Brands and Urban Life

Abstract

While brands are recognized as salient features of the cultural and economic life of cities, the specificity of brands and their impact on urban life has been insufficiently analyzed. Drawing on recent branding theory, and taking the case of specialty coffee brands, this article considers the dynamic process through which these brands frame and co-generate a “third place” experience as part of the functioning of the brand interface and creation of brand value. It highlights the role of consumers in this process, tracing the ways in which they routinely conduct third place social interactions, construct hospitable space, and establish patterns of social relation on the platform of the brand. It is argued that the emergence of an “urban café sociality” characterized by specific forms of togetherness and (limited) modes of belonging is a productive effect of the interactive interplay between brands and consumers in everyday urban life.

Keywords

brand branding coffee third place urban culture sociality

Introduction

Encountered on buses, bodies, and busy city streets, brands are now a salient feature of contemporary cityscapes and urban life. Their ubiquitous presence has been amplified in recent years with the proliferation of flagship retail stores, corporately sponsored skate parks, and other leisure spaces, as well as the branding of urban villages. The growing significance of brands in the city is related to a complex of factors, including but not limited to the rise to prominence of the symbolic economy in what has come to be known as the entrepreneurial city and the centrality of consumer culture in this shift, as well as the concurrent emergence of the brand as a powerful market cultural form (Cronin & Hetherington, 2008; Lury, 2004; Zukin, 1995).¹

Urban analysts have drawn attention to the intensification of brands in the cultural and economic life of cities. For example, studies have underscored the trend in branding cultural quarters marketed to middle-class urbanites (Bell & Jayne, 2004; Binnie, Holloway, Millington, & Young, 2006). Writers have flagged the selling of “naming rights” and use of place sponsorship schemes to advance urban development (Hannigan, 1998; Jayne, 2006). Analysts have emphasized the involvement of brands in the production of new spaces of consumption and “urban entertainment destination” zones (Cronin & Hetherington, 2008; Hannigan, 1998; Zukin, 2004). Moreover, recent work has focused attention on the issue of urban branding, which has become “a necessary cultural strategy” of image enhancement against a background of competition for investment, tourists, and “creative” workers (Greenberg, 2008; Zukin, 2008).

While such accounts indicate the growing prevalence and significance of brands as constituent features of the city’s consumptionscape, on the whole, the specificity of brands and the ways in which they shape experiences of urban life remain largely unexplored. This does not mean that urban analysts are not concerned with the impact of branding on urban life. Zukin (1995, 1998), for example, has suggested that the visual framing of urban space by commercial means, such as the brand, has important implications in terms of the colonization of space and commodification of public culture. A limitation, nonetheless, of Zukin’s account is that it does not provide a sustained analysis of brands. Of the studies that do focus squarely on branding, such as Greenberg’s (2008) account of brand New York, there remains a lack of empirical work regarding the ways in which brands are encountered and used by urban dwellers, which, I argue, is crucial to understanding how brands shape experiences of metropolitan life and urban cultures.

In this article, my aim is to contribute to such analyses by drawing on recent branding theory and extensive empirical research to consider some of the ways in which brands, as particular and distinctive cultural forms, are spun into the fabric of urban life. My main contention is that this is a dynamic process in which brands frame and co-generate experiences of everyday life and forms of urban sociality as part of the functioning of the interface and creation of brand value. To consider this issue, I take the case of specialty coffee brands Starbucks and Second Cup, using data extracted from an extensive empirical study on the production and consumption of the brands conducted in Toronto and Vancouver over a period of 3 years.² The project used three main qualitative research strategies, including participant observation of both Starbucks and Second Cup branded cafés, semistructured interviews with over 60 producers and consumers of the brands, as well as a visual analysis of various brand materials. Focusing on a particular kind of brand in a specific context, this study offers a situated account of brands in the city, based on a recognition of the diversity of brand forms and their contingent cultural impact.

In the first part of this article, I outline some of the major theoretical approaches to branding and establish the framework that informs my analysis. I then introduce the case of Starbucks and Second Cup brands, outlining their specificity as experiential brands expressed through the coordination of a themed servicescape. In the next section, I consider the dynamic interplay between the brands and their consumers, charting how the brands enable the co-creation of an urban “surplus sociality” that consists of a set of social relations, a shared aesthetic, and a sense of belonging (Arvidsson, 2006, p. 13). At the same time, the limitations of such brand-based socialities will be underscored.

