Title: Why do brands cause trouble?
Description: Brands are today under attack by an emerging countercultural movement. This study builds a dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding that explains the rise of this movement and its potential effects. Results of an interpretive study challenge existing theories of consumer engineering paradigm of branding, premised upon a consumer culture that granted marketers postmodern consumer culture, which is premised upon the pursuit of personal sovereignty throughbrands. I detail five postmodern branding techniques that are premised upon the principle that brands are authentic cultural resources. Postmodern branding is now giving rise to new contradictions that have flamed the anti-branding sentiment sweeping Western countries. I detail these contradictions and project that they will give rise to a new post postmodern branding paradigm premised upon brands as citizen-artists.