Journal of Business Research 70 (2017) 441–442

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Business Research

Brand Networks as the Interplay of Identities, Selves, and Turtles: Commen

tary on “Interplay between intended brand identity and identities in a Nike
related brand community: Co-existing synergies and tensions in a nested system”
Robert Kozinets ⁎
University of Southern California, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This commentary emphasizes the networked nature of brands. Brands are identities, and identities are meanings.
Received 1 June 2016 Meanings are always embedded in networks of association. Therefore, all understandings of brands are necessar-
Received in revised form 1 June 2016 ily vast, complex, and incomplete, especially in the contemporary age of branding.
Accepted 1 June 2016
© 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Available online 5 September 2016

Keywords:
Brands
Ecosystem
Identity
Networks

In our favored version, an Eastern guru affirms that the earth is sup-
ported on the back of a tiger. When asked what supports the tiger, he
says it stands upon an elephant; and when asked what supports the
elephant he says it is a giant turtle. When asked, finally, what sup-
ports the giant turtle, he is briefly taken aback, but quickly replies
“Ah, after that it is turtles all the way down.” — Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia. “RAPANOS v. UNITED STATES”. Decision June 19, 2006.
Brands are identities: that's it. That may be all you need to know. But
identity, which is supposed to be simple, supposed to be the singular
thing that stands for something else, turns out to be not so simple at all.
For meaning is a network. And in a network, there are no singular things.
Everything connects to something, some closer, some further away. To
understand identity, to decode the brand, you need to map the network.
Identity and brand identity are rich, culturally fascinating areas. One
might think that much has been said about these topics; initially, I did.
Recently, I read with great interest, and enjoyed, “The interplay between
articulated intended brand identity and identities in a Nike related
brand community” by Niels Kornum, Richard Gyrd-Jones, Nadia Al
Zagir and Kristine Brandis. I am pleased that you will have a chance to
read this article as well. That article, along with some of my own think-
ing on the matter, helps me realize how much profound material there
is in this area of branding and identity. If you fashion yourself a cultural
scientist who is interested in brands and branding, as I do, it is a little
⁎ USC Marshall School of Business, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0808, United States.
E-mail address: rkozinets@usc.edu.
like being an archaeologist at the turn of the last century; if you are will-
ing to go to the right places and dig, there are limitless fields sitting
ready for your excavations.
More than that, really. Because it is as if we are archaeologists work-
ing at a time when the Egyptians and Mesoamericans are still building
pyramids, constructing more of them, experimenting with different
and better ones than ever before. Because today branding is steroidally
supercharged. Commercial and brand culture have never been more in
control of everyday society. The screens and screams of information
and communication technologies dazzle us virtually every single mo-
ment of every single day, increasingly feeding us with ever more com-
merce and neverending brand connections. And here we sit, dazzled
by what is happening all around us in the many commercial worlds of
online, media, retail, and workplace. But not really illuminated about
what is going on around us and behind the screens and scenes.
Certainly welcome are articles such as this one, which point out how
multifaceted and cultural a phenomenon is branding. Branding is not
mere external communication. It is not something internal, either.
Branding is a series of calls and responses compounded over pasts,
places, players, and platforms. Promises, too: modern brands are not
only promises of quality, consistency, and reliability, they are verbs,
ways of getting to what you want, to other things, to states of being,
to people, to values, to images of yourself. Brands are conveyor belts
upon which people place themselves. They are strategies in action,
both for the managers who control them and for the consumers who
surrender control to them in their attempts to control them.
Brands are emotional engagements, as Roberts (2004), Gobe (2001),
and the other “emotional branders” tell us (Thompson, Rindfleisch, &

