Cultural Branding

En el cruce entre la cultura del diseño y el museo contemporáneo se encuentra el branding cultural. En nuestro país, se dio como un fenómeno que comenzó en el siglo XXI con las experiencias del Malba y la Fundación Proa. En la actualidad, se consolidó como un campo autónomo en el circuito cultural.

This study focuses on brand literacy in the emerging market of China. Results reveal Chinese consumer desire to express a deep resonance between Chinese values and aesthetics and a favored brand identity. Chinese brands such as Shanghai Tang and Shang Xia – developed in collaboration with leading European luxury brands – build upon Chinese culture, values, and aesthetics to create distinctive, culturally infused brand identities. At a basic level, culture, which includes aspects of particular histories of meaning, and moments of creative innovation, can be perceived as a resource upon which branding processes and practices can draw. Yet, brand culture refers not to a simple process of applying “culture” to a brand.
Under what conditions may we perceive the many ways in which branding – and brands themselves – go beyond cultural branding, and indeed, co-create culture in relation to consumer processes and practices? One way of thinking about how brands and culture interact draws upon the notion of brand literacy – how well consumers are able to “read,” understand, and engage brands and brand messages. We explore a growing brand literacy among Chinese consumers, and reveal how brand literacy is embedded in a cultural context and contributes to brand culture. This study highlights multidimensional aspects of brand literacy and represents an initial step toward a more developed framework in the context of brand culture.

The early modern commercial book market was the cradle of authorial branding. Authors and publishers increasingly explored the construction of authorial brands: a set of recurring and recognizable characteristics associated with authorial images. This chapter looks at branding in the context of the media landscape of the early modern Dutch Republic. Authorial branding developed over time in conjunction with new conceptions of the individual, technological innovations, and the changing role of-amongst others-patrons and publishers. Analyses of the branding of Jan Jansz. Starter (1593-1626) and Sara Maria van der Wilp (1716-1803) illustrate how the non-formalized, dynamic constellation of the literary eld inspired various agents to create a range of (multifaceted) author brands on the spectrum 'economic-symbolic'.

«[…] para combater o utopismo acelerado das smart cities, promovido pela alta tecnologia das grandes empresas de engenharia e consultoria, não havia necessidade de a Europa da qualidade e excelência se democratizar apenas por via de hamburguerias chiques para as massas; parece preferível promover-se a viagem através/até das/às suas ruas mais intensamente apropriadas, e delas cuidar porquanto frágeis oásis na efemeridade dos seus equilíbrios. […] Hoje isto passa por investigar de que forma a classe criativa se pode articular para produzir interfaces discursivos – os tais conceitos – que tirem partido de valências como as instituições ou o edificado para atingir novos patamares de transversalidade.» In revista ARQA. 119 'Aproximações Locais' Ano XV Julho/Agosto 2015

A cultural perspective reveals how branding has opened up to include cultural, sociological, and theoretical inquiry that both complements and complicates economic and managerial analysis of branding.  An emphasis on culture forms part of a larger movement within the brand research canon, reinforcing a basic premise that culture and history can provide necessary context to corporate perspectives of branding’s interaction with consumers and society. Brand research from a cultural perspective occupies the theoretical space between strategic concepts of brand identity and consumer interpretations of brand image, shedding light on the gap often seen between the corporate and consumer perspectives.  The cultural perspective emphasizes brand heritage, history, and legacy and how these create associations, meaning, and value. Brand culture focuses on how brands share stories, build community, and solve problems. As cultural forms, brands evolve in accordance with changes in the historical, geographical, and social context. From this perspective, cultural, ideological and political environments influence the process of building brands, brand meaning, and brand value. Along these lines, brand culture has been defined as “the cultural codes of brands – history, images, myths, art, and theatre – that influence brand meaning and value in the marketplace.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to review a typology of branding that identifies four perspectives on branding: corporate perspectives, consumer perspectives, cultural perspectives and critical perspectives. This typology helps organise and synthesise the growing interdisciplinary literature on brands and branding, and sheds light on the various ways corporate brands work. A brief synthetic review of branding is offered, along with contemporary examples of emerging aspects of the four branding perspectives. The four perspectives demonstrate the growing interdisciplinary interest in brands. They also signal a move away from a focus on the brand-consumer dyad, toward broader social cultural, and theoretical concerns. Studies that extend brand research into cultural and historical realms may provide an essential bridge between our understanding of, on the one hand, value residing within the product or producer intention, or on the other, value created by individual consumers or brand communities. The insights from this review may shed light on a number of branding research areas, including studies on corporate marketing, cultural heritage brands, and strategic brand communication.
The paper illustrates how complex branding has become, and offers conceptual tools to think about and guide branding from multiple points of view. This paper provides a selective overview of important recent developments in corporate marketing and brand research over as well as a look at visual aspects of four perspectives of branding as a complement to corporate branding research. The typology of brand perspectives helps organise and illuminate a burgeoning brand literature.

