Cultural Mediations of Brands

13A Socially Active Symbolic Operativity: From the Factory to the Matrix of Credibility

The practices of the professionals of commercial mediation are oriented towards an unquestionable objective: to promote offers by making products visible and endowing them with an image, to represent with all the ambition of the verb: “Representation puts force in signs […]. But representing also means showing, intensifying, doubling a presence.” (Marin 1989, p. 22).

How to produce effective signs, how to show, share or impose a belief? This representation is an action related to making people believe, but also to believing. It operates in a context specific to disciplines oriented towards the creation of authority over audiences, the discipline of the art of marketing being, as such, like the art of politics, a discipline oriented towards the conquest and maintenance of this form of power.

After having discussed the issue of relationship and the creation of credibility, I will question the brand as a semiotic management tool, capable of creating meaning and belief.

13.1. Building relational devices

Creating credibility to better attract attention, set up and develop an image, and convince are inherent to the activity of marketing professionals whose main concerns are more credible and coherent than real, even if some companies can be very attached to a founding coherence and authenticity, or even in some cases to a true original mission.

One of the major steps in marketing practices, which ...