That's quite a tall order for a shelf-stable chocolate drink, even one as delicious as Yoo Hoo. Once upon a time, the well-packaged brand was supposed to induce a kind of emotional frenzy in the consumer. In the 1990s, in a twist Packard would have relished, marketing history has veered off in a quite different direction. These days, it is the consultants, not consumers, who are in an emotional frenzy, driven to distraction over the psychodrama of the brand. Brand is not even positive attributes.
Brand is something very specific that the consumer produces.
The advertiser doesn't and can't and shouldn't. It's loyalty to the self. One might think the idea that the Self is constructed of Yoo Hoo and lollipops and cinnamon buns, that brands are truly constitutive in this real and deep-seated way, would be offensive to social scientists such as Deutsch, who presumably believe that individuals can discriminate between reality and illusion. But as market research comes to take on the character of therapy, such distinctions seem increasingly meaningless. If we are our own brands, as management guru Peter Drucker has theorized, then it follows that our brands are also us.