Sur la base d’une revue bibliographique et des entretiens effectués auprès des professionnels, cet article vise à explorer les pratiques actuelles de conservation qui se déroulent au sein des expositions de mode, qui constitue un moyen de communication pour les marques.
Dans un premier temps, les objectifs ou les finalités sont explorés de la part des marques de mode, ainsi que la réception des visiteurs. D’abord, en tant qu’outil de communication, l’exposition sert à la construction culturelle de la marque. D’autre part, centré sur la réception des visiteurs, l’effet cognitif, affectif et conatif est relevé.
Dans un second temps, l’évaluation sur le contenu et celle sur la forme sont étudiées. De plus, concernant des critères d’évaluation, le décalage entre les propositions académiques, les pratiques réelles, et les nouveautés acquises au cours des entretiens est évident, en donnant une référence pour les professionnels qui souhaitent intégrer les méthodes d’évaluation dans la conception d’exposition de mode.

Based on a literature review and several interviews conducted with professionals in this domain, this article aims to explore current curatorial practices in the fashion exhibitions, which is a method of communication for fashion brands.
Firstly, the objectives are analyzed from the side of fashion brands, as well as exhibition visitors. As a communication tool, exhibitions manage to construct the cultural meaning for a brand. On the other hand, the final effect received by visitors differs in levels like cognitive, affective and conative.
Secondly, evaluations of the content and of the form are studied. Moreover, regarding the evaluation criteria, the gap between academic proposals, actual practices and results acquired during interviews is obvious, giving a reference for professionals who wish to incorporate evaluation methods in their fashion exhibitions.

Recent research has shifted attention from brand producers and products toward consumer response and services to understand brand value creation. Often missing from these insights, however, is a focus on cultural processes that affect contemporary brands, including historical context, ethical concerns, and representational conventions. A brand culture perspective reveals how branding has opened up to include interdisciplinary research that both complements and complicates economic and managerial analysis of branding. If brands exist as cultural, ideological, and political objects, then brand researchers require tools developed to understand culture, ideology, and politics, in conjunction with more typical branding concepts, such as equity, strategy, and value.

This paper tries to identify suitable strategies to enhance local cultural heritage - both museums and other cultural sites -, focusing on new product and communication concepts in the perspective of experiential marketing. Particularly we will keep attention to the thematic organization of cultural offer, analysing differences between museums and theme parks. After drawing guidelines to identify cultural themes which do not simplify the systemic complexity of cultural heritage value, we would like to show their role in the naming process and in the definition of product strategies in order to respond to the needs of experiencebased tourism. We will suggest that the paradigm based on the connection between assets, cultural product and communication could achieve different competitive advantages, like recognition, comprehension and experience of a place and its culture, also meeting the need of authenticity expressed by new publics. Finally, we will analyse the role of “museum-square” like experience provider.