Understanding Brands

For the most part, urban studies that refer to brands follow predominant conceptualizations that focus on the visual and discursive dimension of brands, understood as semiotic, signifying devices constructed in distinct “brand factories” to create meanings for products, places, or services (Kellner, 1995; Klein, 1999; Myers, 1999). In this view, advertising is perceived as the main vehicle for communicating the brand, which is conveyed primarily through visual representations, including the visual framing of space in the form of flagship stores (Klein, 1999; Moore, 2000). Reflecting this approach, for example, Klein (1999) suggests that Starbucks cafés can be understood as three-dimensional ads, forming a channel through which the company sends the brand into the culture (Klein, 1999). In addition to advertising, a range of secondary marketing strategies are deployed (brand, extension, and placement) to create associations between the brand and particular social and cultural experiences. While these associations are constructed in the “representational realm,” a key aim of branding is to take them out of that realm and “make them a lived reality” (Klein, 1999, p. 29). This would involve consumers “buying into” the ideas that are conveyed by the brand, using these as a template for the symbolic fashioning of identities and lifestyles.

Critical proponents of this model assert that the brand, a form of commodified, abstracted culture (culture as a way of life flattened out and condensed into image form), mobilized in the interests of corporations and capital, contributes to the colonization or displacement of everyday “real” life (Burkett, 1998; Klein, 1999; Zukin, 1995). Referring to the brand indirectly, Zukin (1995, 1998), for instance, is concerned with the symbolic framing of urban space by commercial interests and means, suggesting that those with the power to produce a vision of public culture also define it: “those who create images stamp a collective identity” (Zukin, 1995, p. 3). In particular, she illustrates how New York’s privatized Bryant Park and Sony Plaza create commoditized images that “dominate the collective imagination . . . [t]hey have exhausted the imagination of what public space can be: it is a vision of civility, bounded by commercial consumption” (Zukin, 1995, p. 262). This approach is also apparent in Greenberg’s (2008) recent work on the rise of brand New York. She demonstrates that the brand is shaped according to the vision of a political and economic elite and managed by powerful private–public coalitions to achieve certain neoliberal political and economic goals. Considering the significance of city branding, Greenberg (2008) contends that the rise of the symbolic economy and emphasis on the brand has propelled the image to a position of “unprecedented prominence in economic and social life,” declaring that “with the ever more sparkling illusion of the autonomous image, deeper shadows are cast on the real, human world outside” (p. 33). In other words, the image supersedes everyday realities and concerns as it takes center stage in the configuration of city life. This process does not occur without a struggle, however. As Greenberg points out, the brand is subject to contestation and resistance through various counterbranding campaigns.

Overall, this view considers the brand as an image or idea that is constructed by corporations or other elite groups and imposed on audiences in a one-way, top-down manner. In this sense, it resembles an older model of the cultural industry and a narrow conception of media based on the broadcast system. Brands are encountered as already formed (though constantly reworked) media messages or texts to be “read”—as hegemonic ideas that consumers either “buy into” or resist by engaging in image-oriented cultural politics (e.g., Kellner, 1995; Klein, 1999; Myers, 1999).

Alternatively, various brand theorists have begun to consider the brand in material, spatial, and relational terms, presenting a conceptualization of the brand as a complex media object (Arvidsson, 2006; Lash, 2002; Lury, 2004; Yakhlef, 2004). A key proponent of this approach, Lury (2004, p. 1) describes the brand as “a set of relations between products or services [italics in original].” Formatted through a dynamic, ongoing process of design and extensive use of information, she posits the brand as “a platform for the patterning of activity, a mode of organizing activities in time and space” (Lury, 2004, p. 1). A meeting point between consumers and producers, it organizes a two-way, though asymmetrical “exchange of information,” which is “a matter not merely of qualitative calculation, but also of affect, intensivity and the re-introduction of qualities” (Lury, 2004, p. 7). The brand, in this view, is premised on a more interactive new media model, in which information flows are not simply one-way but are multidirectional. The brand operates as an interface of communication through its functioning—through the mobilization of a pattern of activity. In this way, the brand is constituted as performative; it is something that does and is recognizable in its doing; its objectivity is an effect of its performativity (Lury, 2004). Not only performing as intended, the brand is considered a “complex, indeterminate or open object”; it is an object of possibility—a processual, virtual object always in the process of becoming (Lury, 2004, p. 51). Configured as open-ended, the brand is also relational, in the context of an increasing relationality of contemporary objects (Knorr Cetina, 2001), which more and more “exist not only as things-to-be-used but also as things-to-be-related-to and things-to-be-transformed” (Lury, 2004, p. 130). Brand performativity, then, involves a process of relationality among the products and/or services it organizes and with its broader environment, which includes consumption and everyday life.

A key point of distinction between the representational approach to the brand and this more performative, virtual view is the involvement of consumers in branding. Consumers are not considered as audiences or readers, but rather as users and co-creators (Arvidsson, 2006; Lash, 2002; Lury, 2004). This approach to branding posits a much more active, constitutive role for consumers in the performance and production of the brand. Consumer information and activity is central to branding processes and the emergence of the brand, which relies on consumer involvement (Lury, 2004; Zwick & Denegri Knott, 2009). As Arvidsson (2006, p. 8) suggests, the brand operates as a “propertied ‘frame of action’” that enables consumers by “empowering them in a particular direction.” It no longer stands in for products, but provides a framework for their use: “With a particular brand I can act, feel and be in a particular way” (Arvidsson, 2006, p. 8). Consumers are encouraged to use the brand to create social identities, experiences, and meanings with the framework it affords. In this context, the aim of contemporary brand management is to guide such activity so that it falls within the parameters of the intended brand image, a key source of which consists of what consumers “do with the brand in mind [italics in original]” (Arvidsson, 2006, p. 7).

