Caroline Marti - Cultural Mediations of Brands

While the purpose is not to optimize, nor is it to denounce. Therefore, thanks to the comfort of freedom of speech allowed by university research, I will not be prevented from presenting the opportunities, and also the potential threats of practices that can weigh on social forms and collective representations.

While the purpose is not to optimize practices, this will not exclude a certain tribute to the inventiveness and deployment of tactical innovations demonstrated by professionals.

This partitioning of approaches and analytical intentions does not solve the question of the impurity that can be attributed to brand communication. It is central to the subject, insofar as cultural figurations are developed against a background of social reception of brands and, more broadly, of social functioning around brands that are very particular, evolving, variable according to individuals, and often linked to a vision of ambivalent commercial communication. This communication, which can annoy and assault, is often socially disqualified, thought of as impure, self-interested and venal, or even relegated to the oblivion of social value. It is also often praised for its ability to surprise, entertain and seduce.

In any case, it makes it possible to understand the complex and rarely working relationship between brand communication and culture and society.

This perceived impurity raises questions. In countries other than France, particularly English-speaking countries and Japan, it is not so significant, as the mass culture of which brand emanations are a part of has the reputation of being perceived in a more favorable and homogeneous way. In France, this continuum seems unevenly acceptable. It is undeniably linked to the representations that innervate our personal and collective encyclopedias. The view that we can take of hybridization phenomena only makes sense in terms of the production of categorizations. The categories to which we refer are thus structuring our vision of the world. As paradigms and patterns evolve, my way of observing may appear obsolete in some time, several years or decades, since our representations transform our opposition systems as practices evolve 9.

The cultural figurations of brands that I will present are the result of a search for value and the intense and broad form of what Barthes (1991) described when he evoked advertising, the commercial motivation being “doubled by a much broader representation, since it makes the reader communicate with the major human themes” (author’s translation).

Like Greimas (1986) who made Judas an adjunct to the Gospel narrative, social disgrace is, in my view, an essential adjunct to commercial speech, condemned to regenerate itself by assimilating and recycling the criticism made of it.

This feature of advertising rhetoric has been observed by linguists and ICS researchers, including Adam, Berthelot-Guiet, Bonhomme and Lugrin. The degraded social reception of advertising, coupled with a certain vulgarity and invasive power, has led to changes in brand communication. In the collective book on unadvertization (Patrin-Leclère et al . 2014), this fundamental question of social criticism is addressed, and I recall it here, because it is necessary for the continuation of the subject and the understanding of the mechanisms at work in cultural figurations.

Commercial communication has been the subject of considerable suspicion for a very long time, whether it is emblematic advertising or the most spontaneous vernacular form: salespeople’s discourse. The scope of explanation varies according to whether the primacy of this mistrust is attributed to the rhetoric inherent in these messages, in which case Plato’s Gorgias constitutes a solid starting point with the criticism of sophists, ready to convince without their words being at the service of truth, or if trade itself, a vulgar and material activity opposed to the nobility of the spiritual, is favored as a starting point for mistrust, as denounced in particular in the biblical account of the famous parable of the merchants driven out of the temple.

In both cases, market rhetoric is opposed to fundamental values of societies – the truth and the sacred. This constitutive antinomy of representations of commercial communication has been found over the centuries and has been mentioned in many discourses: literature, media, songs, etc. (Martin 1992). Criticism has grown richer, it is multifaceted, coming from thinkers and researchers, especially those working on communication and mass culture, and also especially from “anti-marketing” political staff, or staff of associations. Criticism, originally philosophical and religious, has thus become political, sociological, and environmental over time. It crystallizes both the denunciation of a social and political system based on liberal ideology and consumer society and the denunciation of rhetoric that seeks to stigmatize and invade 10. The most critical are those who lend it the most power, as a corollary to a perception of a target of potential passive and fragile consumers, easily destabilized and convinced by these discourses.

These criticisms have largely penetrated people’s minds and circulated in social spaces. They have come together with the development of skepticism among professionals, publicists, advertisers, and media specialists. Many actors were thus moved by an advertising that would no longer be sufficiently appreciated to be effective, by a saturation of the media that would lead to the wear and tear of the genre. Some have gone further by referring to a change in consumers to such an extent that it could be called a paradigm shift.

It is true that paradigmatic upheavals are often mentioned by various thinkers or researchers, the rupture being the opportunity for those who announce it to proclaim a new order and to establish themselves as a guide to the terra incognita that is open to discovery. It is generally stimulated by technological innovation and accompanied by escort speeches 11from economic and social actors. The 1990s had thus seen a “new paradigm” in the field of marketing with the emergence of “relationship marketing”. It valued both the technical possibilities offered by the evolution of information technology, with the famous so-called relationship databases that were linked together, and a rather new perception of the consumer identified as an individual to be captured in a “holistic” way, likely to be loyalized and considered as a target in their own right, hence the appearance in these years of the no less famous and paradoxical one to one .

The paradigmatic break in the consumer’s paradigm announced by some in recent years is part of the flow of a permanent evolution of representations of consumption, consumers and what professionals consider to be good practices. Coupled with the technological evolution and the rise of the Internet, and the representations of market communication mentioned above, these representations of consumer developments have contributed to the emergence and wide dissemination of the idea of a new consumer who has become an “expert” or become “intelligent”. However, it should have been proven that it was not so before. This striking shortcut comes from the observation of the tactics deployed by consumers, who are more easily informed thanks to the possibilities of the Internet to compare offers and optimize their purchases. Evoking a new consumer reveals a very photographic approach with an understanding of phenomena at a precise moment without placing it in a logic of technical, economic, and social evolutions. This could be seen as a denial of the gestation of transformations and, in the case of market mediation, a possible denial of the balance of power, of the existing structural tension between producers and consumers, both of which constantly adjust their act according to each other.