Brands as services with a very own vision (Part I) (original) (raw)

Since the mid-1990s, brand specialists have relied on a variety of institutionalized and relatively undisputed brand strategies. However, a semiotic examination of these strategies reveals contradictions about the concept of the brand, which call them into question. The objective of this article is to highlight the theoretical and practical challenges linked to brand strategies, so as to develop a renewed-and specifically semiotic-approach to the concept of the brand, here defined as "a service with a vision of its own." Apart from offering a renewed definition of the brand, this article proposes to consider any type of economic organization (companies, subsidiaries…) or solution (products, lines, offerings…) as a service. Moreover, it introduces two opposite types of services ('sovereign service' vs. 'adjunct service') to capture all the possible brand relationships between companies, subsidiaries, products, lines, and ranges. Lastly, it refutes the idea that two brands can equally mark a product or communication, laying the foundations for a new brand architecture model structured in accordance with semiotic guidelines. More generally, the article aims to promote the use of Greimasian (post-)structural semiotics in brand management to enrich reflection and improve practices.