From the Mind to the World. Discovering What Brands Really Are

This book offers a complete treatment of brand theory and management and then puts its founding premise to the test. The first ten chapters present the discipline as it has developed in the marketing literature, grounded in the consumer’s mind: brand image and the structure of associations, brand identity, strategic positioning, brand metrics, brand equity and resonance, brand architecture and extension, brand experience and cultural branding. Each chapter combines the established models with deep-dive panels on the underlying research, discussion questions and an applied exercise, including a protocol for interrogating artificial intelligences about brands. The final part reconsiders where a brand exists. Drawing on the mind–object identity hypothesis, it argues that brands are not representations confined to memory but spread objects, materially distributed across products, places, people, networks and the effects they produce, and it examines what changes for those who manage them. The closing chapter introduces Eleatic Power, a framework that makes a brand’s capacity to produce effects observable and measurable, and that underlies the companion platform accompanying the book. Written as a textbook for university courses, the book is also addressed to practitioners and to readers interested in the relationship between brands, mind and material culture.