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BRANDING, CELEBRITIZATIONAND THE LIFESTYLE EXPERTTania LewisPublished online: 22 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Tania Lewis (2010) BRANDING, CELEBRITIZATION AND THE LIFESTYLEEXPERT, Cultural Studies, 24:4, 580-598, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2010.488406

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Tania Lewis

BRANDING, CELEBRITIZATION AND THE

LIFESTYLE EXPERT

The lifestyle expert � a figure whose knowledge is tied to the ordinary and theeveryday � has emerged as a major cultural authority in recent times. This articleexamines the role and status of ‘ordinary experts’, such as Martha Stewart andJamie Oliver, in relation to processes of ‘celebritization’ and branding. Linkingthese processes to broader shifts around the domestication and privatization ofpublic culture and citizenship, I discuss the branding of lifestyle advice in thecontext of the emergence of informational capitalism and the growing role of theconsumer in providing branded lifestyles with value and meaning. Arguing thatthe privatized modes of lifestyle consumption modelled by figures like Stewart andOliver have emerged as a pre-eminent site of social relations, communality andlifestyle ‘activism’, the essay concludes with a discussion of what kind of civicpolitics might emerge out of this context.

Keywords celebrity; popular experts; lifestyle consumption; brands;informational capitalism; consumer agency

Over the past decade, television around the globe has been marked by agrowing focus on teaching audiences, both men and women, how to manageand optimize their everyday lives through a seamless focus on food, homedecoration, health, style, grooming and more recently (as evidenced inglobally popular formats like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, The Biggest Loser andSupernanny) through making over the self and the family. This interest inintroducing audiences to the rigors of self-care and lifestyle management hasbeen accompanied by the emergence of a range of popular lifestyle experts,figures whose advice, in contrast to more traditional modes of expertise, isoften grounded in and focused upon the ordinary, the domestic and theeveryday. This article examines the growing celebritization and branding ofthese ‘ordinary experts’ (Lewis 2008a) � figures whose ‘first-name fame’in the case of Martha, Nigella and Jamie has seen their lifestyle expertisebecome thoroughly commodified and merchandized, a process perhaps mostspectacularly played out through the figure of ‘the living brand’ (Lury 2004,p. 93), Martha Stewart.

Cultural Studies Vol. 24, No. 4 July 2010, pp. 580�598

ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online – 2010 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2010.488406

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There is now an extensive literature on the role of celebrities as pre-eminent cultural authorities (Marshall 1997; Turner et al. 2000; Corner & Pels2003; Turner 2004; Evans & Hesmondhalgh 2005), much of which alsodiscusses the way in which other forms of authority (such as experts andintellectuals) have both been relatively marginalized by celebrity but have alsoto a certain degree become caught up in its logic. In relation to the realm ofpopular expertise, for instance, numerous scholars have turned their analyticgaze to the growing number of lifestyle specialists and domestic expertsappearing on primetime television, discussing their increasing influence andfocus on matters concerning the conduct of the self (Moseley 2000; Taylor2002; Hollows 2003; Palmer 2004; Attwood 2005; Bonner 2005). The crucialrole played by celebrity in relation to the cultural status of the lifestyle guru,however, remains relatively uncharted territory.

In this article I begin to explore some of this terrain by bringing together arange of previously disparate literatures on intellectuals, celebrity andordinariness, privatized citizenship, and branding. I discuss the ways in whichthe celebritization of expertise (via the figure of the lifestyle guru) can be seenas a marker of a growing convergence between a public sphere of commodityproduction and spectacle, and an intimate, private sphere of consumption andordinary everyday life. The increasingly central role played by branding andlifestyle consumption within the logic of popular expertise is central to myargument here; in particular I am concerned with highlighting the mutuallydependent relationship between branded celebrity experts as lifestyle rolemodels and the consumer imaginary in a context where information,entertainment, privatized lifestyle consumption and ethical modes of citizen-ship have become increasingly interconnected (see Lewis 2008b).

Celebrities as experts, experts as celebrities: the shiftingground of cultural authority

Traditionally, experts and celebrities have been thought of as existing inmarkedly different spheres of public life and linked to very different sets ofvalues and logics. Like the figure of the intellectual, experts (at least in theconventional sense of expertise) are associated with high culture as well as withthe modes of rational knowledge and techniques of social organization thataccompanied the rise of the modern state. In contrast, celebrity tends to beseen as co-extensive with popular and consumer culture, with ‘a mediatizedpublic sphere where entertainment is privileged over information, affect overmeaning’ (Lewis 2001, p. 234).

Despite this seeming opposition, these figures are historically linked to therise of modernity as well as to a series of tensions within modernity aroundquestions of power, social status and democratization. Nicholas Garnham

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(1995) notes for instance that the intellectual (and the expert) has from theoutset been marked by this central contradiction; while modernity hasprovided the basis for the democratization of knowledge at the same time it hashistorically put control of that knowledge into the hands of an elite few.Likewise in mapping out the historical emergence of ‘the public individual’,Marshall (1997) associates the birth of the celebrity with the emergence ofmodernity and its twin discourses of capitalism and democracy. Like the figureof the expert/intellectual, the celebrity ‘has come to embody the ambiguity ofpublic forms of subjectivity under capitalism’ (Marshall 1997, p. 4). That is,while on the one hand the celebrity is marked by privilege, on the other handthe ‘celebrity status invokes the message of possibility of a democratic age’(Marshall 1997, p. 6).

