Cultural Mediations of Brands

12Brands: Mediation Devices for Symbolic Effectiveness

The preceding chapters have explored the power of the trademark authority factory, with its variety, variability, limits and boldness, but also common foundations. They reveal cultural and social mediations at the heart of knowledge economies: journalism, education, culture. These mediations are difficult to describe as they are paradoxical: simultaneously artifacts and realities, simulacra that have become realities, self-fulfilling prophecies. This desire for social epiphany for market creations is due to the will of communicators to circumvent promotional discredit and market resistance, but also to create hegemony. In this way, they reveal themselves in their ambition as social integrators of brands, the legitimacy to exist of the latter emanating from their cultural roots.

The complicity, collaboration, submission or voluntary help of the partners carrying the mediation are solicited around the brands thanks to the appropriation by the managers of forms of mediation to include the attributes of the brand with the greatest possible coherence.

This integration is always done at the cost of a few contortions of the primary intention of appropriate mediation and some semiotic adjustments to promote the enhancement of the selected brand attributes.

After having explained the conditions of the mediations in which brands are intertwined, I will define more precisely the nature of these plastic semiotic instances and finally ...