TOWARDS THE CULTURAL BRANDING MODEL OF THE BRANDOSPHERE: FROM SHARE-OF-MARKET TO SHARE-OF-CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS
$avtor = ""; if(empty($myrow2["author"])) { $avtor=""; } else { $avtor="автор: "; } ?>Editor of the International Journal of Marketing Semiotics
georgerossolatos123@gmail.com
Abstract
The aim of this paper is twice foundational. First, it aims at providing a sketchmap for a semiotically informed model of cultural branding that is currently lacking and second to identify how this model could be fruitfully applied for managing a brand’s share of cultural representations, over and above its market share, as well as the textual sources of a brand language as (inter)textual formation. The propounded cultural branding model of the brandosphere is of inter-disciplinary orientation, spanning the relevant marketing and semiotic literatures. The brandosphere is envisioned as a marketing semiotic contester to the almost monopolizing cultural branding model of Douglas Holt (2004) in an attempt to demonstrate that marketing semiotics may constitute a standalone discipline that is capable of addressing, both conceptually and methodologically, various marketing-related research areas, rather than an ornamental add-on to consumer research.
1. Lotman’s cultural semiotics as conceptual platform for edifying the brandosphere
“Cultural semiotics has broadened the meanings of the terms ‘text’, ‘language’ and ‘reading’ to include almost everything perceived as partaking of a sign-relationship understood in terms of inter-subjective communication” (Orr 1986: 812). “If one designates the totality of all sign systems in the world as the ‘semiosphere’ (Lotman 1990 and Posner 2001, 2003: 80 ff), one can say that cultural semiotics studies cultures as parts of the semiosphere” (Posner 2004: 2).
Yuri Lotman is perhaps the most prominent figure in the cultural semiotic discipline whose work is largely under-explored in cultural studies (outside of semiotics), not to mention Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) and approaches to cultural branding that have been voiced therein.
Lotman’s thinking deployed in various phases, as is characteristic of great thinkers. The semiosphere, a considerably multifariously defined and operationalized concept (see Kull 2005; Nöth 2014; Rossolatos 2014b) constitutes an umbrella concept or metaconcept that designates a semiotic space that is made of various interlocking spheres with identifiable boundaries. “In defining the semiosphere Lotman is making a clear shift from the level of individual signs and their functioning in semiotic space toward a higher level of network semiosis and system level phenomena” (Andrews 2003: 34). As argued repeatedly in the relevant literature (e.g., Kull 2005, 2011) the semiosphere is a multi-level and multi-faceted construct that seeks to delineate how cultural spaces are produced as multi-level inscriptions in an all-encompassing semiospheric hyperspace, like matryoshka dolls within dolls. “The semiosphere is heterogeneous space (or communicative medium), enabling qualitative diversity to emerge, to fuse, and to sustain” (Kull 2005: 185). “Lotman especially stresses that the semiosphere is not just the sum total of semiotic systems, but also a necessary condition for any communication act to take place and any language to appear” (Semenenko 2012: 112). Each sphere in a semiospheric space is in a constant dialogue (a point of intersection between Lotman and Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism; cf. Betea 1997) with every other sphere in varying degrees.
Furthermore, each semiotic sphere has its own language, from simpler to more complex, and from strictly formalized to more fluid. “These languages are not equivalent to one another, but at the same time are mutually interprojected and have various degrees of translatability” (Semenenko 2012: 113). According to Semenenko, meaning is generated in communicative acts precisely through the tension that exists among the various languages that make up the distinctive spheres of a semiospheric space. “This makes the semiosphere the universal mechanism of meaning generation” (Semenenko 2012: 113).
2. The principal aims of the cultural branding model of brandosphere
In an era that is marked by excessive connectivity among social actors on an international scale, enabled by increasingly rapid electronic communications, the rate whereby texts and cultural units migrate from periphery to center, but also the scale on which such migrations are effected, could be characterized as being of unparalleled proportions compared to previous historical periods. “Cultural dynamics consists in this fact above others: that nucleus and periphery can change places. What used to be central is now peripheral, and vice versa” (Zylko 2001: 402). Lotman’s conception of the dynamic interplay between the centre and the periphery of a culture and the relative salience of various textual sources in a semiosphere is most pertinent for the brandospheric model, however it rests at a level of abstraction that awaits to be further qualified in empirical terms in order to be rendered managerially salient.