In representing two rather different types of cultural authority, the expertand the celebrity are both nevertheless characterized by a similar tension betweena claim to exceptional or elite status and a kind of public representativeness.However, while the public sphere has classically been the site where experts andintellectuals have reigned, the processes of populist ‘democratization’ andmediatization that have accompanied its growing commercialization have seenthe authority of traditional experts become relatively weakened as morefashionable figures of authority such as the celebrity take centre stage.

One way in which Frith and Savage (1998) contextualize the decliningcultural influence of intellectuals and experts (and as a corollary the growingpower of celebrities) is in relation to the increasing role of populism in thepolitics of the public sphere. Discussing in particular the seismic cultural shiftsthat took place in the UK in the 1980s under Thatcherism, they note thatpopular culture became the pre-eminent site where the politics of citizenshipand civic issues played out. During this period the popular media gainedgrowing power with the press working to construct the ‘people [ . . .] as amythical site of authority’ (Frith & Savage 1998, p. 11). This populist push sawa shift in commonsense understandings of political and cultural power andinfluence. As they put it, ‘[i]n broader cultural terms, the effect has been toelevate the authority of experience (valorized in much feminist and popwriting) over the authority of the intellect, and subtly to change what is meantby knowledge’ (Frith & Savage 1998, p. 13).

While Frith and Savage write about a very specific moment in recentUK history, the social and political shift that they map has considerablerelevance to contemporary Anglo-American political and cultural life underneo-liberalism more broadly. The line between the state and commercial/popular culture has become increasingly difficult to draw as the popularmedia sphere and the realm of lifestyle consumption become pre-eminentsites for the rehearsal of questions of politics and citizenship. In this populistsetting, traditional figures of authority and/or expertise have foundthemselves competing for media airtime with a range of other figures

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who have as much or more authority within the media sphere. Celebritiesespecially have become increasingly ubiquitous and influential. As figureswhose logic of identity is tied to the commercial fortunes of popular mediaand whose popularity is often strongly linked to the biographical and theexperiential, it is not surprising that celebrities have in many ways takencentre stage as the ‘new heroes’ of contemporary consumer culture(Featherstone 1995).

While celebrities have arguably always played an important role in publiclife, what is perhaps rather different today is that the way in which they can beseen to crisscross spheres traditionally associated with fame (such as acting,modelling, sport, etc.) as well as those associated with other forms of authorityor expertise (such as politics). It is increasingly commonplace to see celebritiesrepresenting various global ‘causes’ and meeting with prominent leaders on theworld stage or even moving into the world of politics itself. Within the hyper-mediatized public sphere, the ‘sign’ of cultural authority can be seen to havedeveloped a degree of equivalency and exchangeability. As Turner, Bonner andMarshall argue in Fame Games (2000, p. 11), ‘the distinction between celebrityand other kinds of social or political elite status is becoming less clear as thesigns of celebrity drive out less powerful alternatives’.

If celebrities now reign supreme where does this leave the figure of theexpert in modern life? How, for instance, does this explain the recentexplosion of expertise around lifestyle issues? Zygmunt Bauman (1987) hasfamously argued that more traditional forms of what he terms ‘legislative’knowledge and expertise have lost their potency in contemporary culturewhile Garnham (1995, p. 380) suggests that ‘the figure of the expert is now adeeply ambivalent one in our culture’. This does not mean, however, thatexperts no longer have currency today. Rather, and this is particularly the casein the realm of lifestyle media, it has translated into a radical reconfiguration ofexpertise along more popular (and putatively ‘democratized’) lines. In thisprocess the relationship between the celebrity and the expert is no longernecessarily marked by hierarchies and distinctions between experience versusrationality, popular and consumer culture versus the professional/govern-mental realm (although these oppositions still hold some residual power forcertain sectors of the population). Rather I would suggest that there is anincreasing overlap between these figures and that expertise today isincreasingly caught up in the logic of celebrity.

Celebritization and ordinary expertise

While the combined aura of celebrity and expertise enables popular experts topossess a considerable degree of authority and influence, media celebrity alsoinvolves being presented as a kind of exemplar of ‘ordinari-ness’. As Richard

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Dyer argued in his classic work on stars (1979, p. 39), stardom ‘combines thespectacular with the everyday, the special with the ordinary’. Marshall (1997)points out, however, that the ordinary is associated more with television as amedia form than with the film stars discussed by Dyer. As he puts it,‘[w]hereas the film celebrity plays with aura through the construction ofdistance, the television celebrity is configured around conceptions offamiliarity’ (Marshall 1997, p. 119). Following on from John Langer’sargument that � through the construction of intimacy � television producespersonalities rather than stars, Marshall argues that there is an ‘intenseemphasis on the familiar in television’ (1997, p. 122), a process that is tied inparticular to the kinds of modes of address that are possible on television.

