Joumal of Marketing Management 2005, 21, 573-588

Daragh O'Reilly^ Cultural Brands/ Branding Cultures

This conceptual paper examines the interface between
culture and business, with specific reference to
branding, it argues that, while considerable strides
have been made in recent years to develop Arts
Marketing theory, the subject now needs to take
account of wider social and cultural issues. Vw paper
explores the way in which processes of meaning-
making have been theorised in consumption and
cultural studies, it argues for a view of the symbolic
dimensions of branding practices that positions them
within the circuit of culture, as a cultural
phenomenon, it is argued that brands are symbolic
articulators of production and consumption, in this
Leeds University Business ^^^^^^ ^n i^^ands are representational texts, and are
School socially, not merely managerially, constructed.
Different kinds of cultural brands are identified,
including cultrepreneurs, cultural corporates and
commercial corporates, and their practices in relation
to business and culture are discussed, it is suggested
that marketing (including branding) is not a neutral
analytical repertoire for the study of exchange
relationships, but is itself a particular kind of cultural
brand, namely an ideological myopia which operates in
the service of capital. It is suggested tlmt Arts
Marketing practitioners and scholars consider tlwse
wider issues in formulating their marketing practices
and research strategies.

Keywords: Arts Marketing, Culture, Branding, Social Construction,

Marketing Myopia
Introduction

Recent writing in the field of arts marketing (e.g. Hill, O'Sullivan and
O'Sullivan 2003) has consolidated the application of classical marketing
principles to this area, and begun to develop new directions of enquiry and

1 Correspondence: Daragh O'Reilly, Lecturer in Marketing, Leeds University Business

School, Maurice Keyworth Building, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United
Kingdom, Tel.: +44113 34 34 534, e-mail: dor@lubs.leeds.ac.uk

ISSN0267-257X/2005/5-6/00573 + 15 £8.00/0 ©Westbum Publishers Ltd.

 574 Daragh O'Reilly

conceptualisation (Kerrigan, Fraser and Ozbilgin (eds.) 2004). This paper

aims to contribute to these developments by opening up other perspectives
on the wider relationship between business and culture. It attempts to
analyse the saturation of culture by commerce by looking at meaning-making
processes in society.
At the beginning of the 21st century, everything is for sale, everything is a
brand, and brands are the culture (Klein 2000). Celebrities and stars can come
from the more traditional areas of arts-cultural activity such as opera, the
media, fine arts, film, fashion, rock music, and theatre, but also from areas
such as politics, sports, education, religion, and science, as well as from the
house next door. In the contemporary economy, there are many examples.
Punk-chef Jamie Oliver sells fresh produce (and a construction of 'family')
for Sainsbury's; Vinnie Jones, ex-footballer and film actor, sells alcohol for
Bacardi; Harry Potter sells breakfast cereals for Kellogg's; Tony Blair sells
'cool' for Britain; the English National Ballet puts Barbie in the Nutcracker
Suite; Edvard Munch's 'Scream' is used to brand pubs, and, like Pablo
Picasso's signature, helps to sell cars; luwies and playwrights sign up to
promote political parties and ideas at election time; Bernie Ecclestone
'sponsors' New Labour; the Osboumes commodify their family life on
television; Jade becomes a brand on Big Brother; easyjet parades its customer
'service' encounters in a weekly docusoap; and arch alco-capitalists, Diageo,
via their Guirmess brand, continue to appropriate as many aspects of Irish,
Cuban, surfing and sporting culture as the brand will stretch to. In short,
there is an emerging commonality about how different kinds of cultural
mearung in all of these sectors are being manufactured, sold to, and
experienced by, consumers and citizens. Yes, it seems, in this culturo-
economic merry-go-round one can package and sell the President of the
United States and cornflakes in a similar fashion.

Arts Marketing

In this wider context, arts marketing can be seen as being too narrowly
focused on the marketing of arts and heritage offerings rather than of wider
issues of business and culture. Much arts marketing literature has to do with
marketing management issues, and audience development. From a
sociological point of view, arts marketing falls within the sociology of
cultijre, and its offshoot the sociology of the arts (Alexander 2003; Tanner
(ed.) 2003; Wolff 1993). A key thinker in this area is Bourdieu (e.g. 1993),
whose work has to do, among other things, with the production, circulation
and consumption of symbolic goods. According to Bourdieu, agents in the
cultural field are endowed with a certain habitus, a 'feel for the game'. Each
of them, producer and consumer, has a strategy, conscious or unconscious, to
 Cultural Brands / Branding Cultures 575

