Keywords

1 Dear Branding Experts

Let me begin my small essay with a personal remark:

Brands started out as something magical, something extraordinary, something special, and yes: something glamorous. Brands were like rainbows (Brown, 2005): mysterious, captivating, awesome, and wonderful, an unforgettable experience. They were an injection of color in the grey uniformity of life. But not only were the brands mysterious, mystery was also the brand concept. The mechanics of brand design and management—the drivers of brand equity—and brand leadership skills were inscrutable, intransparent, and un(der)explored.

But as the success stories of some super brands convinced more and more managers, a resource-based perspective won ground, and decades of scientific effort uncovered the marketing code. Brands have lost their mystery, their uniqueness, their glamour. Today, every CEO, marketing manager and organization seems to be in brand management and seems to apply the same ABC as everyone else: the rules set by Aaker, Belk and de Chernatony, by Ries, Sherry, Trout, Urry, Venkatesh, and Wipperfurth, not to mention Kevin Lane Keller, Jean-Noel Kapferer, and Kellogg on Branding. These authors (and thousands of others) produced important insights, satisfied researchers with interesting empirical findings, and forced the community of brand managers to answer three questions (Keller et al., 2002); to invest in visual and verbal brand hammers (Ries, 2012), to create stupid two-dimensional positioning models (too numerous to cite) and colonize a perceptual brand territory, to tick off bullet point lists and follow the how-to manuals of the “totally brand everything” promoters.

But the success of those concepts came with a huge price tag, as brand science created the brand engineer: an honest manager, who applied POPs and PODs, followed the routes of the superstars (see above) and enriched her brand with an unavoidable, ornamental glimpse of a pomo or SDL customer integration-bricolage.Footnote 1 In following this taken-for-granted ABC, these calculated rules and formalized processes the anti-heroes of brand management tried to reduce their (personal) risk or to hide their lack of creativity and courage.

So brand management is characterized by a paradox. By applying the canon of branding techniques and imitating the likes of Apple, BMW, and Coca Cola, those concepts and systems are strengthened through sheer repetition. Once everyone is imitating or applying the same tools as everyone else, it is nearly impossible to break out: uniformity will outplay uniqueness, single brands will be weakened, and mediocre results will be the consequence. In other words, such a process of institutional isomorphism (Di Maggio & Powell, 1983) disenchants the brand, makes it an everyday cloth, not a special evening dress.

Following the discussions about brand redundancy, about the reduction of freedom through a brand strategy, about reputation as a core resource, and about the consistency and continuity of branding, we—you and me—probably wish ourselves back to the times when brands were mysteries, when they were regarded as something extraordinary in an ocean of the commonplace. In other words: we miss what Popperian scientists, diligent brand engineers and brand-experts who reduce everything to bullet point lists excluded (or try to exclude) from any discussion. We miss the aspects of magic, we miss a punctum, and yes, we miss the glamour of branding’s Mad Men days: in our aseptic and anti-heroic times we not only excluded sharp suits, lunch cocktails, and alluring outer office secretaries from brand managers’ everyday businesses. The sterility and political correctness of our era also plays a role in the way brands are designed, managed, and controlled: fulfill your promises! Be authentic! Be consistent! Be 360 degrees! Totally integrate everything!

We hypothesize that, like customer orientation (Kumar et al., 2011)—another of those politically correct buzzwords of marketing and branding, those imperatives only serve as the cost of competing and not as a source of sustainable competitive advantage. They remind us of the must-be dimensions in a Kano-model (Kano, 1984), that do not evoke delight, do not make the product “sexy” or make the customer shout out “wow”. Instead of creating the next Vogue or at least the next Red Bull, instead of encouraging cultural or aesthetic brand innovations, they produce an iron cage of brand bureaucracy (Holt & Cameron, 2010) and consequently boring brands.

With some of those ideas in mind I am trying to challenge an audience of likable and scientifically profound media brand experts with a simple question: where is the magic, where is the glamour of media brands? I want the pendulum hurled back towards the magical side of branding. Such an audacious challenge will obviously invite critique to which I must reply.

