The Semiotics of Brand
Discussions of the category of ‘brand’ in anthropology inherit many of the tendencies of
popular and professional discourses on the subject. In anthropology, for example,
following much popular discourse, discussion of brand is almost always made identical
with the discussion of the culture of circulation that brands indirectly index, hence, brand
is almost synonymous with globalization, and therefore, most attention is given to
specific highly salient brands (Coca-Cola, Nike) that serve as ‘meta-symbols’ (Miller) of
this global culture of circulation, which, in turn, is often presumed to be centered in
Western global brands and local, non-western uptakes. Since ‘brand’ is a complex media
object, its very definition is a contested metapragmatic domain between interested
popular discourses and varied professional discourses of designers, lawyers, marketers,
consumers and activists. Furthermore, as a privileged semiotic object, the semiotic
categories of brand are frequently extended not only to a whole new range of services,
quasi-commodities and objects that are not in themselves economic objects (including
experiences, places, countries, even recent discussions of ‘anthropology’ itself as a
brand), so that the semiotic language of brand has undergone a curious form of genericide
in which brand is often coextensive with semiosis as such. As a result of these
tendencies, brands are typically represented as being in their very essence a kind of
deterritorialized, immaterial form of mediation, a kind of globalized intertextuality, a
semiotic image of the global capitalist economy itself (Lury 2004), very far from the
materiality of messages on bottles in which they are often encountered on a token level.
This review will seek, by contrast, to frame the phenomenon of brand as being a material
mediation, aggressively reframing incommensurable semiotic meta-discourses of brand
located in various popular and professional discourses within a semiotic framework,
attending to different semiotic moments of this phenomenon. Rather than pre-decide the
issue of what brand is, where brand truly ‘lives’ (as a label on a commodity? As an
association with a producer? With a consumer? Is brand really ‘about’ globalization,
hyper-reality? The condition of post-modernity?) I define these semiotic moments of
brand (following Moore 2003 and his adaptation of Jakobson 1960) on the model of the
speech situation, in terms of the way they foreground the involvement of different
participants in the commodity exchange relationship which brands form both a
component of and a regimenting meta-commentary on. Rather than attempting to
discover an ‘essence’ of brand, or locate brand in some universal semiotic corollary of
the allegedly universal human propensity to truck and barter, I will use a family
resemblances or prototype model of brand, to show the ways that the concept shifts its
focus along historical or cultural planes. The general semiotic language will be a
Peircian framework (as has been adopted by many other analysts of brand, Moore 2003,
Lurie 2004, Beebe 2004, 2008). The major discourses engaged with will be
anthropological, but where appropriate discourses from other fields, notably design and
legal theory, will be engaged. However, this review will only touch lightly on more
general issues such as intellectual property law, globalization, periodizations of
capitalism, insofar as they are consequentially registered in the semiotic definition of
brand.
As we traverse these different discordant discourses about brand, within a
generalized perspective treating brand as an object of conflicting semiotic ideologies
(Keane 2003), the objective is not only to taxonomize the various semiotic moments, or
to offer a finalized definition, but to point to a direction in which we can see a basic
tendency. It will be argued provisionally there is a tendency for brand to become almost
a byword for ‘semiosis’ in general, a catch-all category for the individuating social and
semiotic properties of those objects that are objects of capitalist exchange, or exchange in
general (as brand is quite often compared to the Maussian ‘total social fact’ (Lury 2004)),
or even, objects in general. It will be argued that this tendency is due to the way that
brand is defined in relation to a privileged other term, the product or use-value. Like
some binary star system where a highly visible luminous object wobbles around a
massive dark companion, much of the behavior of brand can only be explained in terms
of its relationship of alterity to its ‘dark companion’, the product. The two terms form a
privileged doublet, as the advertising koan goes, ‘the producer creates a product, but the
consumer buys a brand’, we see again and again at all levels that brand becomes a term
for the ‘semiotic’ dimension of a product, including capaciously virtually every known
form of semiosis, decoration, design, associations, indexicalities, iconicities, symbolisms,
indeed all possible qualitative forms of differentiation (sensations, qualities, affective
attachments). Sometimes, too, brand seeks to float free from its dark companion (leading
to a kind of hyper-reality where brand becomes an autonomous product), or strives to
absorb it (so that all qualities, ‘semiotic’ or ‘technical’, brand and product, are gathered
together in an undifferentiated haze of an ‘economy of qualities’). This is because brand
is defined in opposition to the latent notion of utility, use-value, technical, material
objectivity of the product. So far from brand becoming ideologically or really
independent of the product, the brand and the product form a privileged pair of
complements, so that the opposition brand/product develops as folk-ontological
opposition between immaterial/material, form/function, decorative/functional,
symbolic/technical, properties of subjects/properties of objects and so on. However,
precisely by attending to the way that these oppositions lead to antinomies and crises, the
conundrums of discourses on brand amount to an immanent critique of the basic
ontological oppositions underlying them, for example, the basic opposition between
semiosis and technical dimensions of artifacts, or non-referential and referential functions
of language (for critiques of this opposition from other quarters see Pfaffenberger 1992).
