Nike’s FuelBand: Sensor sociality and the rise of post-ideological brands

Over the last decades, critical accounts of advertising and branding have been dominated by a focus on the semiotic strategies used by advertisers in their attempt to associate products with desirable lifestyles and the aura of ‘cool’ (Williamson1978; Wernick 1991; Goldman 1992; Goldman and Papson 1996; Klein 2000; McGuigan 2009). In this context, Nike has often served as a prime example for advertising’s power to create ‘mystifying’ commodity signs – its famous ‘Swoosh’ logo and the ‘Just do it’ slogan – and branding strategies that are built on identifying and exploiting ideological tensions in consumer society (Holt 2002; 2010).

This paper however takes Nike’s FuelBand as an example for the argument that the semiotic, representational and ideological enterprise to account for advertising and branding has become insufficient for theorising modern marketing communications.