However, if you expect an answer to my question, you can stop reading now, because I don’t have one.

If you can accept a bricolage of ideas then perhaps this is the article for you.

To fulfill the academic requirements, to guide you through the article and to develop a kind of future memory (Ingvar, 1985) before reading, I will offer my core hypothesis before I start the discussion:

The strategic aspect of glamour could aesthetically refine a commodity and characterize a brand. By providing magical traits brand equity could be strengthened, and above-average earnings could be kindled—but there is a price to pay!

2 Why Not Think About (Brand) Glam?

The possible story of a relationship between media, brands, and glamour remains largely untold, although glamour has proceeded to be an important strategic category for any aesthetic production and a main source of survival for several media brands: think about magazines, TV shows, blogs or coffee-table books that accompany the glitzy lifestyle of shining celebrities, vulgar movie stars, and distant dictators, or that picture opulent apartments, heroic shop windows and James Bond villain-styled atmospherics.

This essay follows another, a more general route as it will discuss glamour not as the content of media products, but as an aesthetic dimension that could probably add value and so increase brand equity. In other words: we are going to discuss the glam factor as a strategic aspect of brands.

From Belle Époque Paris, the classical days of Hollywood and the times of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, when glamour was a technique of aesthetic production of extraordinary individuality to the glamorous lifestyles of Balenciaga, Blackberry, and the Beckhams: glamour was and is a vague—perhaps even glamorous—concept and word. In this chapter, I would like to offer some contextualization that helps us understand the concept and its management. Beyond that, I will also try to motivate my readers to consider glamour as a perhaps neglected, but nevertheless promising category of surplus value.

First I will present three definitions, I will start with three characterizations of glamour:

2.1 Glam Is a Child of Capitalism

Capitalism rewards companies for offering relevant products, creating surplus value and producing attractiveness and reputation. It pays for innovation and efficiency. Customers respond to the incentives, and so it obviously works.

A performance-driven, information-saturated society that is overwhelmed with “me too’s” welcomes those concepts and companies that succeed in an exhaustive search for uniqueness or in making the exchange partner addicted (or at least loyal). That’s why marketing and branding became essential features of capitalist market societies.

A key concept that could create brand equity and promise attractiveness, differentiation and loyalty is aesthetics. Not in its superficial interpretation as a mere surface and design phenomenon, and not in its historical association with fine arts, but as the source of a sensory experience, as a rich intrinsic hedonic value and as a reason for products being pleasurable and rewarding without regard to whatever utilitarian function the product might perform (Davay, 1989; Holbrook, 1981).

The category we have chosen out of a stunning variety of aesthetic styles—think not only of beauty and the sublime, but also categories like cuteness and coolness, authenticity and elegance—is glamour. Like its cousins, glamour can represent a significant surplus value and create pleasure that heightens the consumer’s overall satisfaction, specifies explicit attitudes and influences implicit evaluations.

Although glamour doesn’t have a documented archive or a clearly marked history, we can trace some of its roots to Hollywood’s star system, to the narratives of pop, and to a Putinesque Russia: The Hollywood glamour style from the 1920s was a unique blend of aristocratic, fashionable, sexual, theatrical, and consumerist appeals that exercised an unprecedented influence over global aspirations, desires, and lifestyles (Gundle, 2008). Based on its European origin—the creators of Hollywood glamour were émigrés from Germany, Russia, Hungary, France, and Britain—and far away from the world’s centers of privilege and style, the Californian film industry reinvented glamour as an enticing form of capital that relied solely on technique, artifice, and imagination. In other words: the attribute glamorous was/is not natural, but producable, and relied/relies on an audience with aesthetic literacy that rewards the surplus value that endows a person (or an object, or a brand) with a glamorous radiance. It was Bret Easton Ellis (1998) who pointedly expressed such a world when he inaugurated his Glamorama, which was populated with consumers that were defined by the branded items they consume: glam brands like Armani, Calvin Klein or Dolce & Gabbana defined the looks, glam items like sunglasses or cellphones the lifestyle, and rock music provided the glamorous sound. At the same time, top marketing academic Jennifer Aaker (1997) identified glamorous as a core trait when defining brand personalities and a few years later John Grant, an author of several marketing bestsellers, promoted glamour as an “erotic brand strategy” (Grant, 2006, p. 224). Dimitry Ivanov even identified a “logic of glamour” as a driving component of today’s capitalism, especially in Russia (Ivanov, 2011).

