Extract

Traditionally, both the business and research worlds have posited direct links between products and place: Hollywood films, Paris fashion, and Swiss watches. It has been thought that regional and industrial success can at least partly be explained by mutually reinforcing effects: a locally embedded industry adds to the brand and vice versa. In this chapter, we argue that this view does not fully explain the 'origins' of products nor does it explain fully how origins embed a place. We explore the notion that the 'origins' of products can be considered to be 'collective brands' with considerable power. As such, they are built up in a dialectical relationship between product industries and their places. Understandings of the connections between products and places could benefit from thinking about the role and geographies of 'brand channels' (Jansson and Power 2010) in which brands are constantly worked on. These brand channels are the spaces and conduits for the messages and various iterations that brands rest upon. However, just because the brand is about one place does not mean that the channels are constructed and transmitted locally. Rather, we argue that it is important to think of brand channels as being rooted in a relational space where brands are constantly reworked and renewed in global circuits (Sassen 2002).