The accelerating interplay between cultural center and periphery mandates even more urgently the need for a model and a methodology of cultural branding whereby multidimensional dynamic changes may be mapped with view to enhancing the predictability of emergent cultural trends and the impact such trends may have on the semantic nucleus of a brand and its periphery. “If we follow the semiospheric approach, culture takes the shape of a heterogeneous whole bustling with multiple rhythms of development and transient domains” (Zylko 2001: 400).
Lotman’s semiospheric approach, by combining the micro-cultural or micro-structural with the macro-cultural or macro-structural points of view in the determination of the flows of dynamic cultural change, also affords to pose considerable challenges both to cognitivistic approaches in consumer research (cf. Van Osselaer 2008) and cognitive semiotics which assume as their point of departure and ultimate point of reference an ego-centric cogito. By situating the cogito in a wider inter-textual semiospheric trajectory, without suppressing its significance and without rendering the functions of cogito redundant, the semiosphere affords to shift focus from a conception of the individual as autonomous processing unit (the AI metaphor) towards the ineradicably textual embeddeness of the subject in a nexus of cultural texts whose relative salience constantly changes. “Texts serve to select that which is to be remembered or forgotten, thus changing the concept of ‘facts to be remembered’” (Sonesson 1998: 105). Hence, cognitive approaches with regard to how messages are processed, stored and retrieved in memory should be addressed in the brandospheric model, however from a point of view where memory is considered to be part and parcel of a collective cultural ethos (cf. Ricoeur 2004) that spreads through contamination and through the conditioning of subjects in mutually recognized aspects of seeing.
For the Lotmanian school of cultural semiotics culture is far from an objectively identifiable plenum of acts of human expression. As Segre (1989) points out, what appears as a rigidly structured system in fact constitutes a reserve that maintains in its contours traces from different epochs and multiple permutations. This posits a particular challenge to the formulation of a cultural branding model in terms of demarcating the historical boundaries of specific cultural spheres, texts and signs that make up a brandosphere. “Culture is made of a web of semiosis, a thick tapestry of interwoven sign systems. This web is not perfectly smooth and continuous, however, and cultural semiotics finds its way into the sign system of a culture through the discontinuous, the breaks and gaps, the unexpected, the ambivalent” (Orr 1986: 813).
Mapping out the dynamic interplay between cultural centre and periphery which is responsible for infusing ‘life’ into a culture is crucial for (i) understanding which currently peripheral cultural spheres in a brandosphere may assume central importance for consumers in a mid-to-long term horizon (ii) which textual sources and textual forms make up distinctive spheres (e.g., cinema, politics, popular press, leisure activities) and how their relative salience shifts over time (iii) what types of signs, in terms of concrete representations, as well as modalities make up each textual form and how their importance shifts over time. These three interlocking levels for addressing how a semiospheric environment, and, concomitantly, how a brandosphere mutates over time, even at a sketchy level in the context of this presentation, are suggestive of the all-encompassing character of Lotman’s semiotic conceptual model of culture that combined the macro-cultural with micro- cultural outlooks in a uniform perspective.
Yet, the adequate operationalization of these three analytical levels by recourse to the Lotmanian corpus is in need of both considerable scholarly elucidation, insofar as Lotman did not offer a strict blueprint of levels and units of signification akin to Greimas, for example, save for examples of what such levels and units would consist of (e.g., Lotman 1976), but also in the face of post-Lotmanian advances in the delineation of multimodal discursive units and their quantification with the aid of content analytical tools (see Rossolatos 2013a, 2014c). The above are compounded by the aforementioned precariously multifaceted definitional scope of the very notion of semiosphere which must be meticulously qualified prior to venturing into further segmenting a brandosphere into units and levels (see Rossolatos 2014b).
Therefore, the primary task the brandosphere seeks to accomplish consists in a conceptual model of how a brand as sign-system mutates dynamically through time alongside the above-mentioned three levels of cultural analysis, while paying heed to how the macro-cultural point of view is reflected in the micro-cultural and how culture is in turn enriched by the texts that are produced on a micro-cultural level.
The generation of distinctive brandospheric clusters based on the above three levels of analysis will allow for a systematic approach to the management of the textual sources that feed into the cultural imaginary of specific brands in specific categories, while also allowing for comparison across categories and for the generation of ever ramifying and more elaborate typologies, thus enhancing the predictability and hence the effectiveness of future communicative activities.