From Hollywood to glam-capitalism, from glam-personalities to glam-brands the scientific community learned that the perception of glamour emerges from certain attributes; design and distance, gloss and grace. Or as Margaret Troph defined it in the 1930s: “sex appeal plus luxury plus elegance plus romance” (cited in Rosa et al., 2004, p. 42). Glamour can be produced, and that’s good news for managers. Together with Postrel (2013, p. 9) we could understand it as a “calculated tool of persuasion”—a rhetoric that’s used to twist and to woo. A rhetoric that could enrich the brand, improve customer equity and so strengthen a main asset of capitalism.

2.2 Glam Is Kind of a Paradox

The Colette fashion store in Paris is not only a well-known and respected media and retail brand, but also one of the authorities on European glamour: Colette manages to synchronize the visibility of the lower classes (androgynous shop assistants from the banlieues that seem to be tattooed and pierced all over the body) with very expensive luxury fashion from both young artists and major fashion labels. It is this paradoxical bricolage of low and high (culture) that makes the experience of Colette so glamorous, that makes the carnivalesque celebration of good taste and the promise of a better life so convincing.

In general, glamour needs such a paradox to keep things from getting too perfect, unreachable, or even boring. Actually, the paradox is already built-in, if glamour is analyzed from a linguistic perspective. Among others, Peter Sloterdijk (2009) clarified that in Middle English the word glamour is an alteration of grammar and also an expression of magic (Sloterdijk, 2009, footnote 1). The paradessence (Shakar, 2001) of glamour lies in these two interpretations: on the one hand it is understood as a set of rules that produces predictability and acts as a blueprint for production. On the other, we define glamour as a mysterious appearance, an erratic allure.

This duality reminds us of Roland Barthes (1981), who constructed an alternative critique of photography and its relationship to personal experience, and most prominently distinguished between studium and punctum as the two reading practices for photographs.

Studium refers to the range of meanings available and obvious to everyone. Like grammar this component is readable, decodable, and producible. Barthes says that he is interested in these aspects (as he is interested in the world), but does not love them. We recognize the studium with more or less pleasure, but we never feel delight or pain. Doesn’t that sound like a description of the engineered or bureaucratic brand?

Both photo and brand need something beyond their initial meaning, something elusive, an incurable desire, a detail that pricks us. This something, this detail is the punctum. The punctum inspires private meaning and cannot be easily communicated through linguistic resources. It’s a partial object, a detail, a supplement that holds the recipient’s gaze. It is an element which rises from the scene and unintentionally fills the whole image. It steps into the light (glamorous isn’t it?), acts as figure, not ground, but can—applying the information integration hypothesis (Anderson, 1981)—dominate the whole appearance.

Every person, product, and brand could be perceived as glamorous when both aspects, punctum and studium are present to make the entity appear extraordinary.

2.3 Glam Is the (Prissy) Sister of Pornography

When comparing glamour with pornography we will be focusing on the following three aspects that glamour borrows from porn: the visual component, its sequential nature, and the perception of being vulgar.

  • The perhaps most famous description of pornography comes from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who famously said in his 1964 order (Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964) that he could not define pornography but “I know it when I see it”. The same might be true for glamour. One cannot define this aesthetic impression, but one perceives something glamorous when one sees it. And this is meant literally. It is about seeing, it’s all about images. More and more movie stars, politicians, and sports heroes understand that principle and generate a large number of images that potentially make them or their corresponding organization appear glamorous