This conceptualization of the brand has significant implications for understanding the relationships between brands and urban life. What is now central is the creative, though tightly managed interplay between brands and urban dwellers, through which brands are both performed and spun into the lives of urbanites. According to this approach, the issue is not a matter of whether brands are colonizing or displacing “real” urban cultures, but rather how such cultures are configured in particular ways through interactive processes and joint performances—as an effect of the productive overflowing of the framing of economic and cultural activity by the brand. I use this approach to move beyond notions of the brand as representation and consider the following questions: How are brands configured to enable the generation of common social worlds? How are certain meanings and experiences of urban life constituted in the dynamic interplay between consumers and brands? How do forms of urban culture unfold on the platform of brands? To begin this analysis, however, it is first necessary to introduce the brands, Starbucks, and Second Cup.

Starbucks and Second Cup Brands

Now the advertising is not what’s important, it’s more about the experience. The building of the brand is really about your experience. The way you build a brand is one experience at a time, fulfilling the expectations of each consumer every time. (Greg³, Second Cup management)

Starbucks and Second Cup were both introduced in the 1970s in the cities of Seattle and Scarborough, respectively, each in the form of a retail store selling high-quality coffee beans to a small target market of discerning middle-class consumers for home consumption. From this initial format, the brands have both evolved to their current, predominant expression as a streetfront café premised on the provision of customized, gourmet coffee in a stylized, social coffee house setting. While they share many similarities, the brands are distinguished by the way they organize, label, and present their specialty coffees, the coffee lingo they introduce to their customers, as well as the use of interior design (which I discuss in the following section). Starbucks is also more global in scope than Second Cup, which is predominantly located in Canadian cities. Moreover, Second Cup is based on a franchise format in which each café is individually owned and operated, whereas Starbucks has followed a corporate model of control. Both brands have expanded tremendously throughout the 1990s and 2000s, contributing to the shape of both the specialty coffee market and café culture in cities across Canada.⁴

Starbucks and Second Cup can be defined as “experiential brands,” a term that is used to describe those brands that, “in conjunction with their corporate-sponsored symbols and products, offer consumers distinctively themed servicescapes, designed to facilitate certain kinds of hedonic/aesthetic experiences and social interactions” (Thompson & Arsel, 2004, p. 632). Servicescaping is a particular form of “brandscaping,” which involves the organization of space by the brand, including the coordination of elements such as location, architecture, interior design, and atmosphere to invoke a complete aesthetic experience (Lury, 2004). Such brand spatialization, following Thrift (2009), can be understood as a kind of “atmospheric installation” intended to generate “enhanced sensory experiences” among consumers (pp. 234, 72). According to Moor (2003, p. 45), this progressively widespread marketing strategy allows for a more “proximal relationship between consumer bodies and brands,” in which affective, experiential connections can be established (Moor, 2003, p. 45). Indeed, as Moor points out, consumer experience is “increasingly both the object and medium of brand activity” (Moor, 2003, p. 42). Specific brand experiences are shaped through the use of theming—a technique that provides a framework for the organization of environments in such a way as to establish a unifying image or experience (Lukas, 2007, p. 1). As the marketing literature suggests, theming is key to creating experiences that are engaging, rich, and memorable (Pine & Gilmore, 1999). It works through the identification of a particular theme, as well as a set of impressions and cues that will convey that theme, using this inventory to guide the process of design (Pine & Gilmore, 1999).

Framing a “Third Place” Experience

In the case of both brands, Starbucks and Second Cup, the café servicescape is configured to invoke a “third place”–themed experience. The third place is a notion described by Oldenburg (1989) as an informal gathering place between work and home where people meet and engage in a range of social interactions, from an exchange of glances to conversation. It operates as a kind of public space, resembling a town square where people can commune and associate outside their individual residences. It is marked by a sense of playfulness, community, and camaraderie. Reflecting this formulation, Lynn, a marketing director for Starbucks Canada, related, “I like to think of the cafés as the third place so customers have their home and their work, and Starbucks is, and for a lot of people, the third place that they go to.” There are three main ways in which brand engineers construct a third place experience. These include the use of interior design and décor, the integration of local community, and the formatting of baristas to perform third place qualities.

