Immortal Brands? A Temporal Critique of Promotional Culture

Abstract

This article contributes to the theoretical analysis of branding and promotional culture by exploring how professional practice, legal systems, and applied academic research have championed a notion of the brand that is powerful, durable, and everlasting—in a word, “immortal.” We argue that this immortalized brand challenges emerging critical scholarship through its ignorance of the brand’s weaknesses and limitations, especially as they pertain to time and history. To counter that challenge, we argue for a heightened awareness of the brand’s temporality. In the service of this goal, this article explores several cases of aging brands, retro brands, and abandoned trademarks to showcase how consideration of brands in time reveals their contingent and historical nature.

Notes

¹ A notable example of this is White Cloud toilet paper, reintroduced in 1999 as the house brand for WalMart and voted in 2013 as the top brand of toilet paper by Consumer Reports (DiClerico, 2013; Neff, 1999).