The efforts of corporations to capture our sense of self and connect consumption to individual identity construction has undergone several transformations. In the 30 years following World War II, Fordist capitalism was at the height of its powers. From a communication perspective, companies’ marketing strategies during this period were not dissimilar from a sender–receiver model of communication, in which the goal was to get information out to potential consumers regarding the superiority of a company’s products over its rivals.

It should be noted that while branding and marketing tended to be fairly functional and mass oriented during this period, there was also a strong aspirational quality to marketing efforts. Companies and their branding strategies do not live in a social or political vacuum, and what was going on socially and politically in the 1960s and 1970s had a significant impact on the ways that companies marketed their brands to consumers.

In this era of niche marketing, then, we see how branding strategies respond to the changing cultural and political environment, in this instance involving the appropriation and commodification of anti-establishment discourses about personal expression, equality, and freedom. A shift to consumer engagement is a direct consequence of the emergence of neoliberalism and the recognition that we are now firmly in a period that we might call communicative capitalism. We have therefore moved to the point where brands function as institutions; that is, just as bureaucracies used to be the most powerful organizational forms that guided our behavior, so brands have now taken on that role.

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