Interior Design and Décor

Orchestrating a “tactile space of information” (Lash, 2002, p. 148), café space is coordinated through the use of earth-toned palettes, velvet sofas, slate fireplaces, and hand-blown fixtures to convey qualities such as warmth and sophistication, and to invoke a relaxed, third place atmosphere. The precise colors, textures, and finishings vary between the brands. For example, Second Cup uses a deep, espresso brown to suggest the warmth of coffee, while Starbucks draws on a series of palettes reflecting the four elements (earth, water, fire, wind). Such distinctions help to define the boundaries of the brand. As Lynn remarked, interior design is configured “so that when anybody walks into a Starbucks they feel and they know that they’re in Starbucks, so that’s where the colour palette, the design, the label really comes into play.”

The third place ambiance is reinforced through assemblages of lighting, smells, and the controlled introduction of music, which is carefully selected to generate, as one Second Cup franchisee put it, the café “groove.” Furnishings and objects are also arranged to encourage third place social interactions. For example, leather club chairs set in pairs and Parisian café tables configure intimate meeting spaces. Fashionable couches facing the fireplace invoke a laid back attitude. Meanwhile, objects such as newspaper stands and books suggest an interactional space of conversation and cultivation of ideas (Thompson & Arsel, 2004). As Julier (2005) suggests, these design objects play an important role in the “designscape” since they help to “activate” the way a space is narrated or themed.

In many ways, these themed environments build on a historical coffee house tradition, whereby “early coffee houses and cafes are credited with having nurtured the intellectual, artistic, and political spirit of innovation that characterized the modern city” (Cormack, 2008, p. 372; also, see Laurier & Philo, 2004). Contemporary cafés, nonetheless, foster a more privatized form of sociability. They are designed to encourage intimate conversations and anonymous exchanges rather than the open public discussion commonly associated with the idealized (bourgeois) cafés of the past (Gaudio, 2003).

Implicating Local Community

A third place vibe is further framed through the implication of community in the servicescape. The cafés include community bulletin boards where individuals and local groups can post (preapproved) messages. They also incorporate local references into café design, which, while largely standardized to ensure a consistent experience across time and space, is flexibly formatted to adapt to specific sites. Thus, Starbucks cafés often display artwork by local artists, while Second Cup franchises incorporate murals and designs that reflect their immediate surroundings. For example, a Second Cup café in Toronto’s entertainment district features menus framed by film reels and movie posters altered to convey coffee themes (Audrey Heppuchino, Latteman Returns). As a Second Cup brand manager explains,

the feel of the café, the personality is what we call it, that personality should cater to its community. We’re not McDonalds, we’re not cookie cutter, we think because a café is so personal, you have to cater to the personality of the community.

In line with such “glocal” design strategies, situated urban settings are literally incorporated through use of architecture and real estate. For example, café patios open onto city sidewalks, while the use of large windows both separate and connect urban streets and interior café space, blurring inside and outside environments. Furthermore, the coordination of café location prioritizes urban streetfront sites in lively quarters and gentrified neighborhoods, the characteristics of which are mobilized to frame a third place environment. Using these place-based branding techniques, as Pike (2009) suggests, the brands are intricately “entangled” in local geographies and urban communities.

Baristas

The device of theming is also used to “performat” the cultural work of labor (Adkins, 2005). This involves a process wherein “workers are trained in the stylistics of performance and moreover a particular performance or consumer interface is attributed to specific brands” (Adkins, 2005, p. 123). As Witz, Warhurst, and Nickson (2003) point out, this “labour of aesthetics” is particularly prominent in new interactive services such as boutique hotels, cafés, and restaurants, where it “forms a vital part of the aesthetics of service organization as it is experienced by customers” (p. 50). In the case of Starbucks and Second Cup, baristas are trained to convey stylized third place qualities such as friendliness (through small talk), hospitality (being inviting, welcoming), and recognition (remembering favorite beverages). For example, former Starbucks barista and manager Liam discussed Starbucks’s 3-minute interactive service model, explaining that

They encourage conversation that makes the people feel that they belong there, that makes you feel like you know them, or they feel like they know you . . . so they want that interaction, especially if it makes people feel belonged, they want sense of community in the coffee shop. They still want it to be quick, and that efficient . . . it has to be conversation that’s moving along.

Liam relates how Starbucks’ baristas are skilled in efficient, interested conversation designed to foster feelings of belonging and invoke a “sense of community.” Though less strictly prescribed, Second Cup staff are also required to smile, express consideration, and be friendly toward consumers to make them feel appreciated.

Recognition of regulars is especially promoted by both brands, since it generates an ongoing relationship with consumers and encourages brand loyalty. As a Second Cup franchisee in downtown Toronto explained, the “sense of community developed with the people who work here as well as with the customer” is “obviously a huge part of how we maintain our business.” Attributed to the brand, the aesthetic labor of baristas is thus vital to the establishment of affective connections with consumers and forms an important part of the brand experience and, ultimately, value.