While previous researchers have attempted to explain the uncertain quality of visual arts with reference to branding theory, they have overlooked the role of art fairs. Socio-cultural approaches to branding allow us to explore the function of intermediaries in valuing contemporary arts. This article aims to analyze the role of art fairs in the process of branding young and emerging artists. In particular, a prestigious art fair, Frieze London, serves as an instrumental case study for developing a systematic understanding of art fairs in terms of valuing and branding contemporary art.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that greater awareness of the connections between the traditions and conventions of visual art and the production and consumption of images leads to enhanced ability to understand branding as a strategic signifying practice Several prominent, successful artists served as case studies to illuminate the potential for insights into the interconnections between art, branding, and consumption
by turning to art history and visual studies. Discusses the cross-fertilization of art and branding, focusing on three contribution areas: the interactions between art, brands and culture, the self-reflexivity of brands, and brand criticism.Successful artists can be thought of as brand managers, actively engaged in developing, nurturing and promoting themselves as recognizable “products” in the competitive cultural sphere.This paper places brands firmly within culture to look at the complex underpinnings of branding, linking perceptual and cognitive processes to larger social and cultural issues that contribute to how brands work and argues that art-centred analyses generate novel concepts and theories for marketing research.

As modern practice shows, museums can form not only national but also urban identities, with equal success and thus become a framework for a complex system of local images and narratives. The brand as
an identity today is formed not only at the level of public statements, made by administration representatives, alongside with the use of the official identity (logo, colours), but also in everyday space, which implies the need for the museum to enter the city space and for its museumification.
In this article, the author would like to highlight, once more, the role of the museum in the formation of a sustainable brand of the territory, to show examples from Eastern Europe and, finally, to analyse the experience of museums working alongside the urban space to produce and maintain a certain brand.
In addition to the analysis of direct tools, the author seeks to highlight a series of problematic issues that arise from working with the formation of a brand in Russian cities. In the article, the author addresses the often ignored basic principles and strategies for the integration of museums into the urban space.

Pietra, Henaff, bière Ch’ti… de nombreuses marques régionales ont réussi à s’ancrer solidement sur les marchés en s’appuyant sur des cultures et des identités régionales. L’objectif de ce article est de montrer comment les marques peuvent se développer en s’enracinant dans une culture régionale et en mobilisant l’identité régionale pour favoriser l’attachement de ses consommateurs. A partir de l’analyse de la stratégie d’une micro brasserie bretonne, nous montrerons comment il est possible de construire une stratégie marketing originale et performante en s’appuyant sur une culture régionale. Nous analysons comment une marque peut mettre en récit et mettre en action une culture régionale.

The paper takes as its subject celebrity and consumption and the cultural logic of the celebrity brand. It introduces the concept of celebritisation as the engine of celebrity culture, discussing ways in which celebrity brands operate as ‘map-making’ devices which situate consumers within networks of symbolic resources. We construct particulars via an investigative narrative that draws critically upon published accounts of the life and work of Andy Warhol, generating observations of signature practices and technologies of formation of Celebrity Brandhood. Within an inductive architecture we modulate to celebrity brands as transmediated marketing accomplishments which trade upon allure, glamour and charisma, constructed around rituals of transition, belonging, intimacy, and affect. We suggest that at the heart of the machinery of the cultural logic of the Celebrity Brand is the mediated spectacle as a field of social invention and transformation. In this way, the paper opens up pathways toward further interpretive analyses of celebrity brands, articulating the basis of accounts of Celebrity Brand Theoretics.

User-generated advertising (UGA) has been booming over the past
few years as marketers have been actively seeking to enhance
consumer engagement. Yet, our understanding of the
implications, the importance and the potential of UGA from a
cultural branding point of view remains limited. This study
furnishes the conceptual model of consumer cultural engagement
in order to appreciate in a more nuanced manner than afforded
by consumer sentiment analyses how UGA contributes to fleshing
out co-creatively a brand vision. To this end, a sociosemiotic
approach is pursued by dimensionalizing the cultural resources
employed in UGA along the interlocking layers of text/register/
domain in a cline of instantiation. The conceptual model is
exemplified by recourse to a UGA corpus from the 10th and final
wave of Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl promo mechanism,
undergirded by a mixed methods research design that features a
grounded theoretical procedure, facilitated by quantitative analyses.

