Social Work Commons^™

Is Marketing Messing With Your Clients’ Heads? Brands, Identity, And Clinical Practice, Paul Schuster

Master of Social Work Clinical Research Papers

This narrative review of the literature explores current understanding of whether and how consumer brands affect clients’ constructs of self and therefore clinical mental health practice. The relevance of this question stems from the growing body of academic business and marketing literature dedicated to engineering brands into consumers’ constructs of self, and from the marketing infrastructure dedicated to engineering brands suitable for self-construction. From a social constructionist perspective, the question is additionally relevant considering how environmental factors related to constructing the self ultimately affect mental health. Systematic searches of four databases fail to find any articles addressing potential practice implications …