Cultural Mediations of Brands

Conclusion to Part 3

The appropriate cultural mediation by brand managers is invested for the “added value” it represents. It is appropriate insofar as it is perceived as positive, virtuous, and open to the possibilities of adaptation to serve the brand at stake.

Such a process requires that cultural situations, constructions, and practices be addressed by brand managers for their communicative dimensions. What is a characteristic, then becomes an objective, that distorts cultural mediation, which has been transformed into a showpiece, as the poetics of mediation is transformed less than its intention? The communication of pedagogical means becomes a tactical objective.

This “DIY”, in the sense that it is used in La pensée sauvage by Lévi-Strauss (1990), thus testifies, at an abstract level, to the professional gesture of mobilizing and recycling elements circulating in social space to transform it and use it for other purposes.

Yves Jeanneret (2014) theorizes this by explaining the anticipation inherent in all communication practices through cultural constructs that act as frameworks for exchange. They prefigure (but do not determine it with certainty) a communication situation.

It may happen that there is resistance, an outcry on the enunciative gesture, as was the case in December 2013 with the setting up of a Vuitton exhibition, in a building in the shape of a giant trunk with the logo, installed in the Red Square, near Lenin’s mausoleum. The presence of the 30-meter-long ...