On “Brand”—Whether a Semiotic Marketing System or Not

Abstract

Problems of definition and conceptualization have plagued the word “brand” for longer than any reader’s professional memory. Conejo and Wooliscroft have recently addressed this issue in their creative and radical Journal of Macromarketing article challenging especially the American Marketing Association’s official definition of brand. The following note offers response to the central content of the authors’ framework and discusses derived semantic and conceptual concerns, while endeavoring to contribute to a coherent and viable understanding of the brand construct and its surrounding conceptual system, but from a different posture than their approach. Unless a generally accepted understanding of the elemental brand term and construct is settled upon, shoring up our field’s conceptual underpinning, one large part of the body of marketing theory will remain ethereal.