Cultural Mediations of Brands: Unadvertization and Quest for Authority

Brands, which are major economic entities and major symbols of market mediations, are increasingly appearing in the social arena as cultural actors in their own right. Their quest for social legitimacy and to have control over the markets goes beyond the usual framework of their communication with initiatives that have begun to have an impact on the French cultural landscape. Media, digital content, educational kits, museum exhibitions and so on are the actions of an unadvertization, which has the potential to transform not only the rapport brands have with the public but also representations of knowledge and culture. The communicative approach at the heart of this book illuminates the contemporary transformations of communication, highlighting three main types of cultural mediations: media, education, and cultural heritage institutions. Cultural Mediations of Brands thus provides a theoretical and critical analysis of the brand and the symbolic effectiveness attributed to it.

Table of Contents:
Foreword ix Acknowledgements xiii Introduction xv Part 1. Adapting the Media Model 1 Introduction to Part 1 3 Chapter 1. Legitimacy and Foundations of Authority Through Media Appropriation 5 1.1. Speaking out: power 5 1.2. The porosity of the boundary between advertising and journalism: a tradition 8 1.3. The media and advertising thought process 13 Chapter 2. The Media Opportunism of Brands and Its Silences 15 2.1. Virtues of inscription-embodiment material and editorial design 15 2.2. Media design 18 2.3. A media ideal, engagement and circulation 19 2.4. The journalist: the guarantor, a contemporary hero of public speech 23 2.5. A social power 25 Chapter 3. A Media of One’s Own: Brands and the Struggle for Auctoriality 27 3.1. The rise of native advertising 27 3.2. Engagement and defection in advertising methods 29 3.3. The Internet and the regeneration of a common concept 31 3.4. The auctoriality in question 32 3.5. Auctoriality of brands and journalistic claims 33 Chapter 4. Changes in the Media Landscape and Transfers of Authority 37 4.1. Procedures for exploiting journalists 37 4.2. New categorizations 38 4.3. Pre-eminence of the channel and media changes 41 4.4. Media and reciprocal configurations 46 Conclusion to Part 1 49 Part 2. Asserting Intellectual Authority through Knowledge Mediation 53 Introduction to Part 2 55 Chapter 5. Metaphor of the Consumer-Learner and Branded Ethos: Representations in the Commercial Environment 59 5.1. From learning to education, a leitmotif of marketing 59 5.2. The manufacture of a brand ethos 64 Chapter 6. Virtues and Modalities of Ordinary Subordination in the Commercial Environment 69 6.1. Educating the consumer 69 6.2. Modalities of didactic impressiveness: from prescription to solicitude 73 Chapter 7. The Institutionalized Didactic Position: The Masterly Hold 79 7.1. Institutionalization of knowledge mobilized for brands 80 7.2. The “missions” of educational kits 83 Chapter 8. The Temptations of Scientific Mediation 91 8.1. Scientific mediation and expertise: a construction of authorities in the public space 91 8.2. Figurations and partnership instrumentalization 94 8.3. The missions of the Danone Institute 100 Conclusion to Part 2 107 Part 3. Investing Social Memory Through Cultural Mediation 111 Introduction to Part 3 113 Chapter 9. Cultural Mediation: Regulating the Circulation of Knowledge in the Public Space 117 9.1. The “cultural being” that has become a communicative object: mediation through ranking 118 9.2. Cultural mediation: creating interpretations for the public 123 Chapter 10. From Event Management to Patrimonialization 129 10.1. A museum event 130 10.2. Cartier’s presence at the Grand Palais: occupying the space, being admired, being recognized 134 10.3. The challenges of patrimonialization: mediation and authority 139 Chapter 11. The Conditions for Institutionalization 145 11.1. Lack of essentialism of value and categorization 146 11.2. Sustainability 148 11.3. Public configuration 154 Conclusion to Part 3 159 Part 4. Brands: From Mediations to Communicative Matrices of Social Authority 163 Introduction to Part 4 165 Chapter 12. Brands: Mediation Devices for Symbolic Effectiveness 167 12.1. The conditions of mediation: misappropriation, predilection, and adjustments 168 12.2. The brand: a mediation system 171 Chapter 13. A Socially Active Symbolic Operativity: From the Factory to the Matrix of Credibility 179 13.1. Building relational devices 179 13.2. Creating credibility, rhetoric of forgetting and persuasion 183 13.3. The brand: a reproducible semiotic management 186 Chapter 14. The Brand That Has Become a Communication Matrix 193 14.1. The expansion of brand engineering: from unconscious thinking to organizational maieutics 193 14.2. Social displacements and communicative derivations: branding as a process of action and play in competition 197 14.3. From management to symbolic management: a generalized extension 201 Conclusion to Part 4 209 Bibliography 211 Index 223