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This volume addresses some of the most important conceptual, methodological, and empirical challenges and opportunities with which the sister disciplines of semiotics and discourse analysis are mutually confronted in the context of considering new avenues of cross-disciplinary application to distinctive branding research streams. In continuation of the collective volume 'Handbook of Brand Semiotics' (Kassel University Press, 2015), which sought to consolidate relevant scholarship and to identify the main territories that have been established at the cross-roads between branding and semiotic research, the current 'Advances in Brand Semiotics & Discourse Analysis' aims at accomplishing further strides in critical areas, such as the exigency for reconsidering the aptness of existing semiotic theories in the face of the radically shifting co-creative landscape of digital branding, the benefits of systematically micro-analyzing brand communities’ discourses by drawing on CAQDAS programs, the combination of big data analytics with discourse theory in corpus analysis, and the epistemological issues that emerge while combining discourse analysis with time-hallowed marketing qualitative and quantitative research methods. At the same time, the volume hosts a resourceful blend of empirical studies and novel conceptual frameworks in burgeoning streams, such as place, heritage, culinary, personal, and political branding.
https://vernonpress.com/book/1669
http://grossolatos.blogspot.com/2021/07/advances-in-brand-semiotics-discourse.html
This paper furnishes a brand storytelling account of the Covid-19 pandemic. By
adopting a fictional ontological standpoint, the virus’ narrative space is mapped out by
recourse to metaphorical modeling. The disease imagery stems from global mainstream
media in the context of Covid-19’s brand globalization, as increasing
interconnectedness of and interdependence between social, cultural and economic
discourses. The main narrative components (actors, settings, actions, relationships) are
outlined as episodes that make up the virus’ brand personality, against the background
of a reading grid. Subsequently, a nexus of ontological (deep) metaphors is identified
as the virus’ master narrative, by identifying transfers between the global mediascape
and the brand’s narrative space. Deep metaphors are equivalent to cultural archetypes
or mythopoetic structures which make up a collective structural unconscious. Deep
metaphors stem from reducing surface metaphors to their most universal semantic
dimensions by identifying permeating themes. Instead of ascribing primacy to the
The cultural consumption research landscape of the 21st century is marked by an increasing cross-disciplinary fermentation. At the same time, cultural theory and analysis have been marked by successive ‘inter-’ turns, most notably with regard to the Big Four: multimodality (or intermodality), interdiscursivity, transmediality (or intermediality), and intertextuality. This book offers an outline of interdiscursivity as an integrative platform for accommodating these notions. To this end, a call for a return to Foucault is issued via a critical engagement with the so-called practice-turn. This re-turn does not seek to reconstitute venerably Foucauldianism, but to theorize ‘inters-’ as vanishing points that challenge the integrity of discrete cultural orders in non-convergent manners. The propounded interdiscursivity approach is offered as a reading strategy that permeates the contemporary cultural consumption phenomena that are scrutinized in this book, against a pan-consumptivist framework. By drawing on qualitative and mixed methods research designs, facilitated by CAQDAS software, the empirical studies that are hosted here span a vivid array of topics that are directly relevant to both traditional and new media researchers, such as the consumption of ideologies in Web 2.0 social movements, the ability of micro-celebrities to act as cultural game-changers, the post-loyalty abjective consumption ethos. The theoretically novel approaches on offer are coupled with methodological innovations in areas such as user-generated content, artists’ branding, and experiential consumption.
This paper aims at unearthing the appeals, the argumentative schemes and the modes of rhetorical configuration that make up the rhetorical structure of the anti-ageing skin care product category’s print advertising discourse. To this end, the pragma-ontological approach is put forward as an offshoot of the pragma-dialectical perspective in rhetorical analysis and criticism. The pragma-ontological approach adds interpretative depth to the overt argumentation structure of anti-ageing products’ ads on the grounds of fundamental ontology/existential phenomenology. The analysis points to three levels where the ads’ arguments function: an overt level and two covert ones. On the overt level the ads function against the background of mixed ethos/pathos/logos appeals that buttress an argumentation scheme from values. On a primary covert level, the ads appear to be functioning through an indirect appeal to fear, while resting on an argumentation scheme from consequences. On a secondary covert level, the ads are shown to be appealing indirectly to ontological angst, while manifesting an argumentation scheme per impossibile. The cultural implications for policy-making are highlighted amidst a predicament where anti-ageing claims are attracting heavy criticism.