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.06.020
0148-2963/© 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
442 R. Kozinets / Journal of Business Research 70 (2017) 441–442
Arsel, 2006). As sources of great emotional heat they also bring the light of
all sorts of relationships, as we know from Fournier (1998). Brands are as-
sociated with homes of many sorts. Brands like Coca Cola, Facebook, CNN
and IBM are stable hearths around which people gather, as Cova and Cova
(2002) and McAlexander, Schouten, and Koenig (2002) tell us. They root
us in historical eras, and help rewrite history into the present moment
(Brown, Kozinets, & Sherry, 2005). And with their flickering light, they
summon dark shadows in the night (Thompson et al., 2006). They
tempt, they seduce, they deceive, they delight.
How should we understand this complexity? The same way we un-
derstand the most complex phenomena in our world. In every way,
with every tool, every method that we can. As an anthropologist, my
toolkit favors cultural analysis. In this pursuit, I have a special pair of vir-
tual goggles that I wear which reveals cultural meanings. Not really. But
let's call the visual interpretation metaphors anthrogoggles, anyways.
So whenever I wear my anthrogoggles, I look at context in a non-
reductive manner. I try not to shout meanings down, to take shots at
them, to scare those little turtles back into their empirical shells so
that I can theorize what I want to theorize. No, I try to stay very still,
to focus my anthrogoggles, and to observe the play of meanings, values,
images, motifs, symbols, slang, representation, relationships, and every-
thing else that happens as it happens as a human being would sit and
listen and watch the turtle world evolve and unfold. Of course, I am
also and always watching myself, my internal states, my senses, my
own memories and meaning-making as things happen, as well. I am
very interested in what connects whom to what and what else.
Watching where my thoughts go. Watching which images go
with which other images. Watching where the turtles go.
The story I quote at the beginning of this article from Justice Scalia's
decision is a favorite. Scalia tells an Easternized variant of the story, with
a learned mystic being interrogated about the cosmological structure of
the universe. Often the tale is attributed to a little old lady with strange
views who, after a cosmology lecture confronts the great psychologist
William James with her story of turtles on even bigger turtles' backs.
Stephen Hawking and Clifford Geertz both wrote versions of the occur-
rence, and I am utterly convinced that Dr. Seuss was deeply inspired
enough by the metaphor to write Yertle the Turtle using it.
Studying brand meanings as they occur naturally, connected poten-
tially and actually, in networks, in multiple, linked, and qualitatively dif-
ferent and divergent contexts, then, is like studying the world on the
tiger's back on the elephant's back balanced on the turtle's back, who
is balanced on another turtle's back, and another's, with turtles all the
way down, endless. Maybe that is why anthropologists like that meta-
phor so much; I have heard it repeated a lot. Because all human context
is similarly endless: turtles all the way down.
So, when you set out to explore complex levels of identity construc-
tion, as Niels Kornum and his co-author do in their article, they set them-
selves up for a contextual issue of the highest order. Brands such as Nike
are commercial productions that reflect managerial intentions which they
mix with celebrity sports figures like Lebron James or Tiger Woods or
Roger Federer that become used by individual non-celebrities who hun-
ger for something more, some shred of attention and a sense that they,
too, are special, and then they use them in group contexts and with
other people such as in running groups and marathons and online, and
those groups and gatherings and communications become part of ongo-
ing conversations some of which feed back to marketers and academics
and other players interested in the system itself. We can play with these
ideas. They are an interplay. And where do they lead the authors of this
article? To see brands as part of “a nested system” that creates—actually,
that creates, manifests, and continuously, endlessly, transforms—the
brand. Nested systems—identities and collectivities stacked upon one an-
other, like turtles standing on one another, but also mutually determining
one another, and doing so with increasingly advanced communications
technologies and interlinked social systems, rituals, and pressures.
What is the foundation of the brand? Identity. One identity, leading to
another, and to another. Phil Knight to Nike to Michael Jordan to some
wild or weird Danish dude “stripping butt naked in public” during a social
NBRO event. Brands, identities, people, events, brands, identities, places,
moments, interconnected, interconnecting. Brand meanings, brand iden-
tities, brand rituals, all the way down. I am attracted to the idea of things
that are nested within one another endlessly as well as those which are
stacked upon each other, endlessly. I am intrigued by Koestler's (1978)
idea that social complexity echoes organic complexity, where the whole
at one level becomes the part at one level, endlessly. I am enamored by
Deleuze and Guattari's (1977) notions of transitional bodies without
organs, of eyes becoming hands and tongues becoming spleens, strug-
gling with the same old familiarity of habits and the safe comfort of the
familiar. Of assemblages of systems disconnecting and then reconnecting,
taking over new territories and giving up old territories, ceaselessly.
Are messages from marketers that fall upon deaf ears inconsistencies
in the brand? Can we really assume that the “genuine” message of a mar-
keting communication somehow get polluted on its path to the neural cir-
cuitry of the consumer? Have we not sufficiently embarrassed the signal
processing information theory of brand meaning transmission? Can we
discern that this is not mere signal transmission but the communicative
probabilistic universe of a network? The endless potential for connection?
So is it really anarchy, or can we perceive it as a higher level of order?
Maybe it is not order or disorder, but art. Maybe not even art, but culture.
What we seem to have is authenticity, the genuine human contact
that happens whenever people are put into the same space for long
enough without anything very specific to accomplish. People messing
around: human essence. It might be difficult for an economist to model
in any but the most childish regression experiments. But to an anthropol-
ogist, having some drunk dumbass running around at a brand-sponsored
event with his dick hanging out is not particularly special, not an interest-
ing bit of data, nor potentially significant, and not a very difficult type
of behavior from what we see with other male primates in captivity.
Sure, there is a network of potential and potentiating connections.
Brand meanings that lead to NKE stock, the Brand President's official po-
sition reporting to the CEO, Kevin Durant and Phil Knight, and whoever
else Nike sanctions. But it also leads to everyone who has ever owned,
worn, collected, touched, talked, or thought about Nike. Or might do so.
It touches retail outlets and retailers. Potential and actual commercializers
of brand symbols into money and product. Television programs and ten-
nis courts. Smartphones and videogames. And for each and every one of
them, from their perspective, with their input, the pattern is different.
Similar in some ways, but different in many others.
How do we deal with this level of complexity and dynamism? As
these authors do, by staring context in the face. By not burying it in
dead and dying theory but rendering its theory-image in warm tones
of living color. By drawing a careful portrait of its still-breathing human-
ity. By following its contextual vapor trails as they dissolve off into the
distance, one by one, each a potential conspiracy theory. By looking at
the nested ecosystem of identity within brand upon meanings within
context. Tracking them, counting them, until they recede into the dis-
tance. Turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way down.
References
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