  • Both pornography and glamour are not organized as linear stories that consolidate figures, time and coherence into a strong narrative. Instead, glamour and pornography, like splatter movies or circus shows, are organized through numbers (Freeland, 2000). The constant onslaught of stimuli is through single sequences, through special moments and episodes that lead to a kind of happiness. Therefore: storytelling is—contrary to most actual discussions and theories—not the name of our game. Like the audience of a porn-movie that goes to the film for numbers, glamour is fed by single sequences of heightened emotions and spectacle. In other words: glamour emerges in stilled moments, where the world might even recede, if only for an instant (Postrel, 2013). Following Lash’s (1988) distinction between stories and (visual) images, between the discursive and the figural, we understand glamour as the reintroduction of an aesthetics of sensation into marketing and branding. Glamour is an expression that depends on (visual) signs, and relies not so much on cognition as on immersion. In other words: glam brands are both silent (when it comes to storytelling) and loud (in their aesthetic expression) (Salzer & Strannegard, 2004)

  • Although pornography pervades the contemporary visual landscape, and in particular the Web, it’s still a dark market, a little shameful and weird experience, even for its users. And despite its association with the cultural sector, critical acclaim, or at least words like artistry, creativity and profundity never enter the viewer’s vocabulary. The question is not how good (the quality of porn), but how much (box office, profit) (Brown & Hackley, 2012). Just as with pornography, glamour is irredeemably vulgar. In the dictionary sense of the word it’s current, popular, common, pertaining to ordinary people. Claiming or judging something to be glamorous (or cute, or zany) means the application of a trivial aesthetic category that is grounded in ambivalent or even explicitly contradictory feelings (Ngai, 2012). We shall understand that such an aestheticization with a vulgar category is of similar contemporary significance as the traditional moral resonances of the beautiful and the sublime

2.4 Defining “Glam”

I will not offer a definition—I will offer three. Although it might appear a little hair-splitting, we will differentiate between glamour, glamorous, and glamorizing, that means we will define the noun, the adjective and the verb separately. For sure, that’s unusual, but don’t we also find differences between strategy, strategic, and strategizing? Between brands, branded, and branding? Or between aesthetics, aesthetic, and aestheticize? As those examples prove, a noun’s, an adjective’s and a verb’s meaning might be related, but they definitely differ. The noun is normally reserved for a smaller, clearly defined territory (like the glamour industries), whereas nearly everything (from war, to drones, to media brands) could probably be glamorized, so that an audience could perceive or define such entities as glamorous. All definitions will be summarized in a mathematical formalization as suggested by George Spencer-Brown (1972).

We define glamour (noun) as the impression or illusion of a fascinating extra-ordinariness (Fig. 1). To be successful, glamour needs a punctum and presents an idealized picture. It’s a surface and design phenomenon, a sort of magic or trick that makes costs and complications disappear (or at least to be hidden). It survives behind a veil of overdrawn aesthetics that reveals only partial truths: a vacation at an Amalfi coast beach is never as unmarred by difficulties as in a travel brochure. The glamour of battle as it is advertised by military organizations all over the world, edits out the boredom and blood. And the pomp and circumstance of a James Bond Royal Premiere comes together with annoying journalists and the experience of a holiday-season queue at Disneyland. The recipient/consumer blocks out or suspends such truths in exchange for an idealized version of the world: that’s how the glamour of Hollywood and Bollywood, a Hermes shop window or a Leni Riefenstahl Nazi propaganda film are produced.

Fig. 1
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Defining “glamour” (noun)

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To glamorize a brand, an event, a person or a product adds (hedonic and/or social) values through gloss and/or grace to make the entity appear fascinatingly attractive (Fig. 2). Gloss and grace, attractiveness and fascination arise (among other processes) out of the appearance of being distant and effortless. In other words: glamorization needs what Baldessare Castiglione calls sprezzatura (Castiglione, 1959); the graceful nonchalance of Daniel Craig’s James Bond wearing a suit; the glossy finish of a Playboy picture gallery. The book design of Merve that combines and coordinates distance and effortlessness (see below). The surplus value that’s produced through a glamorization process does not refer to the utilitarian function an entity might perform. Rather, superiority is created through hedonic editing and social processes that generate (among others) aesthetic, linking, and prestige values (Cova, 1997; Holbrook, 1995).