This paper offers a brand storytelling, that is a narratological account of Covid-19 pandemic’s emergence phase. By adopting a fictional ontological standpoint, the virus’ deploying media story-world is identified with a process of narrative spacing. Subsequently, the brand’s personality is analyzed as a narrative place brand. The narrative model that is put forward aims at outlining the main episodes that make up the virus’ brand personality as process and structural components (actors, settings, actions, relationships). A series of deep or ontological metaphors are singled out as the core DNA of this place brand, by applying metaphorical modeling to the tropical articulation of Covid-19’s narrative. The virus’ kernel is identified with terror, as a menacing force that wipes out existing regimes of signification due to its uncertain motives, origins and operational mode. In this context, familiar urban spaces, cultural practices and intersubjective communications are redefined, repurposed and reprogrammed. This process is called terrorealization, as the desertification and metaphorical sublation of all prior territorial significations. This study contributes to the narrative sub-stream of place branding by approaching a globally relevant sociocultural phenomenon from a brand storytelling perspective.
This chapter introduces critical argumentation theory and analysis to
cultural consumer research with a view to affording a cultural understanding
of advertising discourse. Although rhetorical figures and rhetorical appeals
have been amply scrutinized in the marketing discipline, argumentation
schemes remain as yet untapped as regards their potential for offering
nuanced insights about advertising claims by attending to the multiple
layers of ad texts’ argumentative structuration. In order to illustrate the
areas of contribution of critical argumentation, a corpus of print ads from
the anti-ageing product category is drawn upon. The analysis unearths
layers of argumentation by attending to latent statements, hidden premises
and logical fallacies. The implications for critical marketing and for
policy-making are highlighted amidst an external marketing environment
where anti-ageing claims are attracting heavy criticism.
User-generated advertising (UGA) has been blossoming over the past
few years as marketers are actively seeking to tighten bonds with
consumers through engagement methods. Despite the rampant availability
of listening technologies and the ever more nuanced mining of social
media through Big Data applications, our understanding of the
implications and the potential of UGA from a digital humanities point of
view remains limited. This study ventures into mapping the interdiscursive
cultural terrain of UGA with a view to furnishing a systematic account of
how it affords to flesh out co-creatively a brand vision. To this end, a
sociosemiotic approach is adopted that dimensionalizes the cultural
resources employed in UGA as a nested structure that combines
macrocultural aspects of cultural order/type with microcultural ones, such
as genre and concrete cultural representations. The conceptual model is
exemplified by recourse to a UGA corpus from the 10th and final wave of
Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl promotion, undergirded by a mixed
methods research design that features a grounded theoretical procedure,
facilitated by quantitative analyses.
Social media brand communities (SMBCs) have been heralded for their co‐creative, participatory potential whereby consumers actively contribute to the proliferation of meaningful brand avenues in a virtuously circular relationship with brands. Elevated loyalty and enhanced brand equity have been posited repeatedly as likely outcomes of a positively engaged community of brand aficionados. However, evidence to the contrary as negative brand co‐creation or brand co‐destruction has been progressively piling up in the extant literature. This paper contributes to the meaning co‐creation in SMBCs literature primarily on two grounds: first, by offering a methodological framework for adapting the laddering research technique in a mixed methods vein to SMBCs data in a thread‐specific context, by leveraging the analytical capabilities of NVivo CAQDAS software; second, by addressing bottlenecks in the applicability of the proposed methodology in light of negative brand co‐creation.
Amidst the constantly augmenting gastronomic capital of celebrity chefs, this study scrutinizes from a critical discourse analytic angle how Jamie Oliver has managed to carve a global brand identity through a process that is termed (dis)placed branding. A roadmap is furnished as to how Italy as place brand and Italianness are discursively articulated, (dis)placed and appropriated in Jamie Oliver’s travelogues which are reflected in his global brand identity. By enriching the CDA methodological toolbox with a deconstructive reading strategy, it is shown that Oliver’s celebrity equity ultimately boils down to supplementing the localized meaning of place of origin with a simulacral, hyperreal place of origin. In this manner, the celebrity’s recipes become more original than the original or doubly original. The (dis)placed branding process that is outlined in the face of Oliver’s global branding strategy is critically discussed with reference to the employed discursive strategies, lexicogrammatical and multimodal choices.
Keywords: Jamie Oliver, place branding, celebrity branding, personal branding, critical discourse analysis, deconstruction
The primary aim of the seminar on Brand Semiotics is to acquaint academic researchers in the wider semiotic discipline with existing conceptual models and research methods in brand semiotics and in branding research with an intent on demonstrating how semiotic constructs may be fruitfully applied in building strong brands. The seminar is of inter-disciplinary orientation, spanning both semiotics and marketing disciplines, while highlighting how semiotics may provide answers to aspects of the research agenda in branding from a marketing point of view. Furthermore, the seminar aims at stimulating discussion about how semiotics has been applied thus far in branding research, but also about the research opportunities that lie ahead.