At the risk of eliding the differences between the various forms andconventions of media fame, I would argue that this intimate or more familiarmode of celebrity is playing a growing role in public life more broadly. Evansand Hesmondhalgh (2005) usefully discuss this effect in terms of ‘celebritiza-tion’, that is, the process whereby growing numbers of public figures today,including experts, are increasingly framed in ways that make them moreaccessible, media-friendly and crucially more ‘ordinary’. They argue, forinstance, that politicians today are increasingly caught up in a process whereby,through various media techniques, their ‘aura of greatness and distance’ isreplaced by a sense of familiarity (Evans & Hesmondhalgh 2005, p. 45).

Television is, however, undoubtedly the pre-eminent site where this‘ordinarization’ of celebrity culture has been played out and it is no surprisethat the emergence of the ‘ordinary expertise’ is particularly associated withthis sphere. As Bonner argues in her book Ordinary Television (2003, p. 3),much of the television schedule is populated by forms of programming � frombreakfast TV to talk shows � that attempt to replicate the routine andfamiliarity of everyday life through ‘direct address of the audience, theincorporation of ordinary people into the programme and the mundanity of itsconcerns’. Lifestyle advice television (such as cooking and home renovationshows) and the figure of the lifestyle expert emerges out of and borrowsheavily from the codes, conventions and concerns of ordinary television. Manylifestyle experts are what one might see as personalities rather than stars �their ‘celebrity’ is limited and largely tied to a specific format or show whiletheir role is to produce a sense of familiarity and trust for the viewing audience(Bonner 2003, pp. 65�66). Figures like Jamie Oliver and Martha Stewart,however, possess a broader celebrity � one which enables them to move acrossa range of television formats and other media sites (as well as, in Oliver’s case,in particular some degree of mobility across national contexts), and that alsoinvolves a foregrounding of their personal lifestyles and biographies. Whilesome of these figures are charismatic and marked by an element of middle classaspirationalism (Nigella Lawson, Martha Stewart and What Not to Wear’s Trinny

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and Susannah are all ‘posh’ to various degrees), their brand of celebrity and ofexpertise is still first and foremost tied to the ordinary and the everyday.

A good example of this growing intersection between celebrity, expertiseand the ordinary can be found in a survey conducted in Britain where peoplewere asked which celebrity parents they would be most likely to choose togive them parenting advice (Home-Start 2006). Jamie and Jools Oliver sharedfirst place with the married hosts of the popular daytime magazine showRichard & Judy as most trusted celebrity parents, with Tony and Cherie Blaircoming in third (only just ahead of Ozzy and Sharon Osborne!). Both the twotop celebrity couples deemed most trustworthy here could be classified aslifestyle advisors or specialists. Jamie’s expertise, however, is of courseconnected to food rather than parenting while Richard and Judy are bothactors with no particular specialty knowledge in parenting or any other area oflifestyle for that matter. Both couples however are themselves parents whosepersonal and family lives feature centrally in their role as public identities (bothJamie and Richard and Judy are regularly referred to in the UK press asnational icons and/or institutions). And both sets of couples represent themore accessible end of the celebrity spectrum, through their familiar, ‘I’m oneof you’, mode of address and the domestic orientation of much of their advice.Their perceived trustworthiness and authority here then can be seen as beinglinked as much to their life experience (both in terms of success and failure)and accessible media personae as to their perceived expertise. While on theone hand, surveys like this suggest the growing difficulty of distinguishingbetween celebrity and expertise today, on the other hand, more crucially, theypoint to the way in which both the authority of expertise and celebrity isincreasingly tied to (once) private and personal sets of concerns and valuesaround the familiar and the domestic.

Intimate citizenship and lifestyle consumption

In his discussion of television’s preoccupation with representing ‘the ordinary’and the ‘close-to-hand’, Nick Couldry argues that ‘we have reached, it seems,the opposite of the society of the spectacle’ (2002, p. 291). The figure of thelifestyle expert in many ways can be seen as emblematic of this shift withincontemporary media culture. In contrast to the processes of alienation anddistanciation traditionally associated with stardom and spectacle, celebritylifestyle experts present us with images and modes of advice embedded in,rather than abstracted from, everyday life. Perhaps the pinnacle of thiscelebration of the ‘anti-spectacle’ are the ‘storage experts’ and cleaning gurusfeatured on shows like the UK’s How Clean Is Your House? and Life Laundrywhere the most banal and routine aspects of domestic life are on show. But

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how might we understand this relentless focus on the ordinary and the anti-spectacular � via the mediating gaze of the domestic expert?

Laurent Berlant’s (1997) notion of ‘the intimate public sphere’ offers auseful perspective on this foregrounding of domestic, familial life, and itsrelationship to the celebritization of public culture and the growing role ofordinary expertise. She argues that since the rise of Reaganite politics in theUS there has been a dramatic shift in how conceptions of the public sphereand of citizenship are now imagined. Habermas, as she notes, described theeighteenth century spaces of intimate, domestic life as sites ‘where personsproduced the sense of their own private uniqueness, a sense of self whichbecomes a sense of citizenship only when it was abstracted and alienated inthe nondomestic public sphere of liberal capitalist culture’ (Berlant 1997,pp. 4�5). Life today in the US (and in the neo-liberal West more broadly)has seen a conflation of these social spaces and of the privatized self and thecitizen. The centre of political life has shifted then towards the privatesphere with citizenship increasingly seen as being ‘produced by personal actsand values’, a process that Berlant sees as evacuating politics of socialstructural considerations while ‘[d]ownsizing citizenship to a mode ofvoluntarism’ (1997, p. 5).

