Thesis Title: 

Branding consultants and the instrumentalization of consumers’ emotions: an inquiry into the rationality at stake in marketing practices

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 research analyses branding consultants’ discourses regarding emotions and their role in branding. Specifically, it examines how consumers’ emotions are instrumentalised for marketing purposes in the context of branding processes. I argue that this entails scrutinising what Foucault would denominate as the "form of rationality at stake" in the conceptualisation of consumers in emotional terms. Precisely, the techniques, strategies, and knowledge involved in the construction of the consumer subject as an emotional entity, as well as the procedures to frame and label people’s experiences as "emotional" in commodification processes and consumption practices.

The empirical work involved conducting in-depth interviews with branding professionals to comprehend the procedures that enable them to build and promote brands through the instrumentalisation of the emotional world of consumers. I argue that the form of rationality that guides these processes in branding is grounded on an essentialist understanding of the human condition and the ways in which emotions influence the production of meaning. This is expressed in branding practitioners’ tendency to universalise specific human experiences to build customer loyalty, based on the idea that emotionality constitutes the essence of humanness and that emotions possess an epistemic status regarding the meanings that a brand embodies. 

Publications:

Arenas, N. (2025). Emotion and Humanisation in the UK Branding Industry. In: L. Edwards et al. (eds.). The Sage Handbook of Promotional Culture and Society. London: Sage. Pp. 3-16. 

Arenas, N. (2023). Eliciting Emotions as Cultural Mediation: Advertising and the Non-rational Space between Culture and the Economy. Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios sobre Cuerpos, Emociones y Sociedad 41(15): 89-100. 

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