Trademarks: Indexes of the producer. The simplest way to begin would appear to be
where older orthodox legal definitions of trademark have done, which identifies the
“primary and proper function of a trademark " as "to identify the origin or ownership of
the goods to which it is affixed.” Certainly the use of a trademark or token of brand
affixed to a product to index the producer of that product would appear to accord well
with ordinary views of a central semiotic function of brand. However, even this relatively
simple semiotic aspect of brand turns out to be complex in semiotic terms. This original
definition collapses two different sorts of marks, proprietary marks optionally affixed to
goods by merchants and regulatory production marks affixed by statute to identify the
work of a single craftsman (Schechter 1927). The legal definition of trademark thus
epitomizes this semiotic function often imputed to ‘brand’. Obviously, however, the
current entity being indexed as source is quite different, usually a fictive person like a
corporation or capitalist undertaking, and therefore does not correspond precisely to
either of these earlier figures of mercantile capitalism. Indeed, the proliferation of kinds
of entities and relations that brands can index has led to questions as to whether the
source/origin indexing function can be said to define brand (Lury 2004). If, following
Moore, we broaden this semiotic aspect to any ‘source-identifying indexical’ (Moore
2003), there are, in fact, more that one kind of source identifying indexical that are often
not distinguished, there are type-mediated indexes like logos, which act as ‘a signature of
authenticity, indicating that the good that bears it is true to its origins—that is, that the
good is a true or accurate copy’ and token-mediated indexes which mark a real contact, a
making, a moment of imprinting by one for whom it acts as a kind of fingerprint’
(Coombe 1996). As Meneley (2004) makes clear, these two different kinds of indexes
are hallmarks of industrial versus craft production, respectively, each leading to different
kinds of goodwill or distinction.
In addition, not only the kind of indexical relation may vary, but also the object
that is indexed as ‘source’: At first glance the ‘source-identifying indexical’ does not
directly index the immediate producer (this is presumably only the case with the tokenmediated ‘craft production’ index) but a ‘surrogate identity’ (Coombe 1996), a ‘prosthetic
persona’ (Mazzarella 2003), a figure of the producer (Manning and Uplisashvili 2007).
In many cases, the source or origin that is relevant is not a specific figure of a person but
a place, which lends the product specific, and protected, technoscientifically and legally
defined qualisigns of distinction and D.O.P. or terroir strategies of food marketing
(Coombe et al. 2005, Heath and Meneley 2007, Paxon 2008). In the case of bottled water
marketing, there is a specific and complex relationship between the product (which is
produced ‘for free’ as a public good via the municipal water authority) and way this
product is represented as being produced by a private company and/or from a natural
spring source (Wilk 2006). The case of bottled water in particular raises the question of
‘goodwill’ as a property not only of rivalrous private corporate persons but also public
ones, inasmuch as it is precisely distrust of the state’s capacity to provide water that
makes private bottled water brands possible, but at the same time, it is precisely the
state’s technoscientific regimes of production and regulation that underwrite the
collective goodwill of the bottled water industry in fact. Here too, an important aspect of
what brands index, the property of ‘goodwill’, is composed of a considerable amount of
‘dark matter’, which upon further inspection turns out to be the state, which provides
services that lend a ‘generalized goodwill’ to private brands.
