Market mediations : semiotic investigations on consumers, objects and brands

"Market Mediations offers a fresh way to look at consumption practices as well as design and branding issues through analysis based on the French and European intellectual tradition. The economy of brands truly came into being in the mid-19th century as a way for manufacturers to transform bulk sales and commodities markets into product markets with high added value. A brand that was already established as a sign of identification and differentiation thus became a driver of social mediation to form a fictional relationship between companies and their end users. Initially, and in the end, the brand served to change the power relationships structuring commodities markets where products were sold in bulk. To account for this vast system of objects and brands, the book draws heavily on the generative trajectory of meaning stemming from the structural semiotics of Greimas obedience; it presupposes that meaning is produced by progressive enrichment from a constitutive core (core values) and gradually rises to the surface to its discursive implementation via objects and figurative elements. "--