While Starbucks and Second Cup orchestrate a third place experience through the organization of a themed servicescape, it is only through consumers’ active, embodied participation that it is realized. As Arvidsson (2006) indicates, “brands do not so much provide ready made experiences, as much as they enable the production, or co-creation, of an experience” (p. 35). Consumers are invited to interact with and qualify (see Callon, Méadel, & Rabeharisoa, 2002) the information conveyed by the café as they enter, order beverages, and potentially linger in the branded space. They are encouraged to draw on the hints provided by the brand to constitute shared meanings and third place experiences in an “act of co-creation” (Arvidsson, 2006, p. 80). In this process, consumers are implicated in the co-performance of the brand, or what Second Cup’s marketing director refers to as “living the brand,” helping to realize its identity and value-in-use as it is spun into their everyday lives. In what follows, I consider how consumers engage and interact with the café servicescape, focusing on the ways in which this embodied interplay not only performs the brand but also shapes and co-generates experiences of everyday urban life.

“Your Social Life Is Here”: Co-creating a Third Place Experience, Constructing Urban Socialities

I walk into the Starbucks and it feels, um, sort of neighbourly, friendly and small. You get the feeling that the staff is working in conjunction and they’re all . . . Starbucks has the feel that there’s a great group of people behind there that are working together, they feel sort of responsive. It has more of a sort of café-type people hanging around talking about whatever, politics, current events.

This remark was made by regular Starbucks consumer, Jeff, who associates Starbucks with what can be considered a third place experience characterized by camaraderie and a sense of community. As Jeff observes, this experience is constituted as much from the café environment and performance of baristas as it is from the autonomous social activity of consumers. This observation was affirmed by the participant observation sessions and interviews I conducted. In this section, I outline how consumers co-create the brand experience by engaging in third place social interactions and the circulation of hospitality. In this process, consumers establish patterns of social relation and co-produce what I refer to as an “urban café sociality.”

Third Place Sociability

The co-performance of a third place sociability by consumers was apparent in my observations of the branded cafés. Picking up on the cues afforded by the brands, consumers were seen hanging out on leather couches and lounging in club chairs while they relaxed with friends, read the newspaper, or tapped their toes to the music. Seated at café tables, lone consumers occupied themselves with a range of playful, artistic, and intellectual activities from writing to drawing or surfing the Internet. Patrons performed dialogic interchanges with the café staff and conversed with friends or business clients. In the open-concept space overlooking the street, consumers engaged in an exchange of glances with other patrons and passersby. While some consumers made brief appearances during a coffee break at work, others spent a significant amount of time in the café or sitting on the patio just “watching the world go by,” as a Second Cup patron in his 60s put it.

While for the most part consumers engaged in third place exchanges as intended, not all consumers participated so straightforwardly. Certain social performances exceeded brand design and confounded the expectations of regular consumers. For example, Monica, a Second Cup consumer in her 30s with young children at home, recalled,

One time I was here reading, and all of a sudden this table of middle-aged women came in, ten of them, that had just been to see “Puppetry with a Penis.” So they were laughing their heads off, and so it was, it was really funny, and actually I interacted a bit with them. But generally speaking it’s annoying because I was there just to be in my own little world almost.

Large groups such as this, including what some interviewees referred to as “yummy mummy” gatherings (involving a group of middle-class mothers, strollers, and babies) were portrayed by interviewees as “taking over” the café space. Not conforming to the spatial design privileging intimate meetings, these groups had to rearrange furniture in order to convene. And while engaging in third place social exchanges, they were of the communal sort that did not comply with the private performances anticipated by most of the consumers I interviewed. What this suggests is a degree of variability in the third place experience that is co-generated in the interplay between brands and consumers. Particular alterations depend on the specific patrons that inhabit the space at any particular time of day or location (whether the café is in the financial district or a suburban neighborhood, for example).

Hospitality

Key to enacting a third place sociability is the circulation of hospitality, which forms an important part of the café ambiance and context of action. As Starbucks consumer Cherie, an urban professional working in downtown Toronto, explained,

They’ve made an environment where it is really comfortable to stay and actually spend time socializing; your social life is here. When I was studying, I used to take a laptop to Starbucks and sit there in one of these chairs and work all day, and I would spend five hours, six hours working . . . I can’t think of anywhere else where you would feel comfortable ‘cause the staff actually want you to be there.

Shaped through hospitable expressions, Starbucks is a space where Cherie feels “at home” away from home. The welcoming environment allows her to “sit there for hours” while she studies, reads, or meets with friends. It enables her to “spend time socializing” with other patrons, who are also encouraged to linger and engage in a range of third place activity.

Hospitality is particularly extended by employees who are trained to be welcoming hosts. This is not a utilitarian hospitality based on the straightforward provisioning of food or drink with minimal interaction. Rather, baristas perform aesthetic labor to convey hospitableness, which is embedded in entertaining social interactions and involves an emotional dimension (Lugosi, 2009). Such hospitality, however, is conditional and is secured through a purchase. This is insightfully observed by Kamala, a young urban professional who works in the publishing industry in Toronto:

You never feel that pressure of having to get out, even if you’ve finished your cup of coffee because you have the empty glass, there’s space that you’ve bought with it you could stay. That’s probably the biggest selling point of coffee houses, they’re places you can stay a long time.