Brand and social imaginary/space-time. In bottled water marketing, the product
is positioned within a broader anxiety-ridden social ontology defined between the
antinomic polarities of public and private, nature and technology. In this way, we can see
that brand acts as a “condensed space-time, and may be analyzed to give a fuller account
of the wider intersubjective spacetime in which it operates” (Munn 1986:10). As Coombe
(1996) shows, the specific kind of alterity involved in creating figures tend to draw on
‘symbolic fields of social alterity’, making the figure of the brand an index of the
imagined horizons of the culture of circulation in which it circulates. In the case
discussed by Coombe, these are drawn from imagined space of the ‘frontier’ in
terms of which American consumers defined themselves, but they could also be
drawn from the field of alterity of empire (McClintock 1995), even the entirely
fanciful characters of folkloric alterity (Olivier 2007). In addition, in many cases
brands are not valuable so much for the way they index real or prosthetic personas, but
the way they index a whole social imaginary, becoming ‘metasymbols’ (Miller), standing
no longer for producers or products but for whole dimensions of circulation, for example
the way that brand ‘labels’, often detached from the use-value or commodity, came to be
self-valuable mediums of ‘contact’ with the ‘Imaginary West’ in the USSR (Yurchak
2006), or the way that socialist products index a particular apperception of temporal
alterity in East Germany, (N)Ostalgia, as well as parallel phenomena elsewhere in the
former USSR (Berdahl etc.) At the same time, the existence of ‘brands’ in political
economic contexts that lack market rivalry between producers and concepts of
‘goodwill’, such as state-planned economies, raises important questions about the limits
of the concept in relation to source-identification, as the category of brand circulates
outside of the presumably functional political economy context that gave rise to it. In
another example, the deployment of puranic devotional images as part of the advertising
and sometimes packaging of commodities by both western and Indian companies in India
reveals more how western ontologies of the commodity engage an implicit secularism
presumed not to be relevant for Indian publics, as well as implicit orientalist ontologies
(Jain 2007). Thus, brands not only index figures of identity (producers) but also figures of
alterity within broader social imaginaries. (phastamagoria/hyper-reality)
Indexing the product. The same legal definition demands that the trademark be
‘affixed to the product’, that is, that brand must be in relationship of reflexive calibration
to the product. Here too is a dimension that is often neglected in what Moore calls ‘the
dematerialization of brand’. While a brand may consist of a variety of semiotic
exponents (a slogan, a logo, trademark, trade dress), and many of these can drift free of
their association with a product, the core of the phenomenon is that brand is some sort of
distinctive semiotic display materially associated with products of a certain type. That is,
brands are both token-level indexicals (each instance of brand is associated with one
instance of a product), but also typifying (unlike craft indexes of production, each of
which is unique), each token of a brand trademark instantiates a type, and guarantees that
each product will be of the same quality as every other. This dimension also takes on a
new importance when the ‘product’ indexed is itself a new kind of object, a place, an
experience, a service, or even something which is not itself a potential object of capital.
It also becomes important when brands increasingly are no longer associated with standalone products but to whole ranges of products and services (Lurie 2004).
As the phenomenon of brand becomes ever more abstract, many stories about brand
tend to collapse the phenomenon into an undifferentiated haze of ‘qualities’, none of
which is in principle more intrinsic, more distinctive, or indeed differentiable from any
other, so that brand is simply another name for the individuating bundle of qualities that,
indeed, could be said to individuate any object, brand becomes, indeed, simply another
word for whatever principle individuates (and renders comparable), any material object
(‘economies of qualities’, Callon et al 2000). Although this approach has the advantage
of helping us see parallels between capitalist modes of qualification and individuation
and those of other cultures of circulation (e.g. the Kula, which also involves a certain
kind of ‘economy of qualities’, or qualisigns (qualities that are potentially able to serve as
signs, Munn , Keane 2003, Meneley 2008)), it is clear that the kinds of qualisigns that
Callon is discussing are those specifically constituted by regimes of standardization and
technoscientific authentication (Meneley 2007, Heath and Meneley 2007, Paxon 2008).
However, as legal scholars in particular (Dinwoodie) are careful to point out, we cannot
apply the same semiotic stories to linguistic exponents of brand as we can to non-
linguistic ones, and we should add, those that are able to be graphically represented
versus those that are not, and finally, indeed, the most problematic exponents of brand are
those that are simplex qualities that cannot be transcribed into a linguistic or graphic
representation (a color, a fragrance).
