brandscape

(BRAND.skayp)

n.

The brand landscape; the expanse of brands and brand-related items (logos, ads, and so on) within a culture or market.

Example Citations:

Marketing scholars such as John Sherry of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. and Grant McCracken of Harvard University in Cambridge note that not only do we inhabit a world full of brands, a ''brandscape,'' but that these are critically important providers of cultural meaning in our lives. A great many of our consumption decisions are based on assumptions about what is appropriate or inappropriate to consume.

— Alan Middleton, "Branding in an e-com world," Digital Marketing, March 13, 2000

GM must retire one division to better manage its domestic brands. I suggest Olds, the GM marque that stands for the least and whose products are lost in the brandscape.

— Ken Gross, "Battle of the Brands," Automotive Industries, February 1, 1999

Earliest Citation:

The processes used by marketers to attempt to singularize, and occasionally sacralize, a commodity so it becomes a differentiated, branded product have been described (Gardner and Levy 1955; Levitt 1984; Levy 1978). Processes that allow brands to function in unison on the social level as a constellation (Solomon and Assael 1987) to communicate status or on the cultural level as a brandscape (Sherry 1986b) to form a significant part of the built environment (Rapaport 1982) have been explored only recently.

— Russell W. Belk, Melanie Wallendorf, John F. Sherry, Jr.,

"The sacred and the profane in consumer behavior," Journal of Consumer Research, June 1989

Notes:

This word appears to have been coined by John Sherry (referenced in the example citation). The earliest citation, below, indicates that the word was used in a 1986 paper written by Sherry, which may have been "Cereal Monogamy: Brand Loyalty as a Secular Ritual in Consumer Culture," a paper presented at the annual conference of the Association for Consumer Research, held in Toronto, Canada back in October, 1986.

Related Words:

brand name-dropping

brand wagon

brandalism

brandwidth

ghost brand

lightscape

manscaping

passion brand

potscaping

single-brand store

Category:

Branding