Fig. 2
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Defining “glamorize” (verb)

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Something or somebody glamorous (adjective) is not just full of glamour, fascinatingly attractive, or the result of a glamorization process. The adjective signifies an air of (vulgar) allure in the capitalistic context of an attention economy (Fig. 3). In a silicon-chipped era where information is abundant and the recipient’s capacity to process and store information remains limited, the incitement and seduction of attention has turned into an overriding objective of organizations. And it’s especially the business of media companies and brands to collect as much attention as possible, either to get paid or to sell the attention to the advertising industry or to alliance partners. The via regia to get wealthy through recognition is to create brands that seem to be outstanding and irresistible, fascinating and attractive. Adding a twist of allure creates attention and affection—and the belief of being “glamorous”.

Fig. 3
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Defining “glamorous” (adjective)

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3 A New Genre of Media (Brands)

Contrary to glamour, branding and brand management, media and even media brands are top priorities in the market of academic and managerial publications. Therefore scientists and managers are confronted with numerous theories, ideas and suggestions that compete for their attention. Instead of giving a summary or personal comments on this complex and confusing literature I will just cherry-pick a few important ideas and suggest definitions by following the Spencer-Brown logic already applied in the former chapter.

The A-journal literature characterizes brands simply as a “collection of perceptions held in the mind of the consumer” (Fournier, 1998, p. 345). This definition clarifies that a brand has no objective existence at all, that it cannot act or communicate—except through the activities of brand holders and owners. One of the main jobs of brand managers, one of their unavoidable tasks is to brand their products, or in other words to make goods or services identifiable, differentiate them from those of the competitors and link them to mental brand networks through the application of names, terms, signs, symbols or design elements. Such a logo, or brand as verb is an absolute must in most industries, including the media. As a search attribute it supports consumers in anticipating future experiences and attachments and lowers their search costs (Darby & Karni, 1973; Klein & Leffler, 1981). Therefore all media (products) are branded. But for sure, not all branded media products can count as (strong) brands. While the former concept is about production, the latter is about perception, or—speaking now in the language of postmodern marketing—about the bricolage of a “consumer as producer” (Firat, Dholakia, & Venkatesh, 1994, p. 52).

When our article suggests a glam component as an extra in the perceived collection of brand attributes, we enrich the brand concept with cultural and social aspects (see also Ots & Hartmann, 2015). The simple psychological interpretation by Fournier, its focus on image and mindshare is too limited to embrace and understand the social and aesthetic needs of our time: glamour has a price, even for brand theory. Media companies especially, whose offerings are social and cultural products per se, have to pay that price. However, they will significantly profit from deeper and broader concepts such as linking and connectivity, shaping and mirroring society, cultural expressions and every-day cultural activities. These characterize not only media, but also brand relationships.

Adding the glamorous media brand (GMB) to a list of (media brand) genres and applying the glam factor has a positive effect not only for media companies, but also for their consumers:

  • Judging something to be glamorous signals it out as something worthy of everyone’s attention. It might create awareness and vivid, favorable, strong, and unique associations (Keller, 1993) that produce a valuable, exploitable asset as a precondition for a comparative and competitive advantage (Hunt & Morgan, 1995). Adding such an aesthetic component differentiates the brand not only from the engineered brand, but also from its possible substitution through algorithms. Both competitor concepts focus on one aspect, namely reliability. In the first case (a), strong brands count as assurance that the brand’s promise will be fulfilled through a translation of brand identity into operational standards that are delivered throughout all brand experiences. The second case (b) deals with the assurance that satisfying experiences are determined by a deep knowledge of the consumer, her lifestyle and culture. The new philosophy of “dataism” makes not only the classical approach to science—hypothesize—model—test—obsolete (Anderson, 2008), but perhaps this also applies to the risk-free, information-efficient brand: why should companies invest in brand design and communication—which is as Luhmann (1995, p. 144) prominently stated always resource-demanding and risky—when petabytes of consumer and context data together with better and better analytical tools transform our ability to predict and to offer individualized experiences?

