Cultural Mediations of Brands. Caroline Marti
to brands.
This book is an extension of my work on unadvertization. It is also the continuation of an HDR, or French Habilitation6, defended in 2015 and carried out under the supervision of Yves Jeanneret.
The objective of the book is to question the propensity of brands to appropriate social forms in order to legitimize themselves in the social space and build their authority. To question forms, which are socially connoted, and the quest for authority, is to attach itself to the articulation between power and what Yves Jeanneret (2014, p. 74) calls figuration:
Figuration couples with expectation: it is the other side of the meaning of forms, on the side of the poetics of texts and media expressions. It is a representation of the communication process that does not involve an explanation, as is the case with the promise, but is based on the interplay of forms mobilized within media productions and textualities.
The cultural figurations I mention are communicative modulations around brands, semiotic entities that actors work on to make subjects of social communication.
I.2. Observing the cultural figurations of brands to build their authority
I.2.1. Observation of a quest for control, a perimeter to be defined
The forms determined by market actors are the result of determinations, communicational choices, beliefs, and representations about what is good or bad communication, that is, what can be effective communication.
The modalities for assessing this effectiveness are not always clear, as objectives are sometimes lost in their hierarchies and the multiple effects that communication is supposed to produce. However, the principle of efficiency is never denied and its scope is always measured by the power it can generate. This effectiveness is sometimes ambiguous, because, while all communication choices are explicitly justified by the desire to increase the effectiveness of brands directly with consumers or through the optimization of the sales channel (trade marketing), some choices are in fact governed by major silent objectives. Some consist, for example, of seducing or reassuring shareholders, enhancing the value of a team or manager, impressing the competition, giving yourself visibility in front of potential buyers, etc.
Communication effectiveness is relational effectiveness: it always involves, at least theoretically, the influence of commercial mediators on the targeted person or group of persons, whether this influence is the result of seduction or coercion, a configuration of proximity or distance.
From this perspective, brands are seen as semiotic entities and essential power bodies for observing commercial mediations, because they are mediating entities, as we will see in more detail later. That is why brands will be at the heart of my subject. They set the tensions that are at play on the markets and in the relationship between producers and consumers.
Finally, they are semiotic authorities; they crystallize by the semiotization to which they are subjected and which conditions their existence, choices determined by the actors of communication in conscience. This implicitly reveals their interpretation of their environment: who are the targets and what is the competitive, societal and social context, how does communication work? I therefore consider brands as the result of representations by specialists in hermeneutics dedicated to consumption.
The will to control brands may seem obvious, but it is worth recalling, because the rhetoric of brands is precisely directed towards proclaiming their innocence; it strives to make people forget what it is based on and the energy that drives it. This characteristic seems to be shared with the media if we take McLuhan’s statement in the 1960s about the astonishing powers of the media:
For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary. Prediction and control consist in avoiding this subliminal state of Narcissus trance. (McLuhan 1964, p. 48)
This reminder highlights this dynamic of an untiring quest for a hold that is quick to be exercised in many forms. The apparent communicative entropy can temporarily make you forget the focus, the obsession of the hold.
The other evidence to be distanced and linked to the first, is the naturalization of an anthropomorphization: “the will to control brands” suggests that these entities are endowed with an autonomy, an ability to exist and want.
Brands are more represented and evoked in professional and vernacular speech as creatures than creations, thus, by this naturalization, masking the conditions of their elaboration to designate themselves as entities that are self-evident. This anthropomorphization is reflected in the evocation of brands as subjects and not as objects, in personalizations and metaphors: you can be a fan of a brand, be a friend on Facebook with it, etc.
Behind the brand, a body of professionals works7, coordinates, and acts for it, but the dominant representation is that of a living and active entity. The phenomena observed reinforces the idea that there is obviously no real enunciation in commercial mediation, but rather a construction of enunciation, without the enunciator being an analog of the issuer.
Brands are always constructions and the fruits of enunciative polyphonies. They are semiotic entities thanks to aggregates of signs, chosen for capitalization, to produce symbolic and financial capital. However, the power of meaning of trademarks can only be expressed when they are included in mediations over which they have only discontinuous control, as we will see in the following chapters.
The challenge of the cultural figurations I mention is to make brands appear to be mediators, by placing them in cultural mediation modes that are located and socially connoted. The mediations orchestrated by professional brand managers, with the collaboration of certain cultural actors, are organized around brands as if they were entities with an identity and, beyond, as if they were authors. However, brands are semiotic entities that are part of mediations decided and directed by their managers8.
The masking of the production of statements to substantiate an enunciation by the notion of brand is the very foundation of brand strategies. To give an idea, we could reduce this phenomenon to that of the invisible person moving puppets or ventriloquists who animate a lifeless form using gestures and words they attribute to it. This masking is inherent in the “fictionalization” of brands, in their manufacturing of a discourse capable of convincing and encouraging adherence. The coherence of this discourse is suspended by the homogenization of the enunciations that produce it. The work of homogenization erases the asperities specific to a particular enunciator, erases any tensions to produce a form that is at least assertive if not clear and univocal.
The “rise of brands” in recent decades seems to me to be directly related to the multiple, sometimes paradoxical, injunctions made to companies that must be, at the same time, sustainable, financially efficient for their shareholders, socially responsible, good employers and respectful of their environment, etc. These injunctions and constraints, which are more or less integrated, are perceived within companies in the paradoxes of decision-making and discourse, in the tensions between entities and departments, in the media coverage to which they are subject.
The production of a logo, a graphic charter, and a linguistic charter is revealing of this imperative concern for a compensatory discourse. This discourse must be stabilized, capable of being stated, and disseminated in order to be given to consume and believe.
For reasons of clarity, however, I will sometimes refer to trademarks as if they were such subjects, as I did for the title of this book, and I will speak, for example, of “brand communication”. But I will avoid this shortcut when possible, even if it means making the subject even more cumbersome by talking about brand professionals or a built brand. In any case, let the reader not be fooled.
The cultural proposals to which I attach great importance are indeed initiatives designed to foster control and strengthen the power of brands. While the function is not obvious, it is clear, but the nature of this power is not; the point of my remarks is to clarify it. How would cultural figurations strengthen the power of brands? More precisely, how