Browsing by Subject "Branding"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Branding Environmentalism for TV: The Rise and Fall of Planet Green
    (2015-08) Zimmerman, Heidi
    This dissertation analyzes the rise and fall of Planet Green, Discovery Communications Inc.'s short-lived multiplatform, environmentalism-themed media brand. Launched in 2008, Planet Green billed itself as "the first 24-hour network devoted to the green lifestyle."� It promised to "bring green to the mainstream"� with a full lineup of environmentalist lifestyle and reality television, environmental news and documentaries, and two websites with a wide array of eco-games and quizzes, consumer advice, DIY projects, an open-ended discussion forum, and short-form videos. But despite a huge and successful launch and a significant programming budget, by 2012, Discovery announced that Planet Green would be cancelled and replaced with Destination America, a male-targeted lifestyle network aimed at a "between the coasts crown,"� said Discovery spokespeople. With shows like BBQ Pitmasters, United States of Food, Fast Food Mania, and Epic RV's, the new channel offered a kind of macho celebration of patriotism and consumerist excess that seemed to applaud the very things that Planet Green cautioned viewers against. My dissertation argues that Planet Green's rise and fall must be understood at the place where contemporary branding meets neoliberal governmentality. It was structured by the simultaneous industrial impulses to "govern through television"� on the one hand, and to maximize profits in an increasingly competitive cable TV market on the other. When it came to branding environmentalism in particular, these simultaneous impulses were in deep conflict and generated a great deal of anxiety among industry insiders. I show that Planet Green took shape in a manner designed to ease these anxieties through branding. In the end, however, even with Discovery's extensive resources and professed commitment to the environment, Planet Green was unable to overcome the tensions between profits and planet saving.
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    "Down in the Treme": media's spatial practices and the (re)birth of a neighborhood after Katrina
    (2012-08) Morgan Parmett, Helen
    In this project, I take the HBO series Treme (2010-present) as a case study for theorizing contemporary relationships between media, urban space, and raced and classed geographies. I argue that textual analyses of media's representations of city space and place, which comprise the bulk of contemporary scholarship on media and urban space especially as it relates to New Orleans and questions of race, are not sufficient in understanding the work of media in contemporary cities, and in post-Katrina New Orleans, in particular. Treme does not just represent race and place in New Orleans, it participates directly and materially in the rebuilding of the city and its marginalized neighborhoods by soliciting practices of community and neighborhood engagement, city branding, tourism, employment, and historic preservation. HBO also enjoins viewers to participate in the rebuilding and revitalization of the city by eliciting the spatial practices of viewers in the form of tourism, ethical consumption, and utilizing online interactivities to create emplaced material communities. Moreover, city and cultural policy, as well as HBO branding efforts, are aimed at fostering these kinds of interactions and spatial practices. Treme is therefore literally helping to drive, create, and intervene into the city that it represents, putting the spatial practices of media production and its viewers to work in ways that present solutions to racial, class, and spatial antagonisms made manifest in the Katrina event. This project therefore aims to contribute to media studies of city space by theorizing Treme as a spatial practice in the neighborhood. Treme provides a poignant case study that enjoins scholars to go beyond the text to consider the broader and more material aspects of HBO's original programming as well as in how media intervenes into particular city sites. It thus brings into focus the innovative ways in which both media and cities are increasingly articulating themselves to each other in the neoliberal city and provides some possible tools for media scholars to analyze those articulations. Theorizing media as a spatial practice, I consider how Treme participates materially in the production, governing, regulation, and organizing of urban and media space at the present conjuncture. I query how the series provides a vehicle for both cultural and economic revitalization and renewal in post-Katrina New Orleans, and I ask what this means for media scholarship on cities when the media industry takes up a role in the transformation of lived, material, and vernacular urban space?
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    NFL Films and the re-production of Pro Football
    (2010-07) Johnson, Thomas C
    The choreographed work of NFL Films in their first documentary, They Call It Pro Football (1966), offers a fitting case study in which to examine the construction and promotion of pro football in the 1960s. Using techniques of textual analysis and social/cultural historiography, I investigate the representational dynamics of pro football in this film. In order to explicate the ideological, sociological, historical, and cultural significance of the film before, during, and after its release, I describe the emergence in the twentieth century of pro football and television, proffer the view that televisual texts perform cultural and political work and are open to multitudinous readings, apply the theory that gender is socially constructed and performed, and draw upon the concept of “emotional branding.”
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    Perceptions of Power in Brands and an Investigation into Market Dominance
    (2016-06) Stoner, Jennifer
    This dissertation outlines a new construct, brand power, to help to explain psychological and behavioral reactions to brands. A variety of constructs from psychology such as values and personality have been applied to brands (Aaker 1997, Torelli et al 2012.) These constructs have helped to not only illustrate the attributes of various brands but also to study the reactions of consumers to various marketing actions. Power is a commonly used construct in psychology but has yet to be applied to brands. This is somewhat surprising given that power is pervasive in social psychology research and the terms “powerful brands” are regularly used by business publications. This research attempts to not only understand the dimensions by which consumers perceive power in brands but also the nuances associated with a brand possessing or lacking each of these dimensions of power. This dissertation consists of three essays. Essay 1 provides a conceptual overview of brand power and reviews four proposed dimensions of power in brands. Additionally, this essay reviews three studies which validate the four dimensions of brand power and develop scale items to measure each of these dimensions. The second two essays then delve into the dimension that is one of the most pervasive in marketing, market dominance. Essay 2 begins to explore how consumers perceive market dominance in brands. Essay 3 then continues the exploration of brand dominance by researching the impact of communicating market dominance on a brand.