Is Marketing Messing with Your Clients’ Heads? Brands, Identity, and Clinical Practice

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 of building brands into construct of self. Even so, the narrative review and discussion identify gaps in clinical understanding, the implications of leaving those gaps unexplored, and future directions for research that might close those gaps.