Origination: the geographies of brands and branding

Brands are increasingly recognised as prominent entities imbued with meanings that stem well beyond signifying a consumable object. Associations evoked by and assigned to a given brand can be interpreted, deconstructed and reconstructed to form an array of ideoscapes that permeate and at times drive transformation of the lived experiences of consumers and fabrics of societies (e.g. Eckhardt and Mahi 2004; Schroeder and Salzer-Mörling 2006; Izberk-Bilgin 2012; Scaraboto and Fischer 2013). Among these, brands’ place associations – i.e. meanings construed through a brand's links to actual or imaginary locations one conjures up in mind (Papadopoulos et al. 2011) – continuingly receive much attention from marketing research. However, whilst acknowledging the complexity of the notion of place concept, majority of the extant research so far focused on national place associations and their role in consumer–brand relationships (e.g. see Heslop and Papadopoulos 1993; Askegaard and Ger 1998; Papadopoulos and Heslop 2003; Balabanis and Diamantopoulos 2004, 2008; Herz and Diamantopoulos 2013a, 2013b). In Origination: The Geographies of Brands and Branding, Andy Pike masterfully unpacks this gap in our understanding of brands and their meanings and offers the concept of origination as means for a more critical theorisation and study of multifaceted spatial dimensions of brand meanings. The book is part of the Royal Geographical Society–Institute of British Geographers series from Wiley.