It is not difficult to see how the figure of the celebrity lifestyle expertmight participate in this logic of privatized citizenship. In an increasinglylifestyle-oriented consumer culture, ‘big picture’ social and governmentalconcerns are reframed as privatized, individualized issues, with people’slifestyle ‘choices’ foregrounded as important sites of ethical responsibility andself-governance (Rose 1989; Rose 1996; Lewis & Potter 2010). As figures whocelebrate the home, for instance, as a site of creative productivity where onecan improve oneself and one’s lifestyle through mastering the art and aestheticsof the domestic, style gurus and makeover experts stand as particularlyprominent representatives of a politics that has seen a growing articulation andoverlap between the privatized realm of taste, values and lifestyle, and publicconceptions of the good citizen.

Their role as paradoxically ordinary types of celebrities, as markers of anti-spectacle and familiarity is again central here. While media coverage of figureslike Martha, Jamie and Nigella often discusses their public lives and woes �whether the focus is on the pressure of Jamie’s public work on his relationshipwith his wife Jools or the endless jokes about how Martha might havedecorated her cell while in prison � these concerns are invariably linked backto the domestic, to their intimate home lives and personal concerns.

Another critical element of this foregrounding of domesticity and theprivatized self is the increasingly central role of consumption in constructingmodels of good citizenship. Just as the social is increasingly conflated with theprivate, familial sphere, so too ‘productive’ modes of citizenship are more andmore discussed in terms of personal leisure and consumption, where an

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investment in practices of lifestyle consumption is seen as an investment in thecitizen-self.

In her discussion of ordinary television, Bonner (2003) notes the way inwhich its domestic and familial-oriented consumption practices are oftennaturalized and integrated with processes of citizen formation. As she puts it(Bonner 2003, p. 105), ‘[t]he objects and services that are the content of so muchof ordinary television, then, have a prime role in identity formation and its fine-tuning, but also in the production of the ordinary, civilized individual’. Lifestyleand makeover shows � in which practical modes of expertise are internalized as‘codes of conduct’ (Bonner 2003, p. 131) � are particularly central to thisprocess. As Bonner argues (2003, p. 214), much of ordinary television works toconstruct lifestyle and identity in terms of an ethics of consumption where‘[t]astes, practices and possessions are all seen to reveal the self’.

What lifestyle programming sells to the audience then is not just productsbut ways of living and managing one’s private life. The celebrity lifestyleexpert takes this process one step further � embodying and enacting models ofconsumer citizenship through their own much publicized and idealizeddomestic and personal lifestyles, which are played out across their variouspersonae as experts, celebrities and private selves. In relation to processes ofcelebrity endorsement, McCracken suggests that celebrities can be seenas ‘super-consumers’ (2005, p. 112). As he puts it, ‘[t]hey are exemplaryfigures because they are seen to have created the clear, coherent, and powerfulselves that everyone seeks’ (p. 112). But just as they are sites of trust,familiarity and stability, they are also marked by their ‘experimentation’ andcapacity for ‘self-invention’ (pp. 111�112).

Like the celebrity, the lifestyle expert also embodies both an idealizedmodel of selfhood and the promise of mobility and transformation but figuredspecifically through a reflexive, lifestyle-oriented mode of consumer-citizenship. In the next section of the article I examine this convergence ofprivatized consumption and notions of good citizenship through a discussion ofthe growing phenomenon of the lifestyle expert as a product endorser and abrand, with US domestic guru and lifestyle entrepreneur Martha Stewart � awoman who Naomi Klein refers to as ‘one of the new breed of brandedhumans’ (1999, p. 2) � providing an exemplary case study.

Branding domesticity with Martha Stewart

In David Marshall’s discussion of celebrity and power he argues that thecelebrity can be seen in semiotic terms as a kind of sign or text. ‘Celebritysigns represent personalities � more specifically, personalities that are givenheightened cultural significance within the social world’ (1997, p. 57). Thisintensification of meaning around the celebrity sign, means that celebrity

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experts like Martha, Nigella and Jamie (whether as live embodied televisionimages or printed names/faces/signatures on a product) can produce an instantset of associations.

This ability to condense a range of connotations into a specific sign enablesthe logic of celebrity to dovetail nicely with processes of commoditization. AsTurner, Bonner and Marshall put it (2000, p. 12), ‘[w]ithin a highly fragmentedbut increasingly globalised mass market, the use of celebrities has become a veryefficient method of organising cultural significance around products, servicesand commercially available identities’. They point out, however, that there aredrawbacks associated with using celebrities as marketing devices. One problemis that the very success and elite status that goes with their celebrity can alsomark them as somehow inauthentic (particularly in relation to the magical,labour-free way in which they are often seen as gaining success), andsubsequently a source of resentment (Turner et al. 2000, p. 13).1

The use of celebrity identities with specific skill sets to endorse relatedproducts and brands can be seen as representing an attempt by marketers toconfirm the authenticity of both the celebrity and the brand � a processmarketers describe in terms of brand synergy. As a figure who is a celebritybut whose status is tied to their (apparently distinterested) specialistknowledge of everyday lifestyle needs, the lifestyle personality would seemto offer a particularly potent site for brand synergy. Not surprisingly we areseeing growing numbers of lifestyle experts putting their names and badge ofexpertise to various products from homewares to wine clubs.