accumulate cultural and symbolic capital as a source of power. Art and

cultural consumption are used in this way to legitimate social differences.
Bourdieu's work is influential, but its research approach and adherence to
the notion of class have been increasingly criticised. Cultural sociology's
definition (e.g. Spillman (ed.) 2002) of culture, on the other hand, sees culture
as a set of social meaning-making processes. There are three key analytical
focuses in this discipline: the idea that social actors use cultural repertoires to
construct strategies of action; culture as a social product situated within
producer networks; and the removal of cultural repertoires, texts and objects
from their context for separate analysis. This approach to sociology offers
arts marketing scholars a range of appropriate directions for enquiry. It also
challenges the narrow focus of arts marketing on the promotion of cultural
offerings.
Arts marketing has a rather conventional approach to branding, to the
extent that it has considered the matter much at all. Over the past few years,
the International Journal of Arts Management does not appear to have had
any articles with the word 'brand' in the title/abstract citations. Brands and
branding rate a few mentions amongst, for example, Bj6rkegren (1996),
Colbert (2000), Kolb 2000), Caves (2000), Heilbrun and Gray (2001), Throsby
(2001), Hesmondhalgh (2002), Hill, Hill and O'Sullivan (2003), and Guillet de
Monthoux (2004). A very recent exception to this is Schroeder (forthcoming),
who discusses branding in the context of the production and consumption of
artistic images and offers a number of artist case studies to explore the
relationship between branding, consumption and art.
The more general silence on branding and art, however, is surprising in so
far as brands are symbolic resources and constructs (see below), and
arguably an important part of everyday contemporary culture, whether they
be commercial or artistic. They are important vehicles for making and
circulating meanings in society. Artistic brands in particular have arguably a
lot to teach commercial brand engineers. , ..

Consumption and Meaning-Making

McCracken (1990), widely cited in the consumer literature, offered a view of

how meaning is manufactured and moved in the world of goods. He pointed
out that a significant lack in the study of the cultural meaning of goods is the
'failure to observe that this meaning is constantly in transit' (op. cit., p.71).
His movement of meaning model (Figure 1) posited that there were three
locations of meaning, namely, within the culturally constituted world, within
the consumer good, and within the individual consumer. In addition, there
were two trajectories: 'world-to-good and good to individual' (p. 72).
576 Daragh O'Reilly

Culturally Constituted World

Advertising/Fashion Fasfiion
System System

Consumer Goods

Possession Exchange Grooming Divestment

Ritual Ritual Ritual Ritual

Individual Consumer

Location of Meaning

Instrument of Meaning Transfer

Source: McCracken 1990:72

Figure 1. McCracken's Movement of Meaning Model

According to McCracken, advertising brings the good and a representation of

this world together within the frame of an advertisement. The fashion system
takes 'new styles of clothing ... and associates them with estabhshed cultural
categories ...'. Advertising and fashion are the instruments for moving
meaning from the culturally constituted world to the good. There are then
four instruments for moving mearung from the product into the consumer's
life. He sees these as symbolic actions or rituals, a kind of social action
devoted to the manipulation of the cultural meaning for purposes of
collective and individual commurucation and categorisation, a way of
'moving meaning out of the goods and into their lives' (p.85). These four
rituals, or symbolic actions are exchange, possession, grooming and
divestment.
 Cultural Brands / Branding Cultures 577

Although the actual visual model offers a helpful conceptualisation of the

double movement of meaning transfer, and McCracken's work has been
seminal in consumer research into culture and consumption, as time has
passed it has become clear that there are a number of issues in the model
which need addressing. The graphic representation/model does not
explicitly take account of issues of representation, which is surprising in that
its central theme is meaning. Secondly, advertising and fashion systems are
by no means the only ways in which meanings are encoded into goods. Also,
the model uses a transmission metaphor, which is a rather outmoded model
of communication. For example, Adler and Rodman point out (2003:14) the
advantages of using a transactional model. Fourthly, the focus in the actual
model on the consumption side is on the individual consumer, and not also
on groups of consumers, or the interaction of the individual with other
consumers - contrast Elliott and Wattansuwan (1998) who discuss the
internai-extemal dialectic of personal and social identity. Fifthly, while the
individual consumer is shown, the individual producer is kept out of the
picture. Sixthly, there is no feedback loop from the consumer to the producer.
Also, the notion of the culturally constituted world is essentially a cognitive
view of culture, rather than of culture as a social meaning-making process
(Spillman 2002). Finally, the model does not address the performative
function of discourse.

