The term “brandscape” dubbed from a combination of the terms “brand” and “landscape” refers to the ability of companies and brands to create an individual, virtual self based off people’s online activities. Using mathematical algorithms and tracking online activities and purchases, companies can provide suggestions for future purchases and potential options for who the individual wants his future self to be. With each online search and purchase, the computer can harvest that information and create a virtual “self” that attempts to mirror the real world individual. This data clone is a shadow of the real world self and presents only versions or portions of an imitation self that is created solely from online activity. The computer produces a hazy and blurry representations of the individual at first, but through an individual’s immaterial labor and over time, the image becomes more crisp and clear as the computer is able to more accurately construct a virtual image of the individual’s self. “The brandscape recodes the consumer subject as a spatialised, desiring, networked body produced through a complex of marketing techniques designed to analyse buying behaviour, target consumers, and seduce them with strongly affective experiences” (Wood, Ball, 47).

Through brandscaping, the real world self becomes a dehumanized compilation of numbers and algorithms creating a machinic object with a set system of desires and ideas. The technology it is meant to be very individualistic and personalized, but at the same time it makes the individual less human by stripping away all other characteristics besides their online personhood. “Brandscapes are spaces whose experience provokes emotions in consumers, which resurface as they encounter it elsewhere in there lives” (Wood, Ball, 53). The real world individual is trained to subconsciously recognize brands, and then later, the individual will search the product or make the purchase allowing the computer to further construct the individuals virtual self. In an ongoing cycle, the virtual self induces certain suggestions and advertisements from brands, and those suggestions influence the real world self which in turn acts upon those suggestions and adds new pieces to the virtual self. 

The brandscape is not a perfect system, however, and there will be machinic errors within the system. The machine's unquenchable desire for difference inevitably leads to its self-destruction and breakdown. Zack delves deeper into this Guittarian idea here. The technology, although ideally a flawless system, is often very mistaken in its analysis of the real world individual and construction of its virtual self. The real world self, as interpreted from the online “self,” is recommended goods and products, however, sometimes, the technology’s suggestions are far from accurate. “Errors occur so often that it has been observed the CRM [customer relationship management] is nearly always ‘wrong’ at the level of the individual” (Wood, Ball, 58). The technology offers suggestions about who you want to be and what you want to do, but at times the virtual self that the computer constructs is a far guess from who the real world individual actually is. It is very easy for the technology to misinterpret the online habits of individuals and have an inaccurate picture of their virtual identity because the machine is only able to draw information from a very small sliver of who the entire individual actually is. 

In an effort to gain command and control over the production and consumption process, the brandscape attempts to gauge the real world self and present possible options for a future self. These data clones of real world individuals are often sorry misrepresentations of who they actually are, but the technology and the brand still maintain the power to influence the real world self and further shape the virtual world self. The virtual self is trapped within the machine and is influenced on both sides by the real world self and the virtual machine that is constantly churning out future possibilities.  Brandscaping anticipates a self that you haven’t become yet, creates a reality that you haven’t yet begun to live, and manifests possibilities you didn’t know you had.