Брендинг как социальная система

Contemporary branding can be characterized as operating in a highly competitive, risk generating and uncertain environment. A dramatic rise in efficiency would involve auditing and refining its current marketing implementations. To help achieve this task, we suggest that branding builds a self-referential and self-developing social system which combines the order assigned to it by a managing subject with chaotic, intentional or spontaneous activities of the social actors that operate within the system. The outside world is thus a required correlative of the system’s self-referent operation. Particular brands and their clusters, as well as branding in general, function systemically. As the notions of ‘brand system’, ‘system of brands’ and ‘branding system’ are frequently confused, we suggest they should be construed as a communicative, managerial and social system respectively. In this triad, branding system emerges and operates in the competitive field in accordance with the initiative of the social actor that forces the brand promotion. Other social actors within the system can assist or hinder this process (whether intentionally or spontaneously), even though they may belong to the inner core of brand promoters. By pinpointing the functional nodes within the system and revealing the social actors behind it, we can predict and diagnose emergent infections and bifurcation points, and in that way exert social and informational influence over these actors to ensure the system’s stability or optimize its functioning. At the same time, the system’s response to the disturbance is often opposite to what the intuition has been predicting. Our analysis of branding is based on a number of contemporary theories in social science and thus abandons the traditional marketing approach to branding management. We offer a new theory of branding as a social management system that combines linear and non-linear circuits.