El text proposa una reflexió sobre els criteris que configuren les marques i els llocs literaris dels autors clàssics, més enllà del seu rigor històric, a més d’examinar alguns factors determinants en la seua transposició didàctica.
Ens centrem en el poeta Ausiàs March (1400-1459), a partir dels llocs vinculats a la seua vida i d’algunes marques literàries que la seua figura ha generat. Entre els primers, abordarem dos àmbits geogràfics bàsics:
a) Els llocs vinculats a la comarca de la Safor, començant per Gandia (on tenia la casa) i Beniarjó, la població d’on fou senyor, amb el record de la casa senyorial i l’ermita, les seues obres hidràuliques (l’assut March i la séquia March) i agrícoles (molins i trapitjos) i el Monestir de Sant Jeroni de Cotalba, on són soterrats el pare (Pere March) i la seua primera dona (Isabel Martorell). Al paisatge urbà i agrícola, afegim el paisatge mariner i alguns indrets de la comarca de la Marina Alta.
b) La ciutat de València, on va residir els últims anys, en la qual es localitzen dos indrets bàsics: la casa on va morir i la seua tomba, dins la Catedral. A l’Alfufera situem el lloc on exercia el càrrec de falconer reial.
Pel que fa a les marques, ens centrarem en la imatge que li ha estat atribuïda, relacionada arbitràriament amb el retrat de Sant Sebastià pintat per Jacomart, que es conserva a la Seu de Xàtiva, que ha donat lloc a múltiples representacions. El nom del poeta ha esdevingut, també, una marca (toponímia urbana, centres escolars, premis literaris, antropònims, etc.).

Branding products and companies has always been associated with private enterprises and less, if ever, with international intergovernmental organizations. International organizations now have a long history behind them, a history often marked by contradictory events. In the last decade the international organizations developed their own public relations department in an attempt to communicate promptly and transmit the general audience their version of reality. Having this in mind we will try to briefly present in the current work the main reasons why we believe that the international organizations, NATO in particular, have started to see themselves as brand and to create a so called “commercial identity” by becoming a brand. By applying the conceptual and analytical framework used in analyzing the marketing strategies of the private companies we will try to see whether NATO is about to become a brand. Our starting point will be a 2008 statement of Francois Bureau, deputy general sec...

The paper takes as its subject celebrity and consumption and the cultural logic of the celebrity brand. It introduces the concept of celebritisation as the engine of celebrity culture, discussing ways in which celebrity brands operate as 'map-making' devices which situate consumers within networks of symbolic resources. We construct particulars via an investigative narrative that draws critically upon published accounts of the life and work of Andy Warhol, generating observations of signature practices and technologies of formation of Celebrity Brandhood. Within an inductive architecture we modulate to celebrity brands as transmediated marketing accomplishments which trade upon allure, glamour and charisma, constructed around rituals of transition, belonging, intimacy, and affect. We suggest that at the heart of the machinery of the cultural logic of the Celebrity Brand is the mediated spectacle as a field of social invention and transformation. In this way, the paper opens up pathways toward further interpretive analyses of celebrity brands, articulating the basis of accounts of Celebrity Brand Theoretics.

La popularización del término "marca España" ha llevado a algunos directores de cine a explotar los tópicos que comúnmente se le asocian (deportes, gastronomía, turismo, cultura, etc.), frecuentemente unidos en la misma película. El tema gastronómico suele presentarse como epifenómeno de la cultura local/nacional, sobre todo en películas de promoción regional y películas que abordan explícitamente el tema de la "españolidad". El creciente protagonismo del chef Ferrán Adrià dentro de la estrategia de comunicación de la Marca España, junto con la presencia mediática de otros chefs de reconocido prestigio internacional, se ha traducido en la aparición de varias películas donde el tema gastronómico se explora en clave de renovación de la imagen de España. Películas como Tapas (dirs. Corbacho y Cruz, 2005), Fuera de carta (dir. Velilla, 2008) o 18 comidas (dir. Coira, 2010) contrastan con el tratamiento del tema en clásicos como la trilogía ibérica, de Bigas Luna (sobre todo Jamón, jamón, 1992) y las celebradas escenas culinarias escritas por el guionista Rafael Azcona: La niña de tus ojos (dir. F. Trueba, 1998), Ay Carmela (dir. Saura, 1990), Suspiros de España (y Portugal) (dir. García Sánchez, 1995). En este trabajo se analiza la representación que en estas películas se ofrece del tema gastronómico como imagen de España.