Cultural Studies and Meaning-Making

In this section, consideration is given to two models from cultural studies

which to a greater or lesser degree attempt to capture meaning-making
processes in relation to cultural products and to products in general, namely,
the cultural diamond (Alexander 2003) and the circuit of culture (Du Gay et
al. 1997). Since these models are not well known in the marketing literature, a
somewhat detailed presentation is required, particularly of the circuit of
culture.

The Cultural Diamond

The cultural diamond was first developed by Griswold (1994) and then
modified by Alexander (2003) to include cultural distributors - see Figure 2
below.
The principle is that 'to understand art and society, researchers must take
account of all four corners and all six links in the diamond.
The problem with this model is that it does not cover issues of
representation. This seems to substantiate the criticism regarding sociology
of culture's failure to make the linguistic tum. If we are to build an
integrative framework for thinking about the production and consumption of
578 Daragh O'Reilly

cultural/symbolic products, there needs to be a specific element which deals

with the process of representation.

Art

Creators Consumers

Society

Soiu-ce: Alexander (2003)

Figure 2. The Modified Cultural Diamond

The Circuit of Culture

In their monographic case study of the Sony Walkman, du Gay et al.
(1997) and in later developments of this idea (Du Gay (ed.) 1997; Hall 1997;
Du Gay, Evans and Redman (eds.) 2000) introduce a new model for culture
as the production and circulation of meaning - not just in artistic products,
but in products in general. This is a model whose central elements date back
to at least the early 1980s (Barker 2000:28). According to Barker (op. cit.,
p.78), 'the advantage of the circuit of culture metaphor is that it allows us to
analyse the specifics of any given level of a social formation, for example
culture'. The following presentation depends heavily on Du Gay et al.'s text
(1997) for its formulation and the debt to these writers is acknowledged.
The Walkman study was the case study of a biography of a cultural
aretefact in terms of a theoretical model based on the articulation of a
number of distinct processes (1997, p. 3). The five processes of production,
consumption, representation, regulation and identity form the circuit of
culture (Figure 3). A full cultural analysis of a cultural artefact requires
attention to be paid to each of these processes. This goes beyond the cultural
diamond by introducing representation, identity and regulation as key
components of the model. The authors point out that (p. 10) meaning is not
sent from one stage e.g. production to consumption, as in a transmission
model, it is 'more like the model of a dialogue'.
 Cultural Brands / Branding Cultures 579

Source: Du Gay et al. (1997)

Figure 3. The Circuit of Culture

For the purposes of this discussion, we are interested in four of these

moments or processses, namely all except regulation.

Production and Consumption '

Du Gay et al. (1997) see production and consumption not as separate spheres
of existence (p. 103) but rather as mutually constitutive. During production,
the encoding of meanings into products takes place, e.g. through product
design activities. Every site or organisation engaged in the production of
culture has a culture of production which is 'an integral part of the company
way of life that informs intra-organizational decisions and activities' (such as
staff recruitment policies, departmental organizational arrangements and
general management strategies). But it also informs the perceptions of
outside observers (p.43). Consumption is where meanings are made, in
actual social usage. The authors trace different approaches to consumption.
Firstly, the Frankfurt school's 'production of consumption' approach sees
consumption as being determined by production; there is no agency on the
demand side; mass consumption is the pursuit of cultural dupes. Others
argue that consumption has identity value as well as use or exchange value
(p. 91). Consumption can be used as a marker of social and cultural
580 Daragh O'Reilly

difference. This goes back to Veblen's theory of the leisure class (1899). It is
also an idea promoted by Bourdieu, who held that taste for cultural goods
functions as a marker for social class (p. 97). Finally, there are those who see
consumption in term of appropriation and resistance. Firstly, subcultural
analysts like Hebdige (1979) saw consumers as using commodities to signify
an identity for themselves which was in opposition to the perceived
dominant culture. From this perspective, consumption is an active process,
and consumers can put producers' signifiers to other uses as they are
polysemic. Again, De Certeau argued that meaning is produced by
consumers through the use to which they put objects in their everyday lives
(consumption as production). This relates to Elliott and Wattanasuwan's
proposition (1998) that consumers use brands as resources to construct parts
of their identities. This view sees social subjects as active agents who play a
crucial role in creating their own identities through consumption. This,
however, does not deal with the question of where the sources of power lie in
cultural exchanges and who owns them.