From a cultural semiotic point of view, and this is a key point of differentiation with regard to the consumer research vernacular, the focus is laid on mapping out the textual sources that make up a cultural reserve and how these sources are transformed, as above noted, in distinctive cultural spheres that make up a brandosphere. The ability for managing dynamically these sources will essentially endow brand and advertising planners with a conceptual toolbox and a concrete methodology for predicting which aspects of a cultural/textual reserve are more likely to migrate from the periphery towards the center of a brandosphere and hence of maintaining relevance of their communications to their targets.
“Lotman (1970: 64–77; 1981: 34–48) bases his approach on the broad concept of text according to which every artifact with a function and a coded message can be regarded as a text; he notes, however, that every culture selects from the set of these texts a small subset which its members consider important for their cultural identity” (Posner 2004: 118). Lotman’s emphasis on the criteria for textual selection (and, furthermore, of particular signs from distinctive texts) is most pertinent for a cultural branding model that is intent on managing dynamically sources of a brand’s textual formation. “The function of a text is defined as its social role, its capacity to serve certain demands of the community which creates the text. Thus, function is the mutual relationship among the system, its realization, and the addresser-addressee of the text […] In this sense it may be said that culture is the totality of texts or one complexly constructed text” (Lotman, Uspensky, and Mihaychuk 1978: 233). Hence, strictly speaking from a Lotmanian point of view, what we are primarily concerned with is not acts of ‘co- creation’, as has become common meta-linguistic currency in consumer research, but what may be called modes of (inter)textual co-conditioning between brands and consumers (insofar as a text is always another text’s inter-text; Orr 1987: 814). In the context of addressing these modes of textual co-conditioning particular emphasis should be laid not only on where the identified texts and their cultural units are situated in between the center and the periphery of a brandosphere from a synchronic point of view, that is based on a descriptive snapshot of their situatedness at a particular moment in the infinitely developing autonomous life of signs, but, even more, how the same cultural units are constantly desemiotized, in Lotman’s terms, and resemiotized in discrete communicative contexts or how they are continuously re-appropriated by distinctive agents of cultural production (brands and consumers).
3. Why draw on the semiotic conceptual heritage for edifying the cultural branding model of the brandosphere, rather than use a cultural branding model already on offer in the marketing literature?
The cultural branding approach in the marketing literature “emphasizes the cultural forces in society and how these can be used to build iconic brands as well as the impact of branding practices on the globalized culture and marketplace” (Heding, Knudtzen, and Bjerre 2009: 208). “Brand meaning is not wholly derived from the market. Culture, aesthetics, and history interact to inject brands into the global flow of images” (Schroeder and Salzer-Morling 2006: 4). “In the cultural approach, the brand is analysed as a ‘cultural artifact moving through history’ (Holt 2004, p. 215)” (Heding, Knudtzen, and Bjerre 2009: 210). Holt’s cultural branding model draws, in part, on McCracken’s cultural anthropological model of symbolic consumption that originally surfaced in 1986 and was later revised. According to McCracken’s symbolic consumption model meaning is transferred from culture to brands to consumers.
Fig. 1: McCracken’s model of movement of meaning (Heding, Knudtzen, and Bjerre 2009: 215).
Both authors have imported semiotic concepts in their terminology (see Heding, Knudtzen, and Bjerre 2009: 216: “This conceptualization of the transfer of cultural meaning draws heavily on semiotics”), albeit in a non-scholarly fashion, that is by employing heavily researched (in the semiotic tradition) terms, such as ‘cultural code’, without acknowledging the terms’ semiotic sources.
McCracken’s co-creation model was expanded to the territory of consumer co-creation which “concerned the adaptation of culturally shared meanings of the person’s unique circumstance for purposes of individual communication and categorization” (Fournier, Allen, and Miller 2008: 785). Despite the wide endorsement of McCracken’s model by consumer researchers, three identifiable limitations offer fertile ground for the construction of a semiotically informed brandospheric model of cultural co-creation (or intertextual co-conditioning).
First, McCracken’s model is not semiotically informed, despite the fact that it is allegedly geared towards an understanding of meaning making processes. By definition, the discipline that examines meaning making processes is semiotics, hence this undue focus on semiotics constitutes a major limitation. Secondly, McCracken’s model only furnishes static descriptions of a cultural co-creative predicament between brands and consumers. The proposed brandospheric model may account for the diachronic evolution of brand discourses.
