol, or at least to predict, these movements as part of their attempt tostabilize markets; consumers – barely aware of these attempts, for they alwayshave one eye on something else – may stop and ‘play’ for a while, but must


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always try to move on, using the force of their investment in one site tomove them into others.

AcknowledgementsThis article arises from PhD research funded by the ESRC. I have borrowed the term‘new marketing’ from John Grant’s (1999) book The New Marketing Manifesto. I amgrateful to Scott Lash, Celia Lury and Angela McRobbie and the editors for theircomments.

Notes1. In 1993, American companies spent only 25 percent of their total marketing

budgets on advertising, with the remaining 75 percent spent on ‘promotions’(Klein, 2000: 14).

2. ‘Below-the-line’ refers to ‘a group of media including point of purchase, publicrelations, direct mail, in-store promotions and all other media’, and is usuallycontrasted with ‘above-the-line’ media, which includes ‘press, radio, television,cinema and outdoor and transport media’ (Ellwood, 2000: 304). These definitionsare somewhat problematic in the context of the current article, but broadly I amarguing that ‘below-the-line’ marketing strategies become more important underregimes of branding, and that experiential marketing is part of an engagementwith ‘other media’.

3. Empirical material was gathered through interviews with senior project workersfrom both companies, and through analysis of documents pertaining to thepromotion and organization of the various events, and videos and CD-ROMs puttogether by KLP Euro RSCG as a record of their activities.

4. In fact, at the time of writing, the strategy is being considered for use in othernational markets for Guinness, including Nigeria and Malaysia.

5. This is based on videos and CD-ROMs made by Guinness and KLP Euro RSCG6. These included the branding of the VIP room at the Homelands dance music

festival in Ireland, and a one-off live concert featuring David Bowie, rock actPlacebo and DJ/producer Talvin Singh.

7. Here I am following Celia Lury’s (2000) discussion of ‘artefactualism’. She suggeststhat under regimes of branding there is a reversal of the relationship betweenobject and image such that objects or products become ‘artefactual’; that is, aneffect of the brand.

8. I am grateful to Nick Thoburn for suggesting this formulation.

ReferencesDeleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi.

London: Athlone.Ellwood, I. (2000) The Essential Brand Book. London: Kogan Page.Frith, S. (1988) Music for Pleasure. London: Routledge.Grant, J. (1999) The New Marketing Manifesto:The 12 Rules for Building Successful Brands

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Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Hart, S. and Murphy, J. (eds) (1998) Brands:The New Wealth Creators. Basingstoke:

Macmillan.Klein, N. (2000) No Logo. London: Flamingo.Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1994) Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage.Lury, A. (2001) Interview with Adam Lury, London, 26 November.Lury, C. (1993) Cultural Rights:Technology, Legality and Personality. London: Routledge.Lury, C. (2000) ‘The United Colors of Diversity: Essential and Inessential Culture’, in

S. Franklin et al. (eds) Global Nature, Global Culture. London: Sage.Lury, C. (2002) ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Brand’, in D. McClean and K. Schubert

(eds) Dear Images:Art, Copyright and Culture. London: Ridinghouse.McRobbie, A. (1999) In the Culture Society. London: Routledge.Massumi, B. (1996) ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, in P. Patton (ed.) Deleuze:A Critical

Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.Miller, D. (1997) Capitalism:An Ethnographic Approach. London: Berg.Miller, D. (2000) ‘The Birth of Value’, in P. Jackson et al. (eds) Commercial Cultures:

Economies, Practices, Spaces. Oxford: Berg.Musselbrook, C. et al. (2000) Witnness PR Plan.Nixon, S. (2002) ‘Re-imagining the Ad Agency: The Cultural Connotations of

Economic Forms’, in P. du Gay and M. Pryke (eds) Cultural Economy: CulturalAnalysis and Commercial Life. London: Sage.

Patel, S. (2001) Interview with Shilen Patel, London, 31 May.Pine, J. and Gilmore, J. (1999) The Experience Economy. Boston, MA: Harvard Business

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THINK,ACT and RELATE to Your Company and Brands. New York: The FreePress.

Slater, D. (2002) ‘Capturing Markets from the Economists’, in P. du Gay and M. Pryke(eds) Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life. London: Sage.

Stewart, S. (1993) On Longing. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Strathern, M. (ed.) (1995) Shifting Contexts:Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge.

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Elizabeth Moor is a research student and teacher in the Department of Sociology, GoldsmithsCollege, University of London. Address: Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College,University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK. [email: [email protected]]


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Branded Spaces. New Marketing

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