Identity

Marketers, designers, and advertising executives are seen as persons of

symbolic expertise used to articulate, i.e. link, production and consumption
through signifiying practices such as constructing ideal identities or subject
positions for consumers or prospects to occupy or negotiate. Within cultural
studies, the notion of identity has been heavily problematised. As Hall (1997)
points out, there has been a 'veritable discursive explosion in recent years
around the concept of identity'. Psychologists of various denominations,
sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, cultural studies specialists,
feminists, Marxists and many other '-ists' have all expressed a point of view
on what identity means. For Hall, the cumulative effect of Marxism,
psychoanalysis, feminism, theories of language and the work of Foucault is
to deconstruct the essentialist notion of the unified agent who possesses a
fixed identity as a referent for the pronoun 'I'. Instead, anti-essentialist
conceptioros of identity within cultural studies stress the decentred subject,
the self as made up of multiple and changeable identities.
Barker (2000) says that according to the anti-essentialist way of thinking:

identities are not things which exist; they Imve no essential or universal qualities.
Rather they are discursive constructions, the product of discourse or regulated
ways of speaking about the world, in other words, identities are constituted, made
rather than found, by representations, notably language.
 Cultural Brands / Branding Cultures 581

Representation and Text

Representation is the practice of constructing meaning through the use of

signs and language (Hall and du Gay:24). Language has always been central
to culture. It is the medium through which we make and share meanings,
and 'has always been regarded as the key repository of cultural values and
meanings'. Language operates as a representational system. Meaning is
constantly being produced and exchanged in every personal and social
interaction in which we take part. Since the cultural turn in human and social
sciences, meaning is thought to be produced - constructed - rather than
simply 'found' - p. 5.
The construct which enables us to analyse the representational moments
of the circuit of culture is the notion of text. The idea that everything can be
read as 'text' is found in communications, folklore, literature, popular music,
performance studies and other disciplines. Many scholars, from different
constituencies, in line with the language turn in the humanities and social
science, define the term widely, for example. Barker (2000), a culturalist,
defines text as:
all practices which signify. Viis includes the generation of meaning through
images, sounds, objects (such as clothes) and activities (like dance and sport).
Since images, sounds, objects and practices are sign systems, which signify with
tlw same mechanism as a language, we may refer to them as cultural texts.

Shuker, a popular music specialist, (2001:14) places the notion of text firmly
into a social context:
The 'meaning' of any engagement betioeen a text and its consumers cannot be
assumed, or 'read off from textual characteristics alone. Vie text's historical
conditions of production and consumption are important as is the nature of its
audience, and the various ways in which they mediate their encounter with the
text.

All texts are constructed and construed in a specific historical context. All
texts are performed, just as all performance is text. Marketing and consumer
researchers have also adopted the text trope. Apart from characterising
products as texts for analysis, scholars of the interpretive or postmodern
persuasion have characterised consumption itself as a text or indeed see the
entire field of research as a text - see e.g. Hirschman and Holbrook (1992).

Brands as Texts
Textbooks on branding (e.g. de Chernatony and McDonald 1998, p. 36)
assign different meanings to the concept of a brand, conceptualising it as, for
582 Daragh O'Reilly

example, a symbolic device or as a strategic asset which produces revenue

and profit streams. From a Culturalist, symbolic point of view, brands can be
read as cultural texts which are culturally produced and consumed, and as
symbolic articulators of production and consumption. These texts represent
or construct identities for their referents, be these organisations, people,
places, or products. Brands are socially constructed texts which mediate
meanings between and amongst consumers and producers. A brand is a 'sign
for sale' (Levy 1959). Brand-texts aim to mark the difference between their
owners' and others' commercial identities. It matters, for example, to Sony
that a consumer can favourably differentiate its brand from others;
otherwise, its retum on capital is threatened. All brand texts are
performative, be they salesperson's representations, staff behaviour in a
service encounter, an interview with the company president, or a marketing
communications campaign. In these ways, all brands are cultural brands.
To say that brands are managerially constructed, and built by managers
only, is to deny consumers a role in the making of their meanings; to disagree
with the proposition that production and consumption are, culturally
speaking, mutually constitutive; to exscribe consumers from brand histories;
to silence their voices; and to ascribe sole 'brand-building' rights to corporate
and ad agency executives already privileged by their access to commercial,
technological and media power. If we are to resist such managerialist
blinding, it is important always to keep in mind the dialogic character of
branded communications, and to assert that all brands are socially
constructed. There is no question of a brand having an 'essence'. Brands do
not exist, however much they may be reified in managerialist texts; they have
no essential qualities. Far from being essential, brand identities are
provisional, to be constructed and negotiated in the context of social
interaction.
Maines (2000) argues that 'the entire field of sociology has been a social
constructionist one for most of the twentieth century'. An explicitly social
constructionist approach is, however, only slowly finding its way into
marketing (see Hackley 1998; 2001).

