Thesis Title: 

Mediating the Non-Rational: Branding Consultants and the Role of Emotions in Marketing

Supervisors:

Dr Don Slater (Department of Sociology) and Dr David Pinzur (Department of Sociology)

Research Interests:

Cultural Studies, Economic Sociology, Sociology of the Body and Emotions, Marketing, Rationality, Political Theory   

Thesis Abstract:

My doctoral thesis aims to explore the connections between emotions, culture and economy within the framework of marketing practices. Specifically, this research constitutes an effort for deepening into the role of emotions in branding and its process of cultural mediation, focusing on the case of branding consultants in London.

I start from the premise that emotions are indispensable for the process of cultural mediation in branding, as the building of brand identities entails aligning specific material settings to emotional and symbolic resources. Therefore, I conceive of the role of emotions as an essential element for a sociological analysis of branding cultural mediation, as the elicitation of emotions through the building of brand identities constitutes an example of how culture is shaped through the work of practitioners related to cultural consumption and market devices.

I believe that assessing the role of emotions in marketing allows for problematising how non-rational mechanisms increasingly organise the embeddedness of the economy in culture in the context of contemporary capitalism.

Publications:

Arenas, N. (2020). De la aspiracionalidad a la circulación del deseo-capital. Reflexiones sobre la capacidad performativa de los publicistas en Chile. Actuel Marx/Intervenciones. Nº28.

Arenas, N. & Villanueva, J. (2019). La politización de la música pop y su relación con el contexto sociopolítico en el Chile posdictatorial. In: F. Arocena, M. Olaza & E. Sandoval (edit.) Sociología de la cultura, arte e interculturalidad. (pp. 235-254). Buenos Aires: Editorial Teseo