Du géofiltre à l'égofiltre: les territoires de jeu des individus-marques à l'épreuve des applications de messagerie sociale Cet article s'inscrit dans la problématique du "territoire numérique de marque" tel que Mariannig Le Béchec et Camille Alloing nous invite à le conceptualiser comme " ensemble de signes transposables, mémorisés par des systèmes computationnels dont des algorithmes et valorisés par l'autorité réputationnelle des internautes" (Le Béchec et Alloing, 2016). Cette notion sera empiricisée sur le terrain des contenus circulant dans les interactions médiées par les applications de messagerie sociale comme par exemple Snapchat. Eu égard à la problématique du "territoire", nous voudrions tout d'abord pointer combien l'étude des jeux de langage composés et circulant via les smartphones permet de documenter des jeux avec le temps et l'espace. En particulier, nous nous attacherons en matière de signes transposables mobilisés dans les vagues des interactions aux "géofiltres", fonctionnalité qui permet depuis 2017 à des individus, des collectifs, des villes, des marques. Suivant les termes de l'application, les "filtres sont des calques visuels géolocalisés que les utilisateurs peuvent utiliser dans leurs Snaps" 1. Ces filtres avec les masques, emoji et stickers font partie du mix sémiotique dont relève le mobtexte (Allard, 2015). Par mobtete, nous entendons une textualité propre aux contenus mobiles et dont les applications de messagerie sociale (AMS) forment un 1 Définitions et conditions d'utilisation des géofiltres :

Moving away from the trend to study the managerial
aspects of Western brand building in Chinese contexts, we
examine how Chinese branding efforts express significant
aspects of their own brand culture. In our research, we use
a Chinese perspective to examine the capacity of Chinese
brand culture to serve as a complement to existing models of
brand globalization. We investigate conceptual and strategic
relationships between brands and culture, and reflect the concerns
of Chinese companies interested in developing global
brands. In so doing, we explore the possibilities and processes
of constructing global Chinese brands, which include calling
attention to the growing significance of the Chinese diaspora.

The purpose of this paper is to present two decisive texts in the advertising history, because they are probably the first to express the transition from product to brand like advertising’s object and reference, and the first to begin with the era of «big advertising», or the era of building Brands, as opposed to the previous era of «little advertising» which just announced products.

En el ámbito del museo, diseño y arte mediático extienden prácticas que plantean desafíos hacia el espectador y convierten estos espacios en experiencias de consumo. Frente a la expansión del espectáculo y el consumo masivo, el museo de arte contemporáneo se transforma: continente y contenido se vuelven imagen bajo un paradigma de museo-espectáculo muy presente en las grandes ciudades. Estas se convierten en enclave urbano, para utilizar al museo como tópico de turismo cultural. A partir del análisis de algunos casos de Buenos Aires y Rosario, se revisita el rol del diseño como articulador de prácticas que dan identidad y visibilidad al ámbito museístico, considerando políticas culturales públicas o privadas: ¿qué implica diseñar hoy para un museo contemporáneo?

Branding products and companies has always been associated with private enterprises and less, if ever, with international intergovernmental organizations. International organizations now have a long history behind them, a history often marked by contradictory events. In the last decade the international organizations developed their own public relations department in an attempt to communicate promptly and transmit the general audience their version of reality. Having this in mind we will try to briefly present in the current work the main reasons why we believe that the international organizations, NATO in particular, have started to see themselves as brand and to create a so called “commercial identity” by becoming a brand. By applying the
conceptual and analytical framework used in analyzing the marketing strategies of the private companies we will try to see whether NATO is about to become a brand. Our starting point will be a 2008 statement of François Bureau, deputy general secretary responsible with NATO’s public diplomacy: “We have the green light to think about a branding policy for NATO”. Nowadays global society, perceptions tend to become more important than reality itself, and thus positive perceptions tend to become crucial. NATO has suffer an image decline in the last decade, therefore some new communication measures tend to impose themselves.
The distinction between soft power and propaganda must be carefully analyzed when we speak about branding NATO. Thus we hope to bring some necessary clarifications in the area of NATO branding. Is there a brand? Is a brand going to be constructed? How does it differ from a commercial society? Does NATO need its own TV channel? Raising questions and offering a new perspective is, in the end, our primary goal, as a debate on this subject is a must that offers a new perspective in the area of theory of international organizations.

