Branding the manifesto

Abstract

Brand manifestos are one of the most recently advanced and popular guises of the manifesto form. Presented in heterogeneous formats (printed, outlined on websites, or as images, podcasts and videos), they constitute exemplars of contemporary brand management. Based on a content and thematic analysis of online discourses that attempt to define the genre and of Apple’s paradigmatic brand manifesto ‘Here’s to The Crazy Ones’, in this article I aim at developing a comprehensive understanding of the form and content of contemporary brand manifestos. My findings demonstrate how brand manifestos recast traditional profit-oriented marketing practices by conjuncting the ‘ideology of the gift’ with discourses of the avant-garde. Following a ‘gift logic’ that can be viewed as fundamentally embedded into a ‘brand logic’, brand manifestos aim at manifesting the inalienable ‘spirit of the brand’ and at creating mutual relations of reciprocity by means of commercial exchange. Moreover, I argue that at a broader level the appropriation of the unconventional and creative connotations of the traditional manifesto form renders brand manifestos into a distinctive subgenre of a larger capitalist marketing discourse, premised on a revolutionary avant-gardist rhetoric that can be labelled as ‘manifesto marketing’.

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