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In view of the developments mentioned, it is clear that it is necessary to avoid depreciated resources and to address targets through bypass channels, through media choices and devices that enhance brands in other ways.

Beyond that, brands are the result of the permanent managerial injunction to create value, a symbolic value on which financial value can be based and thrive. The value creation process integrates the production of a singular ideology attributable to the brand, necessary to differentiate it, make it readable and preferable to its competitors in a market. The anchoring and depth of this ideology are inseparable from the legitimacy that underlies it so that its pre-eminence and authority can shine through. But this process involves circulating brand-specific knowledge that managers would like to share.

Using authority is an investment adapted to such an enterprise in the sense that authority refers both to the masking of the tools of power and the performance of that power. It is the promise of a capture without having to set it up, a result announced without effort to manifest it. Authority implies recognition, credit, obedience to an entity recognized as legitimate, the notion of authority excluding the use of violence, coercion, and even persuasion¹³. Nevertheless, despite the myth of natural authority, authority, which is neither force nor argument, is built. It does not exclude the will to exercise domination and power over others. It is therefore a promise of a relationship that assumes the power to impose a view into social life.

My remarks will not focus directly on the efficiency of this power, but on the adoption of positions of authority to legitimize and give credibility to a discourse and an existence in public life. This quest for authority is based on the establishment of cultural mediations, in the broadest sense, which are assumed to allow for recognition and legitimate expression.

I will focus on the forms of authority sought for brands by reducing the prism, because there is no real essentialism of authority except when it is understood as one already, for example in some institutions. Otherwise, it is a moving force, a dynamic that begins, is maintained, and is reinforced, thanks to forms, discourses, and practices created and invested by actors to ensure domination. I do not claim to give a complete overview of the construction of authority, even in a commercial environment; I focus on the forms that seem most intense to me from a communicative point of view, that is, the most loaded with tensions. The focus is predominantly on the forms instituted as such, or established.