    But there is something that cannot be replaced or substituted by algorithms, data and engineered brands. And this is (the) it (Roach, 2007), the extra, the punctum, the symbolic rainbow-moment that stands out. If brands were more than reliable mechanisms of a promise-management then aesthetic associations and experiences not only become valuable, but even glamorous in themselves. In other words: glamour and other ornamental aesthetics are an answer to competing concepts (big data, algorithms, individualization) that better fulfill the consumer’s quest for assurance and create offerings that promise a confirmation (or positive disconfirmation) of expectations (see Fig. 4)

    Fig. 4
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    The concept of the “glamorous media brand” (GMB)

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  • Not only media companies communicate their values or points of difference through brands, consumers also express their self-concepts and identities through brand preferences (see also Scherer, 2015; Förster, 2015). The purchase of glamorous (media) experiences, products or services might rub off (Park & Roedder John, 2010) and give the consumer access to a displaced ideal, to an untainted version of reality. So glamour represents a special case of what Grant McCracken (1990) calls displaced meaning. This theory explains what economists or politically correct upholders of consumer protection dismiss as irrational, fantastic or escapist: that goods could serve as a bridge, a link to the lifestyle that people dream about. Hopes and ideals remain alive—even in the face of impressive grounds for pessimism

4 Summary

Let me sum up these ideas in three hypotheses that will guide us through the following chapters.

  • An aesthetic component such as glamour could strengthen a (media) brand in the capitalistic game of differentiation and adaptation.

    • Glamour, like authenticity, beauty, or cuteness adds valuable beliefs that significantly improve the competitiveness of a company. Therefore we label this resource as strategic.

    • Of course such a belief is not communicable through classical advertising. Glamour will only be perceived if it’s supported by actions. Brands are made by deeds, not words. And glamorous brands are made by pictures and punctums and not stories and strategies.

  • A punctum could add magical, glamorous qualities, shape the brand and make it extra-ordinary.

    • Although the branding literature does not to my knowledge so far apply or exploit the punctum theory, authors like Stephen Brown are on a similar track when they claim that great brands offer something special, something impalpable, a “certain something—call it je ne sais quoi—that competitors conspicuously lack” (Brown, 2005, p. 164). This extra makes them literally extra-ordinary. They provide what its competitors, the over-engineered, also-ran brands provide (the brand’s points-of-parity) plus something extra as well—an add-on—a real point of difference. Such an element is not only difficult to (pre-)define but also difficult to elicit and to produce. Therefore brand management needs new directions.

  • Managing glamour is the art of managing paradoxes.

    • Glamorous brands are full of paradoxes: glamour is grammar and magic, producible and non-producible, silent and loud. Like a rainbow, glamour just appears—and disappears. Suggesting paradoxes in brand management might be unusual (think about the consistency imperative in brand management) but it might work—not just as a reverse psychology marketing gimmick (Sinha & Foscht, 2007), but as a concept that mirrors the paradoxical times of glam capitalism.

    • In the following three chapters we will be focusing on management aspects of media brands, which we have derived from our discussion on glamour and branding. We will select some important ideas to suggest interesting directions for (media) brand management, whether aesthetic glamorous components are integrated in the brand’s identity or not.

5 The Price of the Glam: Comments on Brand Equity

It was Milton Friedman who stated in 1975 that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”. Everything comes with a price tag on it, and so this applies to the glamorous aspect of a media brand. If glamour added value to the product, increased the brand’s attractiveness and perhaps even the consumer’s willingness to pay, the economics of glamour may work as intended.

The price for being more glamorous is giving up brand control. Activities like customer and third party integration, co-production, co-communication, and co-consumption, brand hacking and hijacking, twisting and jamming (Cova & Cova, 2001; Vargo & Lush, 2005; Wipperfürth, 2005) could be read as a nightmare for brand engineers who still dream of a risk-free, control-everything, and yes: unglamorous blueprint for running brands. But our dataist, hyperaestheticized, liquid, glam modernity (Bauman, 2000; Ivanov, 2011) offers another, a less discussed challenge for (media) brand managers. Interpreting glam as the re-entry (Spencer-Brown, 1972) of magic into brand management, asks for a growing space of uncertainty and ambiguity, for a (media) brand management that is not only concerned about complexity (integrating experiences, subbrands, brand partners, actions) but also about designing and controlling the brand as a nonlinear, non-trivial, paradoxical system. The consequence: less predictability and more unforeseeability, Markov-like brand experiences instead of a serial brand production, a variety of exemplars and beliefs instead of one brand core. As it is probably impossible to outguess the quality and extra-ordinariness of the next experience if a punctum defines a brand’s aesthetic quality and equity, managers not only need an aesthetic literacy, but also an (aesthetic) mentality that makes them invest in brand preenactments (Kuka, Gasteier, & Bluemelhuber, 2014) and in a broad variety of glamorous signals as a condition for the production of glamour.

