Cultural Mediations of Brands

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 ...