Nisa Bayindir

In a consumer culture, people no longer consume for merely functional satisfaction, but consumption becomes meaning-based, and brands are often used as symbolic resources for the construction and maintenance of identity.
 
The consumer is engaged on a symbolic project, where s/he must actively construct identity out of symbolic materials, and it is brands that carry much of the available cultural meanings.
 
Social and cultural theory has paid much attention to the ‘aestheticization of social life’ because it is widely assumed that the techniques used by individuals to perform their identity concern aesthetic or cultural practices and, these performative aspects of the self increasingly constitute cultural resources or cultural capita.
 
Within consumer culture, there's a new conception of self that is the ‘The Performing Self, which places greater emphasis on ‘appearance, display and the management of impressions’.


...In today's digital ecology, culture, brands and Self identity are intertwined, feeding off each other cyclically. Consumer psychology and behavioural sciences offer fresh perspectives for meaningful and profitable engagements for brands by integration of these disciplines in brands' research and strategy lifecycles.
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