In 2013, various demonstrations occurred in Brazil sharing
some of the characteristics of international movements such as the
Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. Brazilians united their voices
against the increase in public transport fares, but soon included topics
such as political corruption and the underfunding of education
and healthcare in their pleas, while the Government was investing
heavily in preparations for the 2014 World Cup. The protests spread
all throughout the country during the Confederations Cup (seen as
a warm-up tournament for the World Cup) after being violently repressed
by the police. On the 20th of June the demonstrations mobilized
1.4 million people in more than 130 cities (Moreno 2013).
One of the surprising aspects of this movement was the appropriation
by demonstrators of the advertising campaign “Vem pra Rua”
(which is referred in this article as “Come to the Street”) created for
Fiat, the car manufacturer. Launched in May 2013, shortly before the
protests became a nationwide phenomenon, the campaign was seen
on billboards and started trending on social networks, helping the
movement to become vivid and fun. Its jingle was sung in the streets,
it was given new lyrics and used to create YouTube videos showing
the action of the demonstrators and the police. The original film can
be seen in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxMIwZZPlcM&ind
ex=5&list=PL2GmqRtYHMV3exhVrT-5RjPLO50eYHIcw)
Brands constitute the main paradigm of contemporary marketing
(Holt 2002) and their study has achieved discipline status (Allen,
Fournier, and Miller 2008). However, according to the authors
“our understanding of brands is incomplete and sometimes even misaligned
with revealed realities of the brand as experienced in today’s
consumer, corporate, and cultural worlds.” Thus, there is a gap in our
understanding as to how, why or when a brand’s private meanings
are able to reflect and resonate the “spirit of their time” (Holt 2004).
The appropriation of the “Come to the street” campaign by the
Brazilian demonstrations represents an opportunity to deepen our understanding
about the concept of brand cultural resonance (Fournier,
Solomon, and Englis 2008). Cultural resonance is “the degree to
which a brand’s claimed meanings reflect, echo, reinforce and reshape
the meanings from the collective social space that consumers
access in defining and shaping their lives” (Fournier et al. 2008, 43).
The authors suggest eight facets by which a brand can engender this
specific type of resonance: 1) cultural bedrock; 2) currency value;
3) meaning oppositions; 4) role resonance and portfolio effects 5)
category resonance; 6) cultural co-creation; 7) multivocality; 8) community.
In this paper, we analyze central aspects of the Fiat brand and
its campaign “Come to the Street” that allowed its cultural resonance
and consequent appropriation by demonstrators.
The investigation of the presence of brands in the context of the
demonstrations can be performed within the theoretical framework
of New Social Movement Theory that emphasizes logics of action
in the spheres of politics, ideology, and culture. Melucci (1985) understands
these new movements as constituting collective actions
based on solidarity as well as being decentralized, de-bureaucratized,
non-hierarchical and composed of networks of small groups. Their
objectives are related to long-term social and cultural changes and
also symbolic transformations for the dynamic building of collective
identities. The actors are highly transitory and temporary and
these networks allow multiple affiliations and part-time activism. In
addition, Melucci (1985) suggests that collective action takes place
because demonstrators communicate with each other and produce
and negotiate meanings.
In this context brands constitute an important source of cultural
resources (Holt 2004). According to the author, a strong brand carries
a story that circulates in culture and that in some way is able to
address cultural tensions of the moment. O´Guinn and Muñiz (2004)
suggest that brands have become cultural platforms which, more than
simplifiers of choice or reducers of risk, have the potential to constitute
themselves as declarations of ideologies.

The Maasai people have their name and cultural identity designs now legally protected and claim royalties for any commercial use thereof, after Louis Vuitton and other brands have used their cultural symbols without permission and even tried to register the Maasai name as a private trademark. The Mixe Community in Oaxaca, Mexico, claimed damages from Isabel Marant and considered taking legal action for plagiarism. Cultural appropriation and commercial unauthorized exploitation of traditional cultural expressions, tangible or intangible.