As Kamala indicates, consumers display coffee cups or other purchased products (or their remnants) as evidence of their right to hospitality. This norm is mutually respected among staff and consumers, whose recognition of this right contributes to the co-creation and perpetuation of the “hospitable space” that characterizes the café (Lugosi, 2009). It is through both the performance of employees and recognition of consumers that hospitality circulates as a shared “situational ethic” that informs social relations in the branded café (Lugosi, 2009). It is integral to the co-production of what Second Cup consumer Kevin, a teacher in his 30s, described as “this patient, relaxed, civilized, comfortable atmosphere where people are polite and they can sit for a long, long time, and there’s no rush, and friendliness.”

Urban Café Sociality

While co-performing a third place experience, consumers create certain patterns of social relation and modes of gathering, contributing to the emergence of what Arvidsson (2006, pp. 10, 13, 80) refers to as a “surplus sociality”—a “common” social world that also serves as a main source of brand identity and value. More specifically, consumers co-generate what might be captured in the notion of an “urban café sociality,” consisting of particular ways of being together in the city, of engaging in relations of strangership and friendship.

For many consumers, one of the main attractions of going to Starbucks or Second Cup is that the brands provide a way of being with others while remaining anonymous. This was an integral aspect of many consumers’ social lives, particularly those who worked from home or lived in single-person households. For example, Rita, a single woman in her 50s who frequents Second Cup, explained, “Well I think it is important as a way to get out of my apartment, to be less isolated. So even though I’m not socializing very much, it’s still a social thing, because I’m with people.” For consumers like Rita who do not necessarily want to engage in face-to-face conversations, but prefer to observe and be around others, the cafés provide a social ambiance they can blend in with.

Alternatively, many consumers use the cafés to engage in interpersonal relations: to cultivate friendships, conduct business, or meet Internet dates. The circulation of hospitality is particularly important for the latter, as it relieves either date from being the host or guest. For example, Jessica, a university student and Second Cup consumer noted that

it’s just a nice place to meet with other people cause you’re kind of on neutral territory, you can arrive when you want, you can leave, you’re not at someone’s house so you don’t feel obliged to be the host or the guest, play either of those roles.

For these consumers, the cafés comprise a meeting place where they connect with friends and acquaintances. This does not mean that patrons always go to the same café in a manner similar to that depicted on the television show Friends. Based in New York, a key setting of this show is a neighborhood café in which a set group of friends regularly hang out together. While this is the case for some consumers, many interviewees, especially those who live in the large city of Toronto, frequent cafés in various locations to convene. For example, Starbucks consumer and stockbroker Paul maintained, “Well, a lot of my social life is around meeting people at Starbucks. When I’m meeting people, it’s like where’s the nearest Starbucks in Toronto where I can meet people.” Serially reproduced and preformatted to guarantee a consistent third place ambiance, the branded cafés enable consumers such as Paul to foster and maintain connections with friends dispersed across the city or even in different cities. In this way, the brand interface is analogous to new media forms such as the mobile phone or platforms such as Facebook that facilitate social networking. These media are used to co-perform patterns of social relation that are increasingly spread out across distance and various sources of activity rather than tied to local neighborhoods.

Co-produced by consumers on the platform of the brand, this urban café sociality shapes the ways in which certain city dwellers relate, gather, and simply be together. It constitutes the basis of a café culture that has become an important part of many urbanites’ social lives and experience of urban life. Not simply imposed on consumers, it is an effect of the processual interaction between consumers and brands, blurring distinctions between commodified commercial and “real” everyday cultures, production and consumption, and objects and subjects, which are not separate, but mutually constitutive.

“Living the Brand”: Embodied Performances, “Brand Belonging,” and Urban Orientations

In this section, I further explore how the alignment of brands and consumers—the intersection between brand and biography—productively shapes experiences of urban life. In particular, I consider how consumers “live” the brand through embodied performances and everyday practices and show how this routine engagement engenders a sense of belonging and provides consumers with familiar ways of orientating themselves in the city.

Routine, Embodied Performances

Configured as third places in between home and work, the branded cafés are designed, through the use of spatial location and rhythmic “ordering devices” (Amin & Thrift, 2002, p. 17) such as opening and closing times, to intersect with consumers’ familiar routes and routines of work and leisure. In this way, patrons’ third place performances are bound up with everyday customs and embodied practices. Consumers interact with the brands as they engage in bodily routines of going to work or taking the children to school, and while they conduct ordinary rituals of reading the paper on weekends. This was the case for John, a postgraduate student and former (independent) café manager, who told me that he liked to “plan rituals around getting my coffee and it’s not the same if it’s not Starbucks.” As he explained,

Well in the mornings (pause) I have a little dog, and so now I remember when I got my place I was looking forward to getting up early and taking my dog for a walk and stopping at the Starbucks and sitting there for, you know, maybe fifteen minutes just thinking about the day and then taking him out to play. And so that’s sort of, kind of, a moment in your day.