The mission of Holt’s alleged ‘cultural branding’ model which he also sells to clients via his agency aims at offering step-wise solutions whereby brands may be transformed into what he calls ‘iconic brands’. The model of iconic branding is “is a set of principles that structures how firms seek to build their brands. These principles work within the axiomatic assumptions of the extant consumer culture” (Holt 2002: 80). “A cultural icon is a person or thing regarded as a symbol, especially of a culture or a movement – a person, institution, and so forth – considered worthy of admiration or respect” (Holt 2004: 11). Apparently a major criticism that may be launched against this definition concerns prima facie the conflation of icon with symbol. According to Holt, iconic brands perform myths that symbolically resolve the identity, desires and anxieties stemming from an important cultural tension, a resolution of opposites mechanism that lies at the very foundation of Levi-Strauss’s original conceptualization of the function of mythic structures (and which has been quite extensively criticized ever since).
Holt further seeks to exemplify his model by recourse to a ‘genealogical’ reading of various brand discourses, including Corona beer’s rebranding in the U.S. market. In the genealogical account of Corona beer’s re-branding (Holt 2005: 281–284) Holt argues for the key success factors behind the brand’s leadership as lying not with attaining to carve a unique associative territory in consumers’ minds (as per the tenets of the traditional CBBE perspective), that is in terms of abstract concepts, but with a specific qualification of the semantic nuances of such associations. In this context, even though Holt rightly claims that associations are the outcome and not the cause of brand strength, he does not fully account for the modes of formation of brand associations (e.g., PDP processing and how schemata are formed based on gestalt psychology), save for engaging on a top-line level and in abstracto with Keller’s CBBE perspective, while being oblivious to the bulky literature on the modes of formation of brand associations (cf. Rossolatos 2014a). For example, by claiming “in so doing, the brand didn’t represent relaxation in a generic way, as an abstract concept stripped bare of connotations, reduced to its dictionary definition” (Holt 2005: 284), Holt implies that abstract concepts by default are not accompanied by connotations and that the semantic scope of abstract concepts is exhausted in dictionary definitions. Obviously, both assumptions are edified on shaky ground. From a practitioner’s point of view, the qualitative exploration of the semantic nuances of abstract concepts has been standard practice in branding research since time immemorial. In this instance, Holt conflates how brand image is explored quantitatively as battery of image attributes (abstract concepts), without further qualification as to the differential connotations these concepts may carry for single members of a respondents’ pool, with qualitative research where consumers are customarily probed extensively regarding how they perceive such concepts, in terms of brand usage by occasion, day-part, etc. It is against such comprehensive consumer insights that research agencies usually venture into accounting quantiatively for the relative mindshare of abstract concepts and not (or not only) against the background of standard lexicon difintions. The second counter-argument that may be raised apropos the above case-study concerns the over-reliance as explanatory ground behind the success of certain branding endeavors on mythic structures (as narratives that cater for a resolution of paradoxically co-existing opposing social forces). Usually brand mythic structures point to deeply laden drivers behind a manifest belief system. The prospective resonance of such structures for positioning purposes in a branding context is dubitable beyond the province of already established brands which cherish high levels of awareness, heritage, trust. Raising myth-making to a predominant paradigm for successful positioning, regardless of current stature in terms of, at least, presence and awareness, is at best a precarious claim in terms of consumer credibility. In other words, a mega brand or major player in a category are more likely to be credible when raising claims of mythic proportions, compared to an unknown brand or to a new entrant. The same holds in the case of capitalizing on a sub-cultural movement (which lies among Holt’s ‘axioms’ of cultural branding). Provided that a brand always speaks ex positio a mega brand that leverages a sub-cultural trend is likely to be perceived as hip and (depending on the execution of such endorsement activities) positive associations are likely to accrue in terms of modernity, keeping up with changes in consumer trends, etc. However, the pursuit of the same strategy by a new entrant is likely to force a brand into a niche territory. Finally, the examples usually offered by Holt as brand genealogies are dissonant with the essence of geneaology that grew with Nietszche and ripened with Foucault (cf. Foucault 1977). For the latter, who drew inspiration and guidelines from the former, a genealogical reading differs from a historiographical account primarily on the grounds of unsettling illusions about myths of origin and presumptuous objective temporal identifications of seminal turns in the evolution of social movements. Holt’s ‘genealogical’ accounts are genealogical only nominally. In essence, they constitute standard historical accounts that is selective narrative crystallizations of the evolution of a brand through time. The managerial import of the presumed genealogical approach is framed vaguely: “genealogical mind-set: the managerial worldview necessary for the management of identity brands” (Holt 2004: 11). Bringing into the interpretative canvass wider societal/cultural forces and attempting to shift the interpretive focus behind brand success towards the effective leverage of shifting consumer trends does not constitute a genealogical reading, but the narrative fabrication of a historical context in order to enhance the credence of brand-related narratives. Furthermore, such interpretive gestures are usually enacted in a descriptive manner that is not informed by a blueprint regarding, at least, elementary semiotic methods for correlating semantic content with surface expression (e.g., commutation tests, textual coherence) in a competitive context and diachronically (as undertaken in Rossolatos 2014a). On the contrary, the genealogical accounts offered by Holt are interspersed with random remarks about abstract concepts, social forces, brand expressive elements, without a systematic account of how such discrete levels and layers of brand meaning generation are interlinked (an issue that was pointed out earlier with regard to the identification of levels and units of analysis in Lotmanian semiotics). This is a key task that is usually undertaken by semiotic readings and a significant opportunity for a cultural branding model that is edified against the background of a robust semiotic conceptual armory and methodological framework. This guideline simply resonates a basic task of scientific investigation that is the need for employing a metalanguage, rather than regurgitating intuitively practitioner lingo, invested with an aura of scientificity.