A number of more prominent figures have also sought to extend theircredibility as experts into the commercial realm through not only endorsingother companies’ products but also by producing their own products and (tovarying degrees) branding their own identities as celebrity experts, with theultimate example of branded expertise being the US lifestyle doyen andpopular cultural icon Martha Stewart. While figures like Jamie Oliver havealso developed significant commercial presences around their brandedproducts and identities, Stewart has taken the phenomenon of embodiedbranding to another level by building an extensive and diversified multimediabusiness empire around the brand name Martha Stewart Living (Omnimedia).

While according to Joan Didion, Stewart herself prefers to be known as‘a presence’ (Didion 2000), in press coverage and business news alike she iscontinually referred to in terms of her brand status (with more recent coveragenot surprisingly being particularly interested in the impact of Stewart’simprisonment for insider trading on the fortunes of her namesake trademark).At the same time, she is also strongly associated with the realm of the feminineand with a ‘genealogy of domestic advice’ that stretches back to the mid-nineteenth century (Leavitt 2002, p. 4).2 For instance, The New York Times oncedescribed her as ‘a latter-day Mrs Beaton in Armani’ (cited in Leavitt 2002,p. 204), while as Carol Stabile notes (2004, p. 323), she has also been

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variously referred to as ‘the diva of domesticity’, ‘the home-making diva’, ‘thedoyenne of domesticity’, ‘queen of artfully distressed home furnishings’, ‘theprincess of potpourri’, ‘the home-decorating czarina’, ‘the style maven’ and‘the domestic taste maker mired in an insider trading scandal’.

As one of America’s most successful businesswomen, ranking alongsidepower players in the entertainment industry like Oprah Winfrey and Madonna(Forbes 2007), Stewart has managed to combine her domestic expertise withhard-headed entrepreneurialism, packaging her persona as a domestic diva intoa lifestyle brand with broad appeal. Starting with a small catering business inthe 1970s and the publication of her first book Entertaining in 1982, shedeveloped a successful publishing career over the 1980s and was subsequentlyoffered a publishing deal with Time Warner for the magazine Martha StewartLiving (Armbruster 2004). While Stewart by this time had already attainedsome media celebrity through various television appearances on, for instance,The Oprah Winfrey Show, her rise to the position of celebrity icon and householdbrand began with a television show called Martha Stewart Living, which airedfirst on cable in 1993 and moved to CBS in 1997, where it rated as the mostpopular new syndicated programme (Mason & Meyers 2001).

Part of the success of the Martha Stewart brand has been her recognition ofthe importance of systematically colonizing the realm of domestic advicethrough working across a variety of media, with the Martha Stewart Living(MSL) brand having a presence across radio, television, magazines and theInternet. The widespread media dissemination of Stewart’s lifestyle expertisehas also involved further brand extension through, for instance, the sale ofStewart’s own ‘home fashions line’ through Kmart, under the name MarthaStewart Everyday, a ‘merchandizing relationship’ referred to by a number ofbusiness commentators as ‘Kmartha’ (Brady 2000).

Some of the gloss was taken off this ‘Martha mania’ (Brady 2000),however, when Stewart was charged with insider trading in 2002 andsentenced to prison in 2004.

As one commentator noted, when Stewart’s business experiencedsignificant losses over the affair, ‘[t]his is a textbook example of the fragilityof a brand invested in a human being’ (Li 2003). The paradox of celebrityendorsement and human branding here is that, while it seeks to embed itscredibility and authenticity in (the lifestyle and expertise of) an actual embodiedsubject, the relationship between the brand as sign and its original source or‘referent’ is variable and unpredictable � despite marketers’ attempts atcontaining and managing the meaning and image associations of brands.

Since her release from prison in March 2005, however, Stewart has gonefrom strength to strength. While her spin-off version of The Apprentice garneredpoor ratings, since September 2005 she has been hosting a new daytime talkshow, Martha, which blends interviews with celebrity guests and segmentsrelated to cooking, gardening and interior design, and which was nominated

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for several Emmy awards in 2006 and is now broadcast throughout the world.Meanwhile her business interests have not only quickly recovered � TheGuardian named her ‘the comeback queen’ (Burkeman 2006) � but she hascontinued to expand the reach of Omnimedia into new territory includingproducing a new magazine, Blueprint: Design Your Life, for women in their 30sconcerned with living ‘better and more gracefully’ (Burkeman 2006).