The value (equity) of such a GMB lies not only in the consumer’s memory of future experiences and in information acquisition cost reductions, but also in a direct experience of hedonic and social surplus-values. If those were strong and could be integrated into the mental brand network, then glamour could be perceived as a defining element of that brand, not just for a moment, but for the longer term. As such an image can fade away very much like a rainbow (see my introduction), glam production is a continuous process, again, a paradox that makes brand equity management so challenging.

Merve is a German publishing house and media brand that succeeds in the discipline of managing paradoxes, perhaps because they accept and play with them. Merve is a competitor to very serious publishers of elitist philosophical, sociological and cultural literature, and their black text-styled books. They succeed, and create customer and brand equity by making the author’s works clearer and more accessible—with the weapons they have: a simple design, white spaces for reader’s margin notes, and a cocktail of texts and pictures that crosses the language of thinking with the language of the visible (see Fig. 5).

Fig. 5
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The design of Merve

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It’s the look and feel of a cheap paperback (and speaking in monetary terms: it’s really cheap), that promises a reachable and readable content, although it will be a tough challenge for the average reader to decipher the ideas and texts. Yes, some philosophy, sociology and economy books are infinitely difficult—but Merve makes them appear accessible, not awesome; easy, not expensive; glamorous, not grave. Only those dualities create the brand equity and—that’s my interpretation now—the glamour of Merve.

6 Glam Style: Comments on Brand Design

The perception (and creation) of a brand’s style could be driven by two processes, either through repetition of always the same elements and/or through extraordinary single experiences (Whitehouse, 1996). Just one magical moment, one sensation of a punctum could update the consumer’s brand knowledge (Anderson, 1981) with the consequence that managers and scientists probably have to update their strategies and policies to enable and support such incidents. An accepted strategy that might conjure a magical moment is the strategy of experimentation (Beinhocker, 1999): trying things out, following what works, and unsentimentally killing off processes that do not succeed. Designing glam brands—their experiences, brand elements, and style—is not only about the creation of coherence, but also about the creation and elicitation of single moments that are fascinatingly attractive as they offer grace and gloss. “Make a punctum possible” could serve as the corresponding imperative.

The following example finds such an extra, such a glam component in a magazine’s core domain, namely the integration of advertising into an overall experience: Butt Magazine is a “wonderful fashion, culture and art magazine”. With those words American Apparel spokesperson Ryan Holiday (cited in Lewis, 2009) once described a magazine that understood itself as the most admired and influential gay-interest publication of the last decade. Yes, it’s by, for and about homosexuals, you’ll find slightly gritty naked guys, sometimes even photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans, and—believe it or not—interviews (isn’t that also the trick with another glam magazine like Playboy?) with glamorous stars like Gore Vidal or Mark Jacobs.

Partnering with photographer-cum-fashion-designer-cum-artist Hedi Slimane and filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, brand alliances with AceHotels and American Apparel, and the unique visual concept (recycled, pink paper, black and white photographs that follow the intimacy of a photo album) may add a twist of glamour. But our interest in Butt is derived from another, a more fundamental aspect: photo spreads in lifestyle magazines normally look like their ads. With Butt, it was the other way around. As Butt didn’t have a marketing department, advertisers like Adidas or Tom Ford kept approaching them on their own with ads that fitted the magazine’s style (see Fig. 6). And if advertisers didn’t have any pictures that shared the Butt aesthetics, then it was the Butt designers who created (logo) ads for those clients.

