BRAND NEW

I have grown up with Cheerios, and Cheerios has grown up with me. When I was young, the cereal promised me muscle and "go power." Now that I am middle aged, it is, I am assured, good for my heart. There are other ring-shaped oat cereals, but Cheerios is a tradition, and I am willing to pay more for it than for generic brands. General Mills charges almost $4 a pound for the cereal, when even grain-fed beef is selling for less.

Cheerios, then, is a brand— part mythology, part relationship, part image, and, oh yes, part oats. A brand can offer satisfactions greater than the sum of the product’s parts. All of us spend much of our lives consuming things. Brands offer a way to organize this consumption and give it meaning.

Branded products have existed for centuries, but the late 1990s was a period of brand mania. The value of brands was thought to greatly increase stock prices. Established brands stretched into new areas—it seemed that Nike’s swoosh and Coca-Cola’s dynamic ribbon would soon appear on everything. And individuals were urged to develop not simply a personal identity but a brand identity.

Brand.New is a product of this enthusiasm, a coffee-table book sprinkled with substantive essays by academics and others, prepared in conjunction with an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. There may seem to be something odd, decadent even, about so lavish a book filled largely with the commercial imagery that many of us see every day. Still, there are images you may not have seen before. The pink room filled with Hello

Kitty paraphernalia—including wallpaper, appliances, countless toys and games, and a chair—and the rather solemn mother and daughter who collected all this sweetness make for a scene I won’t soon forget.

In writing that ranges from abstruse to zingy, the essays summarize current thinking about the mechanics and meaning of consumption. More complex conceptions have replaced the Veblenesque notion of the consumer who buys to catch up and the Vance Packard view of the consumer as dupe. Critics now contend that people choose what they buy as a way of defining and understanding themselves and their society. Goods are a kind of language, and contemporary arguments turn on whether the language fosters or limits human expression.

Strikingly, the book says little about branding per se. Essays allude to how corporations manage and modify their brands, but not to how brands are most accurately valued, or how some brands have been successfully extended and others have not. If branding is a kind of language, we don’t hear much from the native speakers. The title, with its dot-com period, makes a pretty good book about theories of consumption, a well-trod field, seem like something unique and exciting: an up-to-theminute study of branding. In other words, it does the job of a brand.

—Thomas Hine