Stewart’s rapid recovery is no doubt in part due to the fact that Stewartand her spin doctors are masters of brand management, knowing when to drawupon the associations of the Martha Stewart brand in more subtle ways, as inthe example of Blueprint (where Stewart only features in adverts in themagazine, not in the editorial) as well as knowing when to link newundertakings directly to Stewart’s embodied persona. In terms of the latterapproach, one of the company’s latest ventures into the realm of brandextension � building Martha-branded communities � indicates the robustnessof the MSL brand while also confirming Stewart’s status as a leading rolemodel and authority figure in relation to taste and lifestyle. A sales launchcommenced in March 2006 for plots in the first Martha community to be builtin Raleigh, North Carolina, with plans ‘to build 1,800 Martha-inspiredhomes and assorted products in the coming months’ in new communitiesaround the country (Brady 2006). As one media report notes (Brady 2006),this push to build an entire community based around Stewart’s status andlifestyle as a domestic guru � the houses were inspired by the Stewart’s ownthree homes in New York, Maine and Connecticut � represents ‘a new level ofbranding’. While a Canadian housing consultant comments in the article thatOttawans are probably not ready to move into a Martha community theconsultant notes:

[e]verything and everyone tells us that people want to buy more than ahouse. They want to buy a neighbourhood, a community, a lifestyle. [ . . .]We are moving that way � the Martha way � in small steps in newneighbourhoods that have community centres. The US is way ahead ofus � partly because of its population. But maybe Martha is the next step inbranding a community.

From goods to brands: the rise of informational capital

While in Stewart’s case she represents an unusually prominent and successfulexample of branded expertise, like the numerous other expert-personalitieswho have moved into the realm of branding and celebrity endorsement, hersuccess is linked to broader trends in consumer culture today. Her rise reflectsin part a process whereby ordinary, everyday life is becoming increasinglyrationalized and colonized by modes of expertise that are inextricably linked to

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consumption processes. More broadly however it is linked to the rise of a newkind of consumer culture dominated by brand image.

A number of academic and popular books on brands have pointed to thecentrality of branding to contemporary culture (Lury 1996; Klein 1999;Arvidsson 2006). Naomi Klein (1999, p. 30), for example, discussing thegrowing difficulty of distinguishing between commercial interests andsponsored culture, notes that figures like Martha Stewart ‘now mirror thecorporate structure of corporations like Nike and Gap’. Where once there wassome ability to distinguish between the commercial world and the realm ofartistic, intellectual and expert culture, these spaces of relative autonomy havenow disappeared. As Klein puts it, processes of commodification have becomeso ubiquitous and commonplace that ‘[t]he idea of unbranded space [ . . .] hasbecome almost unthinkable’ (1999, p. 59).

The difficulty of finding some critical arena within a world of wall-to-wallbranding is compounded by the fact that the brand, unlike physical commodities �the cars, fridges and televisions of previous eras of consumer capitalism � existsin a kind of imaginary space. While consumer goods obviously still play acentral role in consumption, the rise of a culture of branding is linked to agrowing focus on symbolic and informational processes. As Lury argues, thebrand is to a large extent marked by its intangible, incorporeal nature � ‘it is aset of relations between products or services’ (1996, p. 1).

In an era of informational capitalism, value increasingly emerges less fromtangible commodities than from the symbolic realm structured through andaround the brand. What is crucial here about this shift is that this symbolicrealm is not cordoned off from the remainder of the social � rather as Kleinsuggests branded culture has imperceptibly started to merge with other formsof culture. As John Frow notes in his essay on the signature and the brand,commercial culture is increasingly borrowing from the logic of high cultureand aesthetics today (and vice versa) with the brand mimicking the aura andauthenticity of the authorial/artist’s signature (Frow 2002). We can start tosee then why the popular expert might come to take on a particularly centralrole in this context. While Martha Stewart may be thoroughly corporatized, ina realm of infinite, unbounded information, figures like Stewart bring a formof distinction to the brand that owes something to the ‘disinterested culture’ ofthe artist/intellectual (Frow 2002, p. 72) � that is, they embody a(commodified form of) high cultural or informational capital.

Moreover, the specific form of household-based expertise offered bylifestyle experts like Stewart dovetails neatly with shifts in branding andmarketing towards an increasing focus on ‘synergy and lifestyle branding’(Klein 1999, p. 146), where the lifestyle brand involves ‘extending the love ofluxury objects’ (Frow 2002, p. 64) and high cultural aesthetics more broadlyinto the space of the home. Through a convergence of media entertainment,instructional discourse and brand management (with a particular focus on

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managing the lifestyle expert’s persona as someone who has access to eliteculture but is also somehow ordinary), domestic advice merchants come toembody particular modes of taste and lifestyle that are aimed at consumers’everyday lifestyle needs. And, as Klein argues (1999, p. 149), this focus onsynergy is less concerned with selling products than with matching people’sindividual aspirations to lifestyle brands, that is, with providing people with‘complete lifestyle packages’ � the example of the Martha community beinga particularly good exemplar of this process.

For Klein, the ubiquity of such processes of branding � the logo-ing oflifestyle as it were � points to a loss of critical autonomy in consumer society,and the need to struggle against the constraints of, and make alternative typesof spaces available within, consumer culture. Given the ubiquity of processesof branding where might such spaces exist and how might consumers actwithin them? What Lury’s analysis of branding � as being central to aninformational economy � points to is the role not only of marketers, mediaproducers and cultural intermediaries such as lifestyle experts in constructingthat economy, but also the central role of consumer-citizens. As she notes thebrand functions and acquires value through its status as ‘an interface ofcommunication between producers and consumer’ (Lury 1996, p. 48). Whilethis interface is marked by an ‘asymmetical communication’ that may notnecessarily be a beneficial exchange for consumers (Lury 1996, p. 53), itpoints to the growing centrality of consumers’ beliefs, values and concerns inshaping the informational economy.

