Semiotica strategica, semiotica politica

A comprehensive understanding of the meaning of a brand can only arise from a thorough examination of its distinctive characteristics: that is, it's difficult to speak of a brand in an absolute and abstract sense, while we readily consider what we might define as a responsible and operational social entity -a ‘political’ one- within a given context. Our understanding does not include the brand, but brands, as interpreters of the synthesis of large portions of contingent imagery and sensibilities, major protagonists in a constantly renewing dialectic between matrices of current values and the accesses mobilized by their own recipients. The purpose of this article is to probe how brands, in this sense, are the container into which, on the one hand, the social, socio-political, and economic tensions of a given situation have been selected to converge, and on the other, where the practices of desire, acquisition, and, of course, resistance, of their users themselves are addressed.