Cultural Mediations of Brands. Caroline Marti
of a social memory. Questions of legitimizing knowledge and access to “cultural mediation”, in the strict sense of the term, will be at the heart of the subject.
The presentation of these three sections may give the impression of compartmentalization. If it is assumed that we illuminate the quest for authority of brands through cultural figurations and isolate processes, this does not fully reflect a more intertwined, more complex reality where processes interpenetrate.
Semiotic management by professionals is a major interpretative key to understand and analyze these appropriations that affect devices, positions, and processes. It will be demonstrated in the first three parts and explained in the fourth.
Part 4 is the last step of the journey, the culmination of the previous ones: the conclusion. Its purpose is to explain how brand mediation has become the model, the preferred matrix for communication. The socio-semiotic appropriation of cultural forms by brands suddenly has an opposite dynamic. Thus, the appropriation of the brand model by public space actors: media, schools, museums and other cultural actors is becoming more widespread. If the quest for power is inherent in the communicative life that their managers lend them, the brand has become a model for creating hegemony and bringing together internal teams. With the spread of managerial ideology throughout society, the weight of brands continues to grow.
1 1 Le Monde, December 18, 2013, p. 5.
2 2 Le Monde.fr, “Le gouvernement assigne le groupe E. Leclerc en justice”, November 20, 2013.
3 3 www.mouvement.leclerc/prix-landerneau-des-lecteurs-2018.
4 4 Interdisciplinary research group on information and communication processes, a CELSA research entity, attached to the Doctoral School V of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Sorbonne University.
5 5 (Patrin-Leclère et al. 2014): this book is divided into different chapters and each concept is worked on by its author.
6 6 HDR in Information and Communication Sciences, “De la gestion sémiotique à la prétention sociale des marques. Une analyse communicationnelle des pratiques du marketing”, supervised by Yves Jeanneret, defended at CELSA, Paris-Sorbonne, on December 7, 2015. In France, HDR is the accreditation to supervise research and PhD.
7 7 This body of professionals is very diverse. In branding agencies, advertising agencies or advertisers, their common trait is to contribute to the performance of signs and offers federated by logos. To designate them, I refer in this book to “brand professionals” or “brand managers”.
8 8 Under the term “brand managers”, I include professionals who participate in the construction, monitoring, and support of brands. It refers to all marketing, communication, and design professionals, whether they are in companies, independent consultants or integrated into agencies, but who are all involved in brand management. It deserves further development and deepening, but this is not the purpose of this research.
9 9 Who today thinks of a magazine as the result of a hybrid between text and image? It has long been naturalized and a genre in itself, the source of other media hybridizations.
10 10 This does not exclude the recurrent manifestation of a recurring advertising fervour here and there, with a craze for certain events or activities. One can think, for example, of “La nuit des publivores” (a show presented in more than 40 countries and representing the advertising production of about 60 nationalities) or mention the collection of advertising objects.
11 11 Escort speeches are a type of supporting speech, used in economics for example.
12 12 “In a strong sense”: the author points out that this is the meaning given to this term in German philosophy, that of a commitment linked to values.
13 13 This idea can be found in Arendt (2006).
14 14 The expression here is captured in the broad sense given by Lamizet (1999) rather than in the narrow sense of cultural devices confined to museums, books, etc.
15 15 Some phenomena of cultural appropriation on behalf of brands are left aside: ludic or didactic operations in urban areas, books on offer, event organisation, activities in amusement parks, are just a few examples. The approach is also focused on mainly French examples. The work carried out has yet to be continued on other sites.
16 16 This reference to Jankelevich’s work (1957) also evokes the impossible grasp of the unspeakable and in particular the moment of suspension between a past that is no longer and a future that has not yet happened.
Introduction to Part 1
“The place is the palimpsest.”
(Certeau 2002)
Brands are mediating bodies whose mission is to signify the value of the products that they cover, in commercial spaces, in media issued and managed by companies, and on dedicated display spaces: urban spaces, newspapers, television, radio, and cinema.
While the ostentation of brands is closely linked to media provisions and the place granted to them, media productions dedicated exclusively to brands are constantly developing. They elevate their object, brands, to subjects endowed with auctoriality and, implicitly, with the legitimacy to produce them. Far from confining themselves to a rented place in traditional media spaces, brands are affirmed by their managers in the social space, as media providers. The ability to speak through a legitimate means enhances their ability to appear credible and authoritative.
A paradox can be pointed out: managers use culturally standardized forms to better show the power of their brand, freed from renting spaces so to say, but dependent on dominant communication models. Brands are free in their pronouncements, but are dependent on how their value statements are received in the social space.
By relying on media forms, commercial actors offer a mediation that is both novel, capable of serving their brand, and original, that of a social text whose memory is collectively shared, that of a semiotically and socially connoted text.
The device is thus appropriate, because the media relationship it configures is considered as the producer of a rich relationship, likely to generate authority for the issuer; the device then becomes, thanks to the multiple connotations it contains, metaphorical of a relationship conducive to future commercial transactions.
Here, we perceive a genuine symbolic exploitation: a simple rhetorical game or an actual social claim? The process of capitalization, on memory and social practice, involves a representation of the media and brands and trade, independently and simultaneously; it also reflects, in this context, the representations, beliefs, and symbolic efficiency attributed to the media and the modalities of the possible media influence for brands.
Ownership corresponds to an assumption of autonomy, perceptible in taking control rather than suffering, an invisible hand as described by Adam Smith. This control, emblematic of the natural regulation of markets in classical thought, which presents it as invisible, is etymologically the one that handles and manipulates. In this way, it shapes places, worlds; it refers to the desire for cosmogony suggested by the communication of brands.
The subject underlines the polemological dimension of media appropriation where the reader will perceive a tension and indeterminacy that is not the result of observation, but the result of a struggle.
The four chapters are logical. Speech in media harbors power struggles and the mobilization of this authority, on behalf of brands, offers opportunities. But this leads to a symbolic and semiotic struggle, and results in communicational uncertainty that contributes to the transformation of the media landscape and the transfer of authority.