Then, there is a perhaps disorienting pre-occupation with the concept of ‘brand symbolism’. It is precisely due to the lack of semiotic import that such heavily abused concepts still populate the marketing vernacular even when their pertinence is minimal in applied research. The term symbol is used in consumer research as a proxy to pretty much anything that may be assumed as explanatory ground for intangible associations (i.e., symbolic). Semiotics has made considerable strides into symbolism-related research, while, as I have been repeatedly emphasizing (cf. Rossolatos 2014a), emphasis on semi-symbolic structures (as a more nuanced approach to the en masse treatment of the symbolism issue) has been a key pre-occupation of structuralist semiotics. Unfortunately, none of these advances has made a considerable impact either on marketing theory or practice which has resulted in a regurgitation of the term ‘symbol’ where no instances of symbolism are present (e.g., in advertising imagery, where the term ‘brand symbolism’ is often used in lieu of brand or advertising imagery, in oblivion of the process and the steps involved in turning imagery into symbolism). This unfortunately undue emphasis on the difference between symbolism and other types of signs (in which case it would be more pertinent to lay claim to brand sign typologies, rather than brand symbolism) has been propagated by Holt’s (2005: 273) cultural branding perspective.
Complementary to the above it merits noticing that the impact of culture on consumer behavior has become increasingly recognized in the marketing literature over the past 20 years, which recognition has spawned the research stream of CCT (consumer culture theory) and two academic journals that address consumer culture issues from the point of view of cultural studies, however chaotic and multi-perspectival this field may be: “CCT research draws from an interdisciplinary body of theory to develop novel analytic theoretical frameworks that can illuminate the sociocultural dynamics that drive the consumption cycle” (Arnould and Thompson 2005: 870).
Undoubtedly, there have been exceptionally brilliant scholars in the CCT movement who have offered monumental research pieces. However, at least to my (extensive) review of the concerned collective volumes and journals on CCT, I still haven’t come across an explicit recognition of the sheer diversity of semiotic schools and, concomitantly, their differential impact on conceptual and empirical approaches to consumer culture phenomena.
The orientation of the proposed brandospheric model aims at reinstating controllability of textual sources of brand associations from an internal marketing point of view, rather than giving in to somewhat defeatist claims (and surely non-managerially salient), such as those made by Fournier, Brunel and Lawrence (2013) regarding the loss of control of brand meaning by marketers with the advent of new media and the proliferation of brand communities.
4. Expected contributions of the brandosphere to the extant marketing (semiotic) literature and practice
The brandosphere may contribute to the extant literature in marketing and marketing semiotics with the following. On a conceptual level by furnishing a cultural branding model that draws on a specific semiotic school of thinking (i.e., Lotman’s cultural/textual semiotics) with rich heritage in the concerned field of study. On a methodological level by applying the conceptual armory of the resulting brandospheric model in the context of interpretative cultural analysis, while focusing on how the cultural analysis and the output of complementary quantitative content analyses may aid in strategic decisions about alternative routes for designing future marketing communications, while taking into account a brandosphere’s constantly shifting cultural center and periphery and by drilling down into specific textual sources and cultural units/signs that make up each sphere in the brandosphere. The resulting output will allow brand planners, from an applied point of view, to focus on the systematic management not only of sources of market share, but, equally importantly, on share of cultural representations.
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