Brand image constitutes one of the most extensively and intensively explored and operationalized constructs in marketing theory and practice. This paper problematizes the way brand image has been conceptualized in the traditional branding and cultural branding streams by seeking in a particularly focused manner to disentangle primarily the definitional ambiguities involved in the adjacent concepts of brand symbols and brand icons, and then to elaborate on a critical missing component in the branding literature, viz. how brand imagery is transformed into brand image concepts. The offered conceptual exploratory draws largely on Peircean semiotics and to a lesser extent on structuralist approaches, by way of a contextualized discussion of the differences and similarites between signs and symbols, symbols and icons. Furthermore, in line with the extant semiotic literature, I argue that iconicity constitutes an overarching semiotic principle whereby a brand language appropriates signs and transforms them into integral aspects of its expressive inventory, rather than a mere descriptor of similitude. The conceptual exploratory culminates in a discussion of the implications for cultural branding from adopting a semiotically inflected branding metalanguage.

Resum: Aquest treball presenta la “Ruta Estellés de Burjassot”, una ruta literària creada per l'Ajuntament de Burjassot (l'Horta) que recorre els carrers i les places del poble del poeta Vicent Andrés Estellés a través de la seua obra. Fou inaugurada amb uns objectius concrets el setembre de 2013 coincidint amb el seu natalici i amb la commemoració de l'Any Estellés. Descrivim el conjunt del projecte (localització dels punts, textos seleccionats, participants) que configura una marca territorial per a la promoció del patrimoni.

Abstract: This paper presents the “Ruta Estellés de Burjassot”, a literary tour created by the City of Burjassot (l’Horta) through the streets and squares of the town poet Vicent Andrés Estellés by means his poems and memoirs. It was inaugurated with specific objectives in September 2013 to coincide with his birthday and commemoration of the “Year of Estellés”. We describe the overall project (location of points, selected texts, participants) that forms a territorial brand to promote heritage.

This article explores why cultural branding-ideo-affective market communication addressing intense political tensions-paradoxically seems to lead to political inertia rather than political mobilization. I critically analyse advertising addressing political tensions related to race, ethnicity and immigration, but instead of only following the traced-out trajectory of postcolonial theory, I use the lens ofŽižek's radicalized Lacanian psychoanalysis and treat the therapeutic visuality in cultural branding as ideological fantasies of the market's multicultural imaginary. Through critical visual methodologies, I situate four 'multicultural' commercials in their culture-and idea historical contexts, and juxtapose a postcolonial with aŽižekian reading for each of them. I come to argue that the market's multicultural imaginary (unconsciously) serves important ideological functions in sustaining the political status quo not foremost because it placates anxiety, but because it doesn't. Tapping into previous discussions in critical marketing on fetishistic disavowal and inversion, I offer yet another explanation. The political inertia following from ideo-affective dimensions of cultural branding does not primarily come from therapeutic sedation, but from the opposite, namely the parallax object's upholding of gruesome tension and suspense; a fetishistic tickling. This article ends by critiquing the compulsory use of postcolonial theory in research on racial and ethnic relations. From theŽižekian reading, it appears that the postcolonial gaze is now a punishing agency like any dominant ideology, where the social inequality of global capitalism is deemed a more bearable alternative than the traumatic horror of visible racism, which, subsequently, closes the circuit from radical politics.

The paper takes as its subject celebrity and consumption and the cultural logic of the celebrity brand. It introduces the concept of celebritisation as the engine of celebrity culture, discussing ways in which celebrity brands operate as 'map-making' devices which situate consumers within networks of symbolic resources. We construct particulars via an investigative narrative that draws critically upon published accounts of the life and work of Andy Warhol, generating observations of signature practices and technologies of formation of Celebrity Brandhood. Within an inductive architecture we modulate to celebrity brands as transmediated marketing accomplishments which trade upon allure, glamour and charisma, constructed around rituals of transition, belonging, intimacy, and affect. We suggest that at the heart of the machinery of the cultural logic of the Celebrity Brand is the mediated spectacle as a field of social invention and transformation. In this way, the paper opens up pathways toward further interpretive analyses of celebrity brands, articulating the basis of accounts of Celebrity Brand Theoretics.

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