The establishment of various embodied rituals around the brand such as getting ready for the day or recharging after a cultural event is an important way in which consumers such as John organize their ordinary lives. Lury (1996, p. 12) indicates that the “use of material things—consumption—is a key aspect of ritual processes” through which people create meanings, establish social relations and make sense of everyday life. Woven into routinized practices, rituals, and activities, the brands “come to life” for consumers as they perform “a place of it in their own life histories” (Peňaloza, 1999, as cited in Arvidsson, 2006, p. 80). At the same time, engaging with the brands in a habitual manner and through embodied routines, consumers “live” the brands; their customary activity is bound up with the ongoing production of brand experience and identity.

Familiarity and “Brand Belonging”

Performing an experience of the brands as part of their everyday lives, regular consumers establish a familiarity with the third place environment and brand culture. Patrons learn how to comport themselves, ascertaining how and what to order, the manner in which to socialize with others, as well as the activities they can carry out in the café. This embodied “knowingness” or “cultural capital” (Bourdieu, 1984) enables consumers to engage with the brands at ease and generates a sense of belonging, or what one consumer referred to as a kind of “club feeling.” For example, Marie, a researcher who regularly goes to Second Cup for her coffee breaks expressed how she feels at home with the brand:

I feel really at ease, even when I’m in a shopping mall or something, like when I see a Second Cup I’m like, ahhh, like, there’s my home, always like, because I just feel so comfortable with Second Cup. I know what they have, I know what I want from them. And especially when it’s so part of my [work] routine, like during the weekends when I go to a mall and I see a Second Cup it’s almost like I’m back to my routine now, like it’s almost like that. I don’t need a coffee when I don’t need to work during the day, but I just like the sight of Second Cup, when I see it, and it’s “oh yeah, okay, I’m alright.”

Bound up with her work-a-day routine, Marie has established an affective connection with the brand, which makes her feel “alright” whenever she sees and experiences it. This relates to Thrift’s (2009) concern for urban dispositions, of the ever more “explicit engineering of affect” through the use of “sensory design” and devices such as the brand (pp. 235, 245). Indeed, Marie’s connection or feeling of belonging with the brand shapes the way she orientates herself physically and emotionally; it grounds her as she moves from work to weekend routes and routines across the city. This is not a fixed belonging, however, to a specific neighborhood café, but a mobile belonging to the brand. Second Cup anchors Marie, providing her with a feeling of being “home” away from home, even when away from her regular café.

Consumers indicated that a sense of belonging is also enacted through social recognition. This involves recognition of and by café employees to varying extents, depending on their level of involvement in a particular café, as well as the “café-type people” consumers encounter. This does not mean that consumers necessarily know other consumers personally, although this also occurs. Rather, interviewees referred to a more fluid, dispersed category of consumers that they recognized and felt comfortable with. As Joanne, a nursing student in her early 30s, pondered,

Why do I feel like this is my coffee shop, like this is where I fit in or I’m most comfortable . . . it’s like cigarettes. Players Light people go to Tim Hortons, like that’s the kind of person. Players Light people don’t really come here. People with Dunhills, DuMauriers, Matinees, they come here . . . there’s always going to be one that you fit in more with, but as soon as you recognize a group as being connected to something, then you are connected to them in a way because you recognize them.

As Joanne indicates, she feels connected to the people she encounters at Starbucks with whom she shares an experience in common. This brand-based experience suggests similar values and meanings, and shapes patterns of living, comprising a source of “commensality” among consumers (Bell, 2007). Joanne’s comments resonate with Laurier and Philo’s (2004, p. 8) observation that certain “crowds” inhabit particular cafés, and that “for us to like a café, to adopt it, and develop commitment to it will involve the café having a particular crowd that we can feel we have a relationship with.” However, here it is not a matter of specific cafés, but particular brands around which crowds gather. These crowds can be understood in terms of what Shields (1992, following Maffesoli, 1996) describes as postmodern “lifestyle tribes.” Characterized by a shared aesthetic, ethic, and custom, such social groupings are more liquid, ephemeral, and multiple in contrast to conventional neighborhood-based third place communities (see, Maffesoli, 1996).⁵

Feeling “At Home” With the Brand: Urban (Dis)orientations

Such “brand belonging” shapes where consumers feel at home away from home; how they dwell in particular spaces in the city. It provides patrons with familiar ways of orientating themselves culturally and affectively in their everyday urban lives. It also facilitates connections to others that consumers feel comfortable with and share an experience in common. However, this does not mean that the possibility of belonging and feeling at home in such urban social spaces is available to all. In particular, the third place experience described here is only accessible to those who can afford the entry fee. People who do not regularly participate in the cafés, especially low income and working classes, are marked as “different” and are not recognized. This is evident in the following observation by Nancy, a regular Starbucks consumer in her mid-20s who commented, “when the poor walk in off the street I always kind of feel like something’s, like that thing from Sesame Street, one of these things doesn’t belong here.”

