Pat Kane points to Terry Eagleton's scathing review of Wally Olins' book " On Brand" Here's a snippet:

Olins’s whole case works on the assumption that branding works marvellously well, an assumption he also has to deny if he is to avoid looking like an advocate of exploitation. He is in the position of the pornography king who insists that nobody forces you to watch videos of women being sexually humiliated. ‘People’, he remarks, ‘know perfectly well what they are doing.’ But so do drug dealers. We don’t permit ads urging people to push heroin or kidnap toddlers on the grounds that they can always ignore them...

‘Brands’, argues Wally Olins in On Brand, ‘represent identity.’ It may be that he himself only knows who he is because of his brand of underpants, but the more discerning among us have not yet been reduced to this tragic condition.