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The various parties will refine the processes of seeking authority and clarify the communicative nature of brands through the observation of their “cultural commensalism”. At the same time, the parties will be dedicated to understanding the beliefs and representations of communication professionals who manage brands and choose modes of expression.

Dedicated to particular appropriations, the parties focus on changes in the modalizations of speaking, changes in enunciations that not only transform the statements, and the view that one can take of their properties and statutes, but also upset the places of actors in the social game. This reverse sociology, determined by enunciative games, puts the question of power and the manufacture of authority around brands at the heart of questioning and research.

I have chosen to shed light on the articulation of concepts through emblematic examples with a writing system that alternates questioning notions, field analysis, conceptual connections, and theorization.

The four parts of this book are divided into complementary chapters to further develop the general argument. In this way, I wish to explain the depth of the phenomena observed, explain their causes, shed light on their modalities, expose consequences, and highlight the gradation of the quest for authority around brands. The latter thus ranges from the limited and almost ornamental rhetorical claim to the display of the brand as a legitimate actor in the social space.

Part 1 will focus on the quest for authority inspired by the media model, based on the strength of authorship and the audience, revealing the contemporary ideal of the circulation of knowledge.

Part 2 will be dedicated to the positions of authority in the lecture and expert modes. The desire to be an authority among audiences to initiate and educate will be the modality analyzed using contemporary and historical examples of trademark instruction.

Part 3 will be devoted to the dynamics of the patrimonialization of brands involved in the institutionalization of a social memory. Questions of legitimizing knowledge and access to “cultural mediation”, in the strict sense of the term, will be at the heart of the subject.

The presentation of these three sections may give the impression of compartmentalization. If it is assumed that we illuminate the quest for authority of brands through cultural figurations and isolate processes, this does not fully reflect a more intertwined, more complex reality where processes interpenetrate.

Semiotic management by professionals is a major interpretative key to understand and analyze these appropriations that affect devices, positions, and processes. It will be demonstrated in the first three parts and explained in the fourth.

Part 4 is the last step of the journey, the culmination of the previous ones: the conclusion. Its purpose is to explain how brand mediation has become the model, the preferred matrix for communication. The socio-semiotic appropriation of cultural forms by brands suddenly has an opposite dynamic. Thus, the appropriation of the brand model by public space actors: media, schools, museums and other cultural actors is becoming more widespread. If the quest for power is inherent in the communicative life that their managers lend them, the brand has become a model for creating hegemony and bringing together internal teams. With the spread of managerial ideology throughout society, the weight of brands continues to grow.

1 1 Le Monde, December 18, 2013, p. 5.

2 2 Le Monde.fr, “Le gouvernement assigne le groupe E. Leclerc en justice”, November 20, 2013.

3 3 www.mouvement.leclerc/prix-landerneau-des-lecteurs-2018.

4 4 Interdisciplinary research group on information and communication processes, a CELSA research entity, attached to the Doctoral School V of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Sorbonne University.

5 5 (Patrin-Leclère et al. 2014): this book is divided into different chapters and each concept is worked on by its author.

6 6 HDR in Information and Communication Sciences, “De la gestion sémiotique à la prétention sociale des marques. Une analyse communicationnelle des pratiques du marketing”, supervised by Yves Jeanneret, defended at CELSA, Paris-Sorbonne, on December 7, 2015. In France, HDR is the accreditation to supervise research and PhD.

7 7 This body of professionals is very diverse. In branding agencies, advertising agencies or advertisers, their common trait is to contribute to the performance of signs and offers federated by logos. To designate them, I refer in this book to “brand professionals” or “brand managers”.

8 8 Under the term “brand managers”, I include professionals who participate in the construction, monitoring, and support of brands. It refers to all marketing, communication, and design professionals, whether they are in companies, independent consultants or integrated into agencies, but who are all involved in brand management. It deserves further development and deepening, but this is not the purpose of this research.

9 9 Who today thinks of a magazine as the result of a hybrid between text and image? It has long been naturalized and a genre in itself, the source of other media hybridizations.

10 10 This does not exclude the recurrent manifestation of a recurring advertising fervour here and there, with a craze for certain events or activities. One can think, for example, of “La nuit des publivores” (a show presented in more than 40 countries and representing the advertising production of about 60 nationalities) or mention the collection of advertising objects.

11 11 Escort speeches are a type of supporting speech, used in economics for example.

12 12 “In a strong sense”: the author points out that this is the meaning given to this term in German philosophy, that of a commitment linked to values.

13 13 This idea can be found in Arendt (2006).

14 14 The expression here is captured in the broad sense given by Lamizet (1999) rather than in the narrow sense of cultural devices confined to museums, books, etc.

15 15 Some phenomena of cultural appropriation on behalf of brands are left aside: ludic or didactic operations in urban areas, books on offer, event organisation, activities in amusement parks, are just a few examples. The approach is also focused on mainly French examples. The work carried out has yet to be continued on other sites.

16 16 This reference to Jankelevich’s work (1957) also evokes the impossible grasp of the unspeakable and in particular the moment of suspension between a past that is no longer and a future that has not yet happened.