This brings us back to a question raised at the outset of this articleconcerning the degree to which the rise of popular forms of informational/lifestyle media and the emergence of the branded lifestyle expert can be seento be linked to a new kind of citizen-consumer. And, relatedly, whether thismode of citizenship involves an evacuation of politics (as suggested by Berlant’scritique of the intimate public sphere) or a more complex reconfiguration ofthe politics of citizenship? To address some of these concerns and conclude thearticle, I want to turn now to Adam Arvidsson’s insightful critique of brandcapitalism and his discussion of the central role of consumer agency in the shiftto an informational economy.

In discussing the brand as a dominant organizing principle in contemporaryeveryday life, Arvidsson’s focus, like Lury’s, is directed less at economic issuesthan on branding as a (media) cultural process. Again he is interested in thebrand as a critical interface between production and consumption and bythe role played by consumers in giving brands meaning. In foregrounding therole of the consumer imaginary in producing brand identity, however,Arvidsson sets out a much more ambitious argument about what he sees as thegrowing role of brands as a source of shared beliefs, meanings and socialconnectedness within contemporary capitalism. Brands, he argues, not onlymerge aesthetics and economics, informational and commodity culture, they

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have come to play a more profound role in organizing or giving meaning to theeveryday. In today’s thoroughly branded existence, consumption can be seento have taken on an enabling and productive quality, as a site or set of practicesthrough which consumers construct ‘the common social world that connectsthem to each other’ (Arvidsson 2006, p. 19). At the same time, the consumercomes to play an increasingly agentic role in brand culture as, via theintellectual ‘labour’ of brand consumption, they can be seen to produce a kindof informational capital.

For Arvidsson, the origins of this lifestyle-oriented, informationalapproach to consumption lie in the rise of new forms of media in the1950s and 1960s, in concomittant shifts in the practices and techniques ofadvertisers and marketers, and in the emergence over the subsequent decadesof new associated forms of consumer agency. Television played a decisive earlyrole here being the first medium to integrate goods into everyday life and toenable advertisers to create ‘a lifestyle format where products were linked to aparticular and often imaginary form of life that consumers were invited toperform’ (Arvidsson 2006, p. 27).

In the 1980s in particular consumers were increasingly addressed byadvertisers in interactive terms as creative producers � the consumer wasasked to ‘complete the product themselves, either materially [ . . .] orsymbolically’ (Arvidsson 2006, p. 29). At the same time as consumer agencywas being emphasized, the impact of advertising was starting to be somewhatdiluted by the multiplication and diversification of media outlets, promptingmarketers and advertisers to move from a focus on image and style to a moresophisticated approach to managing customer relations. An expansion of thedata collected on consumers, tied to a growing focus on qualitative research,saw a focus on building ‘brand loyalty’ through developing brand communitiesheld together by a sense of shared consumer identity (Arvidsson 2006, p. 63).

Here then we see the beginnings of today’s brand culture with a growingextension of advertising into the social realm. In the 1990s this growingmerger between branded consumer culture and the production of everydaysocial relations was consolidated by the convergence between mediaorganizations and a range of other industries. As in the example ofMartha Stewart’s monopolization of all things domestic through producingmedia products, ‘hard’ goods, and lifestyle-oriented services, such processes ofconvergence have enabled media brands to integrate with and extend intoevery aspect of daily existence.

Arvidsson’s mapping of the shift within marketing, advertising and mediaculture to an increasingly sophisticated, data-driven focus on consumer agency,interactivity and socially-embedded lifestyles, sets the scene then forcontemporary branding practices and the emergence of branded informationand advice. Contemporary brand management, he suggests, is concerned withthe notion of value as existing at the level of the social imaginary rather than

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being embodied by particular products, that is, it is something created by thebroad set of social relationships that link a brand to particular consumers.Taking the notion of consumer interactivity and connectivity one step further,contemporary marketing recognizes that ‘brand identity is only realized insofaras consumers are involved in its co-creation’ (Arvidsson 2006, p. 82).

Human branding, and in particular the branding of specific forms oflifestyle advice via figures like Stewart, emerge out of and contribute to thisculture of creative and agentic consumption and to informational capitalism ata number of levels. Firstly, the familiar mode of information and advice offeredby lifestyle experts both implies and works to create an interactive relationshipwith consumers in which they are seen to actively engage with that informationon the basis of their own lifestyle concerns and needs. Extending theidentification process associated with celebrity, the human brand also works tocreate an imaginary connection that moves beyond the world of commoditiesand merges with other forms of sociality and community. The figure of thebranded lifestyle experts thus enables people to imagine (and organize) theireveryday lives and consumption practices in terms of broader shared notions oflifestyle, personal ethics and value � a process that may or may not feed backinto the logic of informational capitalism in any kind of predictable ormanageable fashion.

Conclusion: branded lifestyles and privatized citizens

This article has used the figure of the popular lifestyle expert to point to anumber of complex shifts in contemporary culture. Discussing the rise of thecelebrity expert, I have examined the growing role of media culture inflattening out and reconfiguring distinctions between expert and ordinarydiscourse through processes of celebritization. Connecting the celebritizationof lifestyle expertise to the growing privatization of public culture andcitizenship, I have linked the foregrounding of ordinary people’s intimate livesto shifts in commodity culture and in particular a growing emphasis on theconsumption of lifestyle and domestically-oriented advice, goods and services.