Such exclusions are not only related to the cost of participation but also the design of the third place environments, which are made to resemble middle-class living rooms with Ikea-like furnishings, modern artwork, and trendy music. Predominantly middle-class consumers recognize themselves and feel comfortable in such spaces, which are also already inhabited by working professionals, University students, and middle-class urbanites. These upscale, branded environments enable certain people to feel at home while alienating others who do not fit in. Limiting possibilities of recognition, belonging, and feeling at home through participation in the café servicescape, the brands mediate and facilitate the co-creation of exclusive “spaces of belonging” in the city (Morley, 2000, p. 4).

Conclusion

Various urban analysts have expressed concern regarding the implications for urban life of the rise to prominence of the symbolic, or rather, cultural economy. Indeed, a plethora of accounts have drawn attention to the ways in which urban space and cultures are being reconfigured through a concern with “the making and distributing of images” for cultural consumption (Cronin & Hetherington, 2008; Hannigan, 1998; Jayne, 2006; Zukin, 1995, 1998). However, few of these focus specifically on brands, which play a significant role in this process. As such, the aim of this article has been to consider some of the ways in which certain brands affect everyday urban life and shape urban cultures in particular city settings.

In order to accomplish this, I have argued that it is necessary to move beyond conventional approaches that posit a narrow view of the brand as a hegemonic, commercial image and representation constructed through processes of visual framing. Instead, I draw on recent branding theory that considers the brand as a processual entity that emerges through the performance of a pattern of activity and consumer involvement. According to this approach, consumers are not simply receivers or readers of brands, but are incorporated as interactants, informants, and even co-creators. Using this framework, I have argued that brands do not simply colonize or displace “real” urban cultures, replacing them with otherwise “inauthentic” commercialized corporate realities, as proponents of the former approach have indicated. Rather, I suggest that brands provide platforms on which hybrid urban forms of life unfold in particular and often unpredictable ways. More specifically, I have attempted to demonstrate that certain kinds of urban sociality and experiences of urban life are constituted as a productive effect of the embodied interplay between brands and consumers.

I have illustrated this argument by presenting an analysis of specialty coffee brands Starbucks and Second Cup, based on a detailed, empirical investigation of the brands and consumer engagement in the cities of Toronto and Vancouver. Drawing on the cues provided by the brands, consumers conduct social interactions, circulate hospitality, and construct a third place sociability that does not completely conform to brand design. In this process, consumers perform their social lives and maintain social networks, which are bound up with the social life of the brand (see Appadurai, 1986). In particular, I emphasized how patrons construct ways of being together in the city, co-generating a surplus sociality that characterizes urban café culture. Integrated into everyday urban routes, routines, and patterns of relation, I suggested that some consumers establish close connections with the brands. This provides these patrons with a sense of (mobile) belonging and shapes how they orientate themselves affectively, spatially, and relationally in the city. However, it is clear that the brands are targeting certain groups of consumers more than others, co-creating exclusive spaces of belonging, dwelling, and sociality.

Based on this analysis, I suggest that brands are being spun into urban life in ways that are much more complex and profound than indicated by conventional, representational analyses. Not simply a text to be read and reflexively contemplated, brands are something consumers do, embody, and live. They are embedded in urban dwellers’ everyday lives through their performance in the construction of shared meanings, experiences, and social worlds. It is important to reinstate that such forms of urban life are not straightforwardly the product of calculative, commercial imperatives and processes of framing. As Bell (2007, pp. 7-8) has suggested in his work on commercial spaces and hospitality, places such as the branded café not only afford spaces where people can “eat, drink, or socialize,” but are rather “spaces for the forging of a new (or renewed) modes of urban living.” By analyzing the interplay between consumers and specialty coffee brands Starbucks and Second Cup, this article provides insight into the dynamic, embodied ways in which such “modes of urban living” are forged. In particular, it highlights the emergence of an urban café sociality, which is serially reproduced across branded sites, and characterizes a now widespread café culture in the Canadian cities of Toronto and Vancouver.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Susan Frohlick and Liz Millward for reading earlier versions of this article and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, as well as the research participants and cafés that hosted me during the research.

Author’s Note

Versions of this article were presented at the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Annual Meeting, the British Sociological Association Annual Conference, and the Joint Annual Meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society and the North Central Sociological Association.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Sonia Bookman is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Manitoba, Canada. She obtained her doctoral degree in sociology at the University of Manchester, England. Her research interests include branding, consumer culture, and urban life. She is currently working on a research project that explores the branding of the Exchange District, a cultural quarter in the City of Winnipeg.

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