Linguistic distinctiveness. The ability of linguistic trademarks (later extended to nonlinguistic ones) to act as signifers is partially evaluated on the basis of doctrines such as
distinctiveness, dilution and genericide. The traditional doctrine of distinctiveness
relates to a specific dimension of the linguistic aspect of brand, namely, that “original,
arbitrary, or fanciful words” are more singular and distinctive than terms descriptive or
referential or in common usage (this particular model is ultimately canonized in the
Abercrombie decision of 1976). Thus, trademarks are protected to the extent that
they lack a descriptive or referential relationship to properties or qualities of the
product. The same is true of slogans as well as names, so that, for example, legal
departments of corporations routinely have to remind advertisers not to use the wording
of slogans in advertising texts or the slogan becomes downgraded to an unprotected
‘descriptive’ usage, similar to the way that advertisers are reminded not to use the brand
name as a noun, but always as an attributive adjective (not ‘Legos’ but ‘Legos blocks’),
to avoid genericide. Hence, linguistic ideologies separating referential from other
functions are implied here. Also, as Coombe argues (1996) and can be seen in specific
cases like the Brownie camera (Olivier 2007), the legal definition protecting
‘fanciful’ names may have helped in the tendency to recruit arbitrary figures of
ethnic, racial or supernatural alterity to brand products discussed above. Dilution,
instead, “occurs when, because two signifiers are similar, they lessen each other’s
differential distinctiveness” (Beebe 2008). This relates to a Saussurean paradigmatic
dimension of value (Beebe 2008), but crucially, here, too, the properties not only of the
signifiers used by two different undertakings, but also the properties of the product as
use-value, have been at issue. That is, part of the question is whether dilution occurs
when the products are by their nature non-rivalrous as use-values.
Trade Dress: non-linguistic dimensions of brand. On a second level, we can
consider the relationship between the exponents of brand and the product as material
relationship between sign-vehicles. Since the property of brand, indexing a unique
prosthetic persona, may be realized through a variety of markings (exponents) of
different kinds, including linguistic and non-linguistic signs, signs that can be graphically
represented and those that cannot, not only the indexical relation of the mark to the
product is important (the reflexively calibrated token-reflexive linkage), but also the
manner of realization of the different material exponents of brand, logos, trademark,
trade dress or get up what one might call the morphology of brand. In the simplest case,
the kind of prototypical case recognized in older trademark laws, the trademark
represents something akin to a morphological affix, a segmentable material sign which is
potentially distinct, even removable, from the product. However, not only may brand be
realized on a product via multiple exponence, but some of those exponents of brand may
be materially continuous with, or only formally abstractable from the product itself.
Some of the most recondite portions of trademark law are those where brand is
represented by design features that are formally, but not physically, abstractable
(Dinwoodie etc.). Here we see legal semiotic ideologies seeking to distinguish between
form (brand) and function (product, use value), notions of styling, design, decoration as
opposed to technical utility. Often these semiotic ideologies are in conflict with those
aesthetic ideologies amongst designers, who seek to blur those same boundaries between
form and function. The problem is that just as legal regimes tend to prefer linguistic
signs as ‘distinctive’ that are fanciful, arbitrary but not referential or descriptive as
brands, so too legal regimes tend to prefer non-linguistic aspects of brand that are clearly
non-functional, decorative, and clearly separated from the technical or utility dimension
of the use-value or product.
Immaterial ‘services’. Similar problems are raised by services, which are often
misleadingly said to be ‘immaterial commodities’ (what is presumably meant is that they
do not take durable forms like normal commodities), often part of a general sea change in
in capitalist economies where we have moved from an economy defined by ‘products’ to
one defined by ‘services’. In the case of a service, since the product is typically an
autonomous activity (often a linguistic one, say, talk), the categories of quality associated
with branding by definition have to be realized in tandem with that activity, raising
questions similar to those raised by design and trade dress. Cameron (2000, 2008) has
shown in particular the kinds of consequences for an autonomous activity like talk (in
particular ‘top down’ scripting of conversation) when it becomes a marketed, branded
service, showing how real subsumption of an activity as a specifically capitalist labor
process produces changes related to labor discipline (efficiency, monitoring), which is
typical of any labor process subsumed under capitalism, but, because it is a service (that
is, a labor process that is also a product in itself) there are also ‘styling’ changes that act
to produce a uniform brand image of an activity presented to a customer.
