Brand and Myth

Brand and Myth

A Cultural-Philosophical Consideration

Brands reflect the desires of the modern individual. In Nike, it’s the hope of achieving success by simply doing it; in a Mercedes, it’s the pursuit of status; and in a MasterCard, it encapsulates the longing for those moments that cannot be bought with money (but for which you still need money). The list can go on for a long time. Despite the fact that these brand messages are understood across various cultures, they have played a secondary role in cultural-philosophical debates. To professional thinkers, brands appear, at best, as banal and, at worst, as instruments in a malign illusionary context. They are seen as expressions of capitalism, something to be viewed critically, and thus rejected. From a more neutral standpoint, the engagement with brands is understood as a subject of business administration, marketing, and design, and therefore considered outside of one’s own area of expertise.

After training as a communication designer, Stefan M.F. Waller studied philosophy, art history, and religious studies at the University of Hamburg. At the university’s Philosophical Seminar, he was a research associate of Prof. Dr. Birgit Recki from 2007 to 2013 and received his Ph.D. in 2014 with a dissertation on the philosophy of Arnold Gehlen, which was published in 2015 under the title Leben in Entlastung (Life in Relief) by UVK (now Herbert von Halem Verlag). After teaching assignments at the University of Hamburg, HAW Hamburg, Brand University Hamburg, and a stay at Tongji University in Shanghai, he was appointed professor of intercultural brand and innovation culture at Brand University in Hamburg in 2018. Since 2022, he has lived and worked in Ningbo, China, where he holds the position of Vice Dean of the Joint Institute of Zhejiang Wanli University and Brand University of Applied Sciences.