Branded places and marketplace exclusion

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the development of a branded place in a Brazilian city. Drawing on Lefebvre’s spatial triad, I show how the intertwined practices of hegemonic market actors in alliance concur to produce a city space that caters to the aspirations and ways of life of local elites while actively excluding lower-class groups from it. I distinguish three main elements of branded places –architecture and urbanism, brand narrative, and spatial governance– and demonstrate how they produce physical, symbolic, and social boundaries between middle- and lower-classes in the city. These findings contribute to understanding the ways market-mediated spatial dynamics perform exclusion of most vulnerable groups in post-industrial cities and extend place brand literature by accounting for the less documented practices of invested stakeholders in the production of branded places.

KEYWORDS:

• Branded places
• exclusion
• post-industrial city
• space and place

Acknowledgments

The author sincerely thanks CMC’s Guest Editors Michael Saren, Christina Goulding, and Elizabeth Parsons, and the three anonymous reviewers for their feedbacks and hard work in assembling this special issue. He also thanks Annetta Grant, Daiane Scaraboto, Eileen Fischer, Ela Veresiu, Güliz Ger, Julie Emontspool, Markus Giesler, and Pierre-Yann Dolbec for their time and invaluable feedback at various stages of this research project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Rodrigo B. Castilhos is an assistant professor at Skema Business School, France. His research focuses on the interplay between social classes, space and place, and market dynamics. His work has been recently published in the Journal of Business Research, Marketing Theory, and International Journal of Consumer Studies.