Cultural Mediations of Brands

14The Brand That Has Become a Communication Matrix

The brand has become a generalized social mediation tool. Insofar as the embedding of logos in social mediation systems becomes systematic, brands are revealed as matrices of representation that can be extended to areas other than that of merchandise.

14.1. The expansion of brand engineering: from unconscious thinking to organizational maieutics

Escaping the traditional formatting of advertising, constrained by the concentration of space (for reasons of the cost of renting it in advertising spaces), brands can also be associated with inventions or reinventions of forms of social apprehension through the implementation of unique devices.

Logos are thus spread outside the reserved spaces of traditional advertising. But logos are also developing today to mark proposals other than those of traditional commercial transactions. The expansion of logos is becoming more widespread.

Without everything becoming a brand, brand engineering has been deployed, applying in whole or in part to various cases outside the field of transactions. This is called branding. I have used this term previously without fully defining it, although I have shown that semiotic management is an essential part of this communication process. Branding is the discipline of brand engineering¹. This engineering is sometimes mobilized in a conscious, calculated way. It can also be relatively spontaneous as seen in the case of what has been called personal branding ...