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.
Part 1. Adapting the Media Model
1. Legitimacy and Foundations of Authority Through Media Appropriation.
2. The Media Opportunism of Brands and Its Silences.
3. A Media of One’s Own: Brands and the Struggle for Auctoriality.
4. Changes in the Media Landscape and Transfers of Authority.
Part 2. Asserting Intellectual Authority through Knowledge Mediation
5. Metaphor of the Consumer-Learner and Branded Ethos: Representations in the Commercial Environment.
6. Virtues and Modalities of Ordinary Subordination in the Commercial Environment.
7. The Institutionalized Didactic Position: The Masterly Hold.
8. The Temptations of Scientific Mediation.
Part 3. Investing Social Memory Through Cultural Mediation
9. Cultural Mediation: Regulating the Circulation of Knowledge in the Public Space.
10. From Event Management to Patrimonialization.
11. The Conditions for Institutionalization.
Part 4. Brands: From Mediations to Communicative Matrices of Social Authority
12. Brands: Mediation Devices for Symbolic Effectiveness.
13. A Socially Active Symbolic Operativity: From the Factory to the Matrix of Credibility.
14. The Brand That Has Become a Communication Matrix.
Caroline Marti is a Professor in SIC (Information and Communication Sciences) at CELSA, Sorbonne University, France and researcher at GRIPIC (Interdisciplinary Research Group on Information and Communication Processes). She also leads and supervises research in marketing and consumption with an Information and Communication Sciences approach.