A critical account of the process of branding: towards a synthesis

Echoing the shift in orientation from transactional to relationship marketing (Gronroos 2006), the debate over the process of branding has moved from a managerially closed to a socially open orientation (Pitt, Watson, Berthon, Wynn and Zinkhan 2006) creating a multidisciplinary intellectual puzzle. In light of the ‘limit attitude’ approach in critical marketing (Tadajewski and Brownlie 2008), this paper attempts to make sense of this puzzle through a critical examination of the evolution in branding thought. The paper concludes by developing a synthesis, through a constructed tree metaphor, which conceptualizes the multidisciplinary process of branding within a single organic (holistic and integrated) framework.