Caroline Marti - Cultural Mediations of Brands

I will focus on the forms of authority sought for brands by reducing the prism, because there is no real essentialism of authority except when it is understood as one already, for example in some institutions. Otherwise, it is a moving force, a dynamic that begins, is maintained, and is reinforced, thanks to forms, discourses, and practices created and invested by actors to ensure domination. I do not claim to give a complete overview of the construction of authority, even in a commercial environment; I focus on the forms that seem most intense to me from a communicative point of view, that is, the most loaded with tensions. The focus is predominantly on the forms instituted as such, or established.

Why does the adoption of a cultural position make it possible to build authority for brands? Beyond the discourse on the hypermediatization of brands and the actual and incessant quest for new modes of expression, beyond the idea, although currently major, of a brand positioning established not only on offers and the expression of values, but also on communicational innovation, a major question arises: how does cultural mediation 14constitute a particularly valuable relational model for brands seeking authority?

It prefigures what brands can play in the social space; it is a preferred means of putting into circulation, a means of developing a collective consciousness and of playing a political sociability with the institutions that structure the life of the city (Lamizet 1999).

This game in the public space is characteristic of the brands’ ideal life. Communicative in essence, they are semiotic instances reconverted into mediating instances, because they are intended to link the singular and the collective and to specify links with social groups, to symbolize a relationship with the world. Brands are configured by the expressive modes chosen by the professionals who manage them and which they use in the public space. The stakes are high: that of claiming the place that can be attributed to them in this space, described by Lamizet as “a place in which all the symbolic mediations of belonging are inscribed in forms of communication and representation” (Lamizet 1999, p. 110).

Communicators adopt, for the brands they manage, paths traced by others to make their voices heard. Thus, by engaging in collective forms of representation of social and cultural belonging, brands seem to be aimed at audiences rather than at customers or potential customers. This communicative conversionis characteristic of the cultural figurations taken into account for this research. The objective is neither to draw an exhaustive picture 15nor to extract a typology allowing for classifying the different modalities 16.

By seeming to assume the role of cultural mediator, brands contribute to the circulation of cultural forms and the structuring of the relationship to knowledge in society. This perspective of the circulation of knowledge is major in the development of authoritarian forms, with cultural control and domination being strongly affected by this dynamic.

I have identified three main modes of cultural figuration that seem to me to be very revealing and significant in the quest for brand authority. They correspond to three communication modes, three operating instruments, three types of cultural mediation. To avoid any confusion, we could say that they cover symbolic mediations of contemporary knowledge: media mediations, didactic mediations and brand heritage mediations.

Informing, training, and institutionalizing are three major regimes of enunciation and characteristics of brand authority positions. They involve focusing on several levels of analysis: political, social, culturaland semiotic.

The order of enumeration of these three modalities corresponds to a gradation: to make this knowledge known, to disseminate it, to have it recognized as legitimate and to institute it. This process also chronologically overlaps with the ambition of brands when they are placed in the broader context of the history of commercial mediation. Each chapter will be an opportunity to question the representations of communication made by professionals from each perspective, recalling the logic behind the practices:

Any communicative practice is anticipated by a set of cultural constructs that are based on representations and norms, and also on incorporated movements; any device is both a configuration of the conditions of the exchange and a scene where it will be represented; the characteristic of these devices is to provide a framework for exchanges, but also to create an opportunity for engagement and action. In short, a communication situation is prefigured, constituted as a device, but it takes or does not take according to the way in which the subjects invest it (Jeanneret 2014, p. 192).

The various parties will refine the processes of seeking authority and clarify the communicative nature of brands through the observation of their “cultural commensalism”. At the same time, the parties will be dedicated to understanding the beliefs and representations of communication professionals who manage brands and choose modes of expression.

Dedicated to particular appropriations, the parties focus on changes in the modalizations of speaking, changes in enunciations that not only transform the statements, and the view that one can take of their properties and statutes, but also upset the places of actors in the social game. This reverse sociology, determined by enunciative games, puts the question of power and the manufacture of authority around brands at the heart of questioning and research.

I have chosen to shed light on the articulation of concepts through emblematic examples with a writing system that alternates questioning notions, field analysis, conceptual connections, and theorization.

The four parts of this book are divided into complementary chapters to further develop the general argument. In this way, I wish to explain the depth of the phenomena observed, explain their causes, shed light on their modalities, expose consequences, and highlight the gradation of the quest for authority around brands. The latter thus ranges from the limited and almost ornamental rhetorical claim to the display of the brand as a legitimate actor in the social space.

Part 1 will focus on the quest for authority inspired by the media model, based on the strength of authorship and the audience, revealing the contemporary ideal of the circulation of knowledge.

Part 2 will be dedicated to the positions of authority in the lecture and expert modes. The desire to be an authority among audiences to initiate and educate will be the modality analyzed using contemporary and historical examples of trademark instruction.

Part 3 will be devoted to the dynamics of the patrimonialization of brands involved in the institutionalization of a social memory. Questions of legitimizing knowledge and access to “cultural mediation”, in the strict sense of the term, will be at the heart of the subject.

The presentation of these three sections may give the impression of compartmentalization. If it is assumed that we illuminate the quest for authority of brands through cultural figurations and isolate processes, this does not fully reflect a more intertwined, more complex reality where processes interpenetrate.

Semiotic management by professionals is a major interpretative key to understand and analyze these appropriations that affect devices, positions, and processes. It will be demonstrated in the first three parts and explained in the fourth.