Asian Brands and the Shaping of a Transnational Imagined Community

We investigate how brand managers create regional Asian brands and show how some of them are attempting to forge new webs of interconnectedness through the construction of a transnational, imagined Asian world. Some branding man-agers are creating regional brands that emphasize the common experience of globalization, evoke a generic, hyper-urban, and multicultural experience, and are infused with diverse cultural referents. These types of regional Asian brands con-tribute to the creation of an imagined Asia as urban, modern, and multicultural. Understanding this process helps one to appreciate the role of branding managers in constructing markets and places. Brands are constantly helping to create new identitiesand social positions for consumers. For example, the production of global brands has helped diffuse the idea of global consumers connected through the consumption of the same brands (Holt, Quelch, and Taylor 2004). Brands allow people to feel connected to a sphere larger than their im-mediate environment, partaking in what McLuhan (1964) foresaw as the “global village. ” Brands mediate new kinds of social relations, enabling connections between people who may have never seen each other yet come to share a sense of moral responsibility toward the brand and the com-munity to which they perceive themselves as belonging (Muñiz and O’Guinn 2001). As Geertz (2000) points out, the increasing number of economic, political, and cultural interconnections has helped expand the “catalogue of avail-able identifications ” (225), drawing new identities such as the global consumer (Alden, Steenkamp, and Batra 1999) or the Mediterranean consumer (Cova 2005). We study the *Julien Cayla