Cultural Brands/Branding Cultures

All brands cire cultural, but there are different senses in which one can talk
about 'cultural brands'. For the purposes of discussion in this paper, a
distinction is made between different types of cultural brands. These are (i)
cultrepreneurs; (ii) commercial corporates; and (iii) cultural corporates. The
purpose of this categorisation is to identify and distinguish between,
respectively, artists who act like businesspeople, mainstream commercial
businesses and their relationship to culture, and finally cultural organisations
 Cultural Brands / Branding Cultures 583

which are increasingly behaving like businesses in the ways in which they
respond to their operating envirorunent. The increasingly business-like
behaviour of cultural agents and the increasing use of culture by businesses
are two separate aspects of the increasing connection between business and
culture.
Cultrepreneurs are, for example, those UK artistes such as Emin, Hirst, the
Chapman Brothers or, in US popular music, Marilyn Manson or Madonna,
who have adopted strategies of intensive media management in order to
promote themselves as cultural or art brands and thereby their own
commercial success. Such activity is often associated with social
transgression and the strategic use of shock and outrageous identities and
innovations, because media attention is predictably oriented responsive such
behaviour. These brands, unlike corporate commercial brands below, exploit
their freedom to shock, a luxury the commercial brands cannot afford
because it might upset the stockholders or the customers. Arguably this type
of cultural brand finds it roots in a combination of Duchamp and Warhol,
two icons of twentieth-century art marketing. Duchamp questioned how
value was ascribed to certain kinds of art, and logically this has led to the
production of art of questionable value. Warhol, with his emphasis on self-
promotion and fame, has helped to lay the basis for the artist as celebrity.
This combination of questionable product quality and intensive self-
promotion is a strategy well understood by marketers.
The second group of cultural brands, the commercial corporates, are of
course the mainstream commercial organisations, including the global
multinationals. What has become increasingly clear to analysts is the degree
to which these organisations appropriate culture and art-cultural offerings to
build their brands. The mechanisms for this cultural engineering include
advertising, co-branding, celebrity endorsement, product placement,
merchandising, sponsorship, cause-related marketing, merchandising, and
cultural franchising. Through the embedding of marketing communications
messages into film, television, street-level and ambient media, these
corporations so 'naturalise' their presence that, as Klein (2000) puts it, they
become the culture. Holt (2004) writes about this process of 'cultural
branding' and shows how brands become 'icons' through a process of myth
creation. Of course the goals of brand managers and their ad agencies have
not changed, but the importance of branding expertise has become more
important to corporate projects, as witnessed by the emergence of corporate
identity as an academic subject and board level issue. Again, within
marketing textbooks, branding is talked up as being of strategic importance,
not merely tactical. The goals remain the same, but the symbolic has become
of strategic importance to the return on capital. Culturalists who are
interested in a critical approach to marketing practices as part of a project of
584 Daragh O'Reilly

engaging with the politics of economy should take note.

Finally, in the UK, cultural corporates, the third type of cultural brand, are
those organisations such as museums, art galleries, dance and theatre
companies, and schools and universities whose charter or mission is cultural
in the traditional sense. Increasingly, where these can be made amenable to
government influence, essentially through their need for funding, they have
been forced to adopt business models of operating, and thereby become
marketised. Taking an example from education, it is clear that business
schools and management centres have also become 'marketised' as cultural
corporates in the leaming experience business. Given the presence of
branded chairs, the intemal market for loans and transfers of scholarly talent,
the packaging, commodification and trading of knowledge in the educational
market, the increase in student litigation, the weakness of the academic trade
unions, the loss of pay relativity by the sector as a whole, survey evidence
linking high levels of stress to academic work, the paper production culture,
the casualisation of academic labour, the threat of 'human resource shedding'
at allegedly under-performing schools, and the political scrutiny of
academics' productive output by management using performance league
tables, one tends to the conclusion that we no longer work in the marketing
academy, but in a land called Markedemia, a fully marketised and politicised
community, one by which academicians are all Marked - branded - every day
of their working lives. . :
Marketing can be regarded as simply another cultural brand, and
Markedemia as a branding culture, a culture which brands (in a negative
sense) its production workers through the kinds of practices mentioned
above. Far from being a neutral interpretative repertoire for the analytical
study of exchange relationships (as if it ever was), marketing has become
part of the problem (in fact always has been). We used perhaps to chuckle
with Levitt (1975) at the 'marketing myopia' of those businesspeople who
kept their eyes on their products and not on their customers. Now, there may
be signs that the marketing discipline, the ideological servant of capital par
excellence, is itself the myopia - see for example, Marion (2004) for a
discussion of marketing as ideology.
Again, all brand cultures can be read as 'branding' cultures in that their
cultures of production brand or mark their producers and consumers, for
better or for worse. And, they are also branding cultures in so far as they seek
to brand the everyday, to put their mark on how we eat (McDonald's), sleep
(Silentnight), drink (Coca-Cola), defecate (Pampers), talk (Vodafone, BT),
make human contact (Smirnoff), walk (Manolo Blahnik), or simply enjoy a
moment of relaxation (Kit-Kat). Every minute of our lives could, it seems, be
a magical branded moment from the people who care, a Neverland
sponsored experience, if only we would leave it to them.
 Cultural Brands / Branding Cultures 585