Through their instructional role as life specialists as well as through theirown highly visible lifestyles as exemplary consumer-citizens, celebrity lifestyleexperts play a pivotal role in affirming certain modes of consumption-basedpersonal values and ways of living. They also (via the intimate, domesticfocus of their advice) can be seen to pass on, to devolve as it were, broaderissues of ethical decision-making and community responsibility to ordinarycitizens. Lifestyle media as exemplifed by the figure of the lifestyle expert thenbecomes a pre-eminent site where the politics of privatized citizenship isplayed out � where questions of individual morality, choice and duty, as

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performed on lifestyle television or in the makeover sections of magazines,come to dominate and displace other potential definitions of citizenship.

Branded lifestyle expertise can be seen as a logical extension of thisprivatized politics, where figures like Martha Stewart offer consumers facedwith an enormous array of choices an all-encompassing lifestyle ‘blueprint’ (asher somewhat shortlived decor magazine was entitled) which they can apply toevery aspect of their lives (except perhaps the ethics of stock trading). As Luryand Arvidsson’s work suggests, however, the relationship between consumersand these branded lifestyles is not necessarily a passive one. The brand�consumer relationship can be seen as a dynamic, interactive process whereconsumers not only forge the meaning of brands but create the wider set ofsocial relations in which brands are given value. Thus, while consumption hasoften previously been seen as an essentially non-productive activity, with therise of informational capitalism we see the imaginative and decision-makingprocesses associated with private, domestic and the everyday consumption as aform of labour with considerable cultural and economic value. This process is inturn valorized by lifestyle expertise with its emphasis on investing in imaginaryprojects of self (and community) improvement through ‘responsible’ modes ofconsumption � as reflected in the strongly moralizing emphasis of lifestylemakeover shows like the BBC’s format Honey We’re Killing the Kids wherefamilies are taught to consume in a highly regulated and calculated fashion.

Which returns us to the question of the politics of privatized citizenship.Does this displacement of public and national concerns onto the space ofprivate, domestic consumption represent the death of ‘a common publicculture’ as Berlant has suggested (1997, p. 3)? Or rather are we seeing a morecomplex redefinition of the boundaries and sites of citizenship and politics? ForLury and Arvidsson, the growth of a hyper-mediatized mode of informationalcapitalism has seen branded forms of lifestyle consumption emerge as a pre-eminent site of social relations and communality. The limitations of modes ofconsumer-citizenship enabled by brand capitalism are, as Arvidsson notes,reflected in the ease with which capital exploits the social relations ofconsumption as a form of surplus value. At the same time he also argues thatthe forms of sociality produced by the power of the consumer imaginarycontinually escape the bounds of regulated capitalism. That branding itself,with its increased dependence on the social as a site of productivity and ofvalue, is in fact a sign of the instability of informational capitalism and of‘a general weakness of capitalist command’ (Arvidsson 2006, p. 136). This issomewhat of an overstatement given Arvidsson’s own systematic mapping ofthe way in which brand capitalism efficiently exploits ‘the productiveautonomy of the social’ (2006, p. 137). However it does usefully highlightthe way in which the power of popular lifestyle expertise and of lifestyleconsumption partly emerges from its ability to engage more broadly in the

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production of social values � which may or may not converge with the desiresof brand marketers.

While it is perhaps hard to see where Martha Stewart’s transformationaldomestic aesthetics might translate into consumer activism, the many spoofs ofStewart � including Tom Connor’s best-selling parodies Is Martha StewartLiving? and Martha Stewart Is Better Than You At Entertaining? � do reflect adegree of consumer scepticism to the relentless discourse of self and homeimprovement (at the same time as they of course can be seen as a form ofunofficial brand extension). And the powerful response, for instance, thatJamie Oliver’s activism around children’s diets received from the public �where he targeted not only family but also government and corporateresponsibility for the poor nutrition of UK children � marks the space wherethe social imaginary is not always so readily tied to predictable forms of brandvalue and commodity consumption. In terms of realpolitik however a crucialpoint to repeat here is that the branded lifestyle expert is a product of thegrowing and insidious convergence of information and consumption � of thenaturalization of brand culture as a site of broader modes of culture andsociality. In the spirit of adbusters and culture jamming more broadly, modesof consumer activism and strategies for creating imaginary sites beyond thelogo must continue to strive then to construct practices and spaces that bothreflexively utilize and exploit while also subverting the increasingly ubiquitousand informational logic of brand capitalism.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to John Frow and Graeme Turner for their helpful feedback on anearlier version of this article.

Notes

1 These issues have been particularly evident in the case of Jamie Oliver,whose claims to ordinariness and authenticity have met with publicscepticism, although attacks on his ‘mockney’ persona have declined sincehe gained the respect of the UK public through his school dinners campaignand his involvement in the Fifteen Foundation.

2 Leavitt comments that Stewart’s success has emerged from bringing‘domesticity out into the world’, noting that ‘[t]he image of Stewart toastingher initial public offering (IPO) at the New York Stock Exchange with fresh-squeezed orange juice and homemade brioche caught so many people’sattention specifically because of the perceived clash between the public sphereof stock trading and the private sphere of the home’ (2002, p. 201).

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