Cultural Mediations of Brands

Conclusion to Part 2

The social and institutional establishment of brands appears to compensate for the inability of economic actors to exist in the social space from the outset. This compensation strategy sheds light on the nature of brands as logos around which it is possible to communicate on directly transactional aspects (prices, availability, product composition, and service details), but also on symbolic aspects that euphemistically evoke the commercial scope of offers to deny management objectives in favor of a philanthropic dimension of brands while enhancing their social roots and scope.

Brands must be “talked about” so that their offers take on the social and symbolic value they are supposed to produce.

The construction of their ethos contributes to the personification of brands and thus contributes to the creation of an apparent communicative autonomy. In substance, the processes identified through the various examples presented and analyzed testify to a search for adaptation to the ambient, competitive, and societal context:

[…] the image constructed by a given discourse is located in a social and institutional space that sheds light on its genesis and functions. […] Self-presentation is not only a matter of negotiation in immediate interaction, it is also dependent on the field, its rules and structure at the time of the exchange. (Amossy 1980, p. 88)

The rhetoric around knowledge contributes to what can be called a capitalism of knowledge, instrumented to promote ...