Implications for Arts Marketing

In addition to focusing on how to get more customers to watch Shakespeare

or community theatre, or examining how better to apply marketing
principles to cultural organisations, arts marketing should raise its sights. If it
is to develop as a critical and refiexive discipline, arguably it needs to
consider these wider social-cultural perspectives on the business/culture
interface, the issue of cultural brands. The making and selling of cultural
products, and indeed of culture in the wider sense, is embedded within
economic and political power relations, failure to recognise which will do a
disservice to the discipline. Given the symbolic dimensions of culture, and
given that branding is a symbolic enterprise, a discursive-analytical
treatment of branding as discursive practice would open the way to a critical
appraisal of the relationships between business and culture. Elliott (1996) has
outlined how and where discourse analysis might be applied in marketing,
and this author would support this approach being suitably applied to
cultural branding practices. Other scholars within marketing who are using
discourse cinalysis are Hackley (1998 2001), already mentioned above, whose
work investigates advertising agency production cultures; Hopkinson (2003)
on service delivery narratives, and Ellis, Jack and Higgins (2005) on
marketing discourse within the agri-food sector. As yet, there does not
appear to be much published work within arts marketing on the discursive
analysis of brands, apart perhaps from a forthcoming article by O'Reilly and
Doherty, who use discourse analysis to examine the online construction of
commuruty in a popular music context.

Conclusion : '

This conceptual paper examines the interface between culture and business,
with specific reference to branding. It argues that, while considerable strides
have been made in recent years to develop Arts Marketing theory, the subject
now needs to take account of wider social and cultural issues. The paper
explores the way in which processes of meaning-making have been theorised
in consumption and cultural studies. It argues for a view of the symbolic
dimensions of branding practices that positions them within the circuit of
culture, as a cultural phenomenon. It is argued that brands are symbolic
articulators of production and consumption. In this sense, all brands are
representational texts, and are socially, not merely managerially, constructed.
Different kinds of cultural brands are identified, including cultrepreneurs,
cultural corporates and commercial corporates, and their practices in relation
to business and culture are discussed. It is suggested that marketing
(including branding) is not a neutral analytical repertoire for the study of
586 Daragh O'Reilly

exchange relationships, but is itself a particular kind of cultural brand,

namely an ideological myopia which operates in the service of capital. It is
suggested that Arts Marketing practitioners and scholars consider these
wider issues in formulating their marketing practices and research strategies
that a discursive-analytical approach to cultural branding could lead to
useful insights into the power relations at play.

Acknowledgements '

The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful
comments.

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About the Author

Daragh O'Reilly is a Lecturer in Marketing at Leeds University Business

School, previously at Bradford University School of Management. His
research interest is, broadly speaking, in the relationship between business
and culture. Recent work includes a chapter on popular music marketing in
Kerrigan, Fraser and Ozbilgin's (ed.) Arts Marketing (Elsevier 2004). Also in
the area of popular music, a chapter co-written with Dr Kathy Doherty
(Sheffield Hallam) and entitled 'Music B(r)ands Online: Constructing
Community' has been accepted for publication in Ayers, M., Cybersounds:
Essays on Virtual Music Culture (Peter Lang forthcoming) . He has recently
taken over the chairmanship of the Arts & Heritage Marketing SIG of the
Academy of Marketing. Prior to entering academia, he worked in a variety of
sales/marketing roles. He is a Member of the Chartered Institute of
Marketing. . • - • ] . - ] .