Fig. 6
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Adidas advertising in Butt magazine

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Such an approach integrates content and advertising into one experience and stands in sharp contrast to hundreds of other well (and sometimes even over-) designed magazines, in which advertising still follows its own CD-standards and so pollutes the media product’s/brand’s aesthetics. Our small, pocket-sized gay quarterly that transformed into an internet only magazine in 2013, stood out of the crowd when they replaced visual pollution through ads (Serres, 2008) by a kind of glamorous media art. Such a post-heroic gesture of cooperation and coordination (between the magazine makers and its sponsors/advertisers) fulfills the advertiser’s and the magazine’s aesthetic responsibility and paradoxically leads to a heroic result: the perception of glamour!

7 About Logos and Holos! Comments on (Brand) Identity

Together with several cultural critics we argue that identity is not assumed in the depth of a personality, but is based superficially—on “the glamour of the modern personality” (Ferguson, 1999, p. 11). Such a façade-only interpretation of identity justifies an expression of (brand) personalities in superficial signs, in brand elements or secondary cues that could elicit a punctum and a unique alluring appearance. Furthermore, such an identity is…

  • Probably borrowed—especially when we analyze (media) brands, as those normally appearing in the format of brand alliances. Take Kiefer Sutherland playing Jack Bauer in 24, a FOX production running on my Iad via the Netflix app: at least six brands (or branded products) compete for my attention and create my overall experience. All of those provide secondary associations (Keller, 1993) and create an opportunity for a glam component to rub off and be transferred to another brand (assuming that the brands, their products and overall images fitted together: Simonin & Ruth, 1998)

  • Liquid and dynamic. In a Baumanesque world, where nothing keeps its shape, and social forms are constantly changing at great speed and radically transform the experience of being human, identities—once being perceived or at least labeled as being stable, fixed, and consistent—will have to mirror the consumer’s obligation in (being) spontaneous and inconsistent (Bauman, 2004; Lipovetsky, 2005). Especially the visual system, once the most static brand component, is now redefined too: logos become holos, a holistic, flexible ID system that could count as the beating heart at the center of a brand (van Nes, 2013). Media brands like MTV, Google and AOL are the core exemplars of such a dynamization of superficial identity. Identities that count on a glam component will have also have to give way to looser and more provisional identities that are subject to constant change and renegotiation

How the brand identity, and its (glam) component are valued depends on taste and aesthetic norms: although glamour might be universal, its manifestations and perceptions vary from era to era, (sub-)culture to (sub-)culture, and person to person. Some people might perceive the elegant simplicity of an Apple or Braun appliance, a Prada costume or the Eso hotel Cerro Paranal as glamorous, others the baroque excess of Goldman Sachs, the Gucci style, or the Gramercy Park Hotel. For some Playboy, Paris Hilton and Pinterest might be glamorous; others regard them as vulgar or outdated media brands. And when glamour acumen and glamour literacy are not distributed equally, the aesthetic component’s share in the brand’s identity cannot be fixed.

Based on these observations I would like to suggest the following hypothesis:

Although identity is a surface phenomenon, is probably borrowed from other brands and is open for renegotiations, an identity needs commitment and authenticity to succeed.

To accept the dubiousness, ambiguousness and mysteriousness of a glam brand the audience probably needs the impression that the brand’s stature within that (glam) community is deserved (Holt, 2002). The brand should not be devaluated as a parasite that appropriates and exploits the glam culture, but be perceived as part of a movement. The most important and shining example of glam-esteem and authenticity is not a magazine called Glamour, it’s Condé Nast’s French edition of the Vogue magazine that is perceived as the voice of the fashion industry that best reflects (and coproduces) the cultural zeitgeist: as Vogue still enjoys its role of a “style guide, trend-former, and cultural weathervane” (Gundle, 2008, p. 379) it is still the magnet for fashion photographers, models, make-up artists, designers, and journalists. And an authentic promise to its readers to be part of a global glam culture.

In other words: it might be easy to create glamorous media brands but to produce real glamour is a challenging endeavor. It not only asks for aesthetic literacy and updated management tools but also for the belief that this status is earned, not just produced. This makes the glam component not just a supplement (Holert & Munder, 2004), but a strategic asset.