Lovemarks: Indexing the consumer. Through brands, however, products are also attached
to figures of consumption: idealized consumers. This new attention to the figure of the
consumer in the brand, and the way that brands interpellate consumers and are
appropriated by them, is often linked once again to a epochal periodization of capitalism,
a general shift from a social ontology of productivism to one of consumerism, where
there has been a general move from brand as a figure of production to a figure of
consumption (Mazzarella 2003): a semiotic transition from trademarks of production to
so-called lovemarks of consumer loyalty (Foster 2005). This perspective on brand seeks
to see the “value” of brands as being a joint product of the labor of both producers and
consumers. Often the new relationship between producers and consumers expressed in
brand is treated not as one of rhetorical persuasion but as Habermasian dialog in the
‘hybrid forum’ of the new economy (Callon et al 2000, Lury 2004). The kinds of
statements and qualities associated with brands are said to move to ones that emphasize
subjective affective involvements and vague associations with lifestyles rather than
specific objective properties of the product itself. Branded objects attract to themselves
not only properties of the subjects (“person-alities”) that produce them but also, by
association, the subjects that consume them. Robert Foster describes this as the
reattachment of the alienated product to another personality, that is, to the
consumer. It is this reattachment that is achieved through branding. I hasten to
add that branding involves more than the labour of special workers who design
logos and devise advertising campaigns.... Branding also involves the work of
consumers,whose meaningful use of the purchased products invests these
products with the consumer’s identity. . . . Put differently, the persons of
consumers enhance the value of brands. (Foster 2005:11)
In some cases, particularly recent discussions of virtual environments, it can much more
directly be argued that the line between producer and consumer is truly blurred (Coombe
et al.). Importantly however, the intertexts of brand that occur as it is appropriated and
redeployed by consumers, sometimes helping define the brand or lending it their own
labor of consumption, is not legally recognized in property law and is subject to unilateral
restriction. This area of brand has become a dominant theme in recent literature, linked
to often uncritical appropriation of the professional discourses, definitions and claims of
marketing professionals into anthropological discussions, a reflexive move aided by the
frequently porous professional boundaries between the two discourses (Callon et al.
2000). Here, again, just as producer is treated as a Goffmanian ‘figure’, so too the
consumer. Here, as well, we can see shifts from the interpellation of the consumer qua
consumer to interpellation of the consumer as citizen, among other modalities, thus
conflating different social imaginaries (for example Berdahl 1999, Bach 2002, Jain
2007,Özkan and Foster 2005), or as having certain specific desirable social properties
that are associated with the prototypical consumer, for example ‘cool’, ‘cute’ (Allison
2000, 2004, Iwabuchi 2002, 2004), or even secular ‘culturedness’ (Gronow 2003, Kelly
and Volkov 1998) or religious piety (Jain 2007).
Figures and fetishes: Character branding. Naturally, as brand objects attract
more properties of subjects, whether of producers or of consumers, we come squarely
into the vexed category of the brand as a fetish (which, nevertheless, is not at all the kind
of fetish envisioned by Marx, as I will argue), or at least, certain aspects of that
notoriously polysemous entity, specifically those having to do with the conflation of
categories of subject and object. It is at this point, too, that analysts turn from Marx to
Mauss, often finding in brand a kind of curious image of the Maussian ‘total social fact’.
This portion of the analysis does not exactly fit under any of the rubrics above, so I will
treat it as a separate one. In this final section I will explore the ways in which brands, as
figures, come to take on more and more properties of actual subjects, becoming more and
more like actual animate figures, with which consumers are able to form more complex
affective relationships. Some classic cases, like figures like Betty Crocker (discussed in
detail by Lury 2004), deserve comparison to the use of puranic images of deities
discussed by Jain (2007), and especially to the complexities of Japanese characterbranding discussed by, for example, Allison (2000, 2004, 2006ab) and Iwabuchi (2002,
2004), and in particular the kinds of forms of intertextuality between product ranges
(where the character brands are either drawn from actual narrated characters or in due
course become actual narrated characters in various media), and the different kinds of
affective bonds between consumer and product enabled by ‘cute’ character figures as
opposed to western signifiers of ‘cool’.
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