Building strong brands with structuralist rhetorical semiotics: A stepby- step exposition of the methodological framework of the brand trajectory of signification. 12th International Association for Semiotic Studies World Congress, Sofia, Bulgaria, 16-20 September 2014
The theory of counterfactuals has been widely applied in economic1 and
management sciences, including marketing.2Among the various facets of
the counterfactuals literature that have been addressed by branches of philosophy
and linguistics, such as philosophy of language, logical semantics,
linguistic semantics, modal fictionalism, pragmatics, I am focusing on the
specific topic of possible worlds. In particular, by drawing on semantics,
textual semiotics and rhetoric, I am addressing how fictive elements, embedded
in a fabular world and once conceived of as counterfactual, achieve
to be actualized in advertising discourse as part of our cultural world. By
adopting Eco’s fundamental premise that our world is first and foremost
culturally constituted, and by recruiting rhetoric as an essential complement
of a hybrid semantic/textual semiotic approach, I venture into the
fantasy island of cinematic and literary fiction, only to show that this and
other possible worlds are not that far apart. The managerial applications
for brand genealogists, but also in terms of developing advertising texts
by drawing on a combinatorial logic of properties and individuals from
fictive worlds, are highlighted as an addendum to the practical implications
of philosophical and semiotic theory.
Purpose – This paper scrutinizes how Miley Cyrus’s brand values are projected through the multimodal semiotic structure of the live performance of the song “Do my thang” (from the Bangerz album [2013]).
Design/methodology/approach – Sociosemiotic conceptual framework in conjunction with an interpretive videographic method of analysis, facilitated by the multimodal qualitative discourse analytic software Atlas.ti.
Findings – It is shown how a brand image is enscripted in Cyrus’s spectacle as ‘script within script’, in various modes (other than the verbal and sonic ones that are defining of the recorded song), and in the interaction among modes, with an emphasis on the dance mode (as composite mode made up of the kinetic and haptic ones). Furthermore, it is shown how Cyrus construes an imaginary, neo-burlesque brand space of hyperdifferentiation, narcissistic play and polymorphous sexuality that she and her dancing crew project onto an evoked audience.
Practical implications – Attending to structural couplings between signs and modes in the context of bespoke artists’ brand languages constitutes a priority for managing an artist as brand, and, concomitantly, for safeguarding relevance for a fandom. A multimodal reading grid is offered to this end.
Originality/value – From a branding point of view, this study constitutes the first one that theorizes the live show spectacle as the manifest discourse whereupon brand image and brand values are edified, with an emphasis on the dance mode, over and above the verbal/ visual modes that dominate the advertising/branding literatures.
Keywords: artist branding, live show, sociosemiotics, multimodal semiotic analysis, atlas.ti
preview @ https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2877042
Semiotics has been making progressively inroads into marketing research over the past thirty years. Despite the amply demonstrated conceptual appeal and empirical pertinence of semiotic perspectives in various marketing research streams, spanning consumer research, brand communications, branding and consumer cultural studies, there has been a marked deficit in terms of consolidating semiotic brand-related research under a coherent disciplinary umbrella with identifiable boundaries and research agenda.
The Handbook of Brand Semiotics furnishes a compass for the perplexed, a set of anchors for the inquisitive and a solid corpus for scholars, while highlighting the conceptual richness and methodological diversity of semiotic perspectives.
Written by a team of expert scholars in various semiotics and branding related fields, such as John A. Bateman, David Machin, Xavier Ruiz Collantes, Kay L. O’Halloran, Dario Mangano, George Rossolatos, Merce Oliva, Per Ledin, Gianfranco Marrone, Francesco Mangiapane, Jennie Mazur, Carlos Scolari, Ilaria Ventura, and edited by George Rossolatos, Chief Editor of the International Journal of Marketing Semiotics, the Handbook is intended as a point of reference for researchers who wish to enter the ‘House of Brand Semiotics’ and explore its marvels.
The Handbook of Brand Semiotics, actively geared towards an inter-disciplinary dialogue between perspectives from marketing and semiotics, features the state-of-the-art, but also offers directions for future research in key streams, such as:
• Analyzing and designing brand language across media
• Brand image, brand symbols, brand icons vs. iconicity
• The contribution of semiotics to transmedia storytelling
• Narrativity and rhetorical approaches to branding
• Semiotic roadmap for designing brand identity
• Semiotic roadmap for designing logos and packaging
• Comparative readings of structuralist, Peircean and sociosemiotic approaches to brandcomms
• Sociosemiotic accounts of building brand identity online
• Multimodality and Multimodal critical discourse analysis
• Challenging the omnipotence of cognitivism in brand- related research
• Semiotics and (inter)cultural branding
• Brand equity semiotics
You may download the full ebook version @
http://www.mediafire.com/view/ys32yw23l6hy8gn/handbook_of_brand_semiotics.pdf
http://ijmarketingsemiotics.com/handbook-of-brand-semiotics/
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2681179
http://www.academia.edu/9910895/Handbook_of_Brand_Semiotics_ed._and_co-author_Kassel_Kassel_University_Press_2015
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, with an emphasis on Lotman’s cultural/textual semiotics and social media, with an added focus on user-generated advertising (henceforth denoted as UGA). 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.
