There's an intersting post with invitation for comments on Sepulculture on the subject of whether consumer branding is possible/worthwhile/viable for a larger publisher (giving Soft Skull, correctly or not, as an example for the kind of branding he's talking about as more prevalent amongst independents.)
I've two thoughts about this and will start with the one that's a caveat. A great independent publicist told me recently that while she and others definitely know Soft Skull as a publisher, and are curious about what we do, she hasn't a clue what my lead Fall 2006 title is. That can be a big probem, given that the mainstream media is going to frequently say: "OK I wanna do one Soft Skull book, which should I do?" I want to tell them, "You choose! I'd love to know which you choose, and why!" But it just doesn't work that way, sadly. And it's pretty impossible to build mainstream buzz around 35-40 titles a year...and it just goes against what we believe not just ethically (all authors are equal) but practically (I can do my best to discern another person's set of tastes
So, that's the caveat: the downside of a brand is that it's harder promote the individual components of it, and unlike a magazine where the brand the the thing that is bought, with us it's the book that is bought. (And sold books are what keep us in business...) So branding is definitely not the be-all and end-all as I'm slowly learning...
But Sepulculture was asking about the propects of the corporate publishers achieving branded-ness, since after all, despite my caveat, if we had no brand, we'd be really screwed, so it definitely has significant value. My instinct is that it can be done, but it would really require a complete reinvention of the structure of the corporate publisher. You'd need to create small imprints within the company, consisting of a group of maybe 4 to 8 people functioning as an entire editorial and marketing and publicity operation, availing of the corporation to provide infrastructure, sales, distribution. They would have considerable autonomy, so long as they met their financial targets. Everyone in that unit would be encouraged to think like a publisher, considering the entirety of how a book gets from the writer to the reader. And the sales, rights and contracts, production and manufacturing groups would be structuring themselves as service providers.
In effect the Random Houses and Penguins would be holding companies of a stable of imprints and the primary difference between them, and a company like Soft Skull wrorking with a distributor like PGW, is that they would have stable cash flow and great economies of scale on everything from FedEx to printing. (Operations like Perseus and Avalon are existing examples, albeit on a smaller scale, of this hypothetical structure)
But, absent that level of autonomy it would be very difficult to build a brand, since all a brand is, really, is a small group of people creating something they think is lovely, and a larger group of people (readers) agreeing it is lovely, and a bond developing between them. That connection can't be faked, not in books...