This NYT article details people who keepblogs devoted to their favorite brands and the corporations who love them. The desire to connect ourselves to something larger and more meaningful in the world we know leads some to join churches, some to root for college-football teams, and others to become proselytizers for Barq's root beer. Brands have fans just as the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees do, those teams, in fact, have done more to makes teams and brands synonymous. Both megateams and megabrands, when they have outgrown their local function and usefulness, depend on the bandwagon effect to grow, they foster an aura about themselves that simply reflects their own popularity independent of anything they might have done to deserve it -- the phenomenon becomes tautologous: everyone should drink Coke because everyone else does, and that's simply that.
I suppose when one feels that self-branding, the way in which one markets oneself, fails to generate enough buzz, one longs to attach oneself to a larger and more powerful brand, one with more institutional heft behind it.
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