Cultural mediations of brands: unadvertization and quest for authority

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

DESCRIPTION
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.