How brands (don’t) do things: Corporate branding as practices of imagining “commens”

Kyung-Nan Koh

doi:10.1515/sem-2015-0055

Article

How brands (don’t) do things: Corporate branding as practices of imagining “commens”

Kyung-Nan Koh

Published/Copyright: July 17, 2015

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From the journal Semiotica Volume 2015 Issue 207

Abstract

How do brands do things (if, indeed, they do)? Using ethnographic data gathered inside a Hawaiian corporation, this paper examines how the brand form is developed imaginatively by stitching together the various voices of corporate stakeholders and also organizing the relationship between the corporation or their products and the targeted publics as participants in a hypothetical semiotic participation framework. The concept of commens of Charles Sanders Peirce is used to help explain how corporate actors seek to create a felicitous condition by which brand forms may ensure reception of messages as well as perlocutionary acts of consumption. It is suggested that contemporary branding practices are understandable as attempts to establish commens – a necessary condition for any effective communication between sign-producers and sign-interpreting social agents.

Keywords: brand; commens; corporation; prolepsis; semiotic communication; semiotic ideology

Funding statement: Funding: Dissertation fieldwork was funded by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Grant No. 7224). This work, the writing of it, was supported by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Research Fund of 2013.

Acknowledgements

Ideas in this paper have been presented in various versions at various occasions, including the Penn Semiotics Lab in 2009, the 2010 AAA Annual Meeting in New Orleans, the 2012 International Conference of the Semiosis Research Center, the 2013 “Global Semiosis” Working Symposium at Brandeis University, the 2013 Seoul Semiotics Summer School, and the 2014 Twelfth World Congress of Semiotics. I would like to thank the audiences at these events, Asif Agha, Mark Auslander, Nancy Felson, Yunhee Lee, Richard J. Parmentier (especially), John Plotz, and Javier Urcid, for their encouragements and comments. Nicholas Harkness, Constantine V. Nakassis, Richard J. Parmentier, Michael Prentice, Greg Urban, and Bonnie Urciuoli read drafts and generously provided detailed comments. Special thanks go to Greg Urban for his continuing support, enthusiasm, and Metaphysical Community (1996b), which I have been greatly inspired by as a beginning Ph.D. student and which probably affected this work in a way that is not immediately clear to both of us. I thank Diana Min-Sun Kang for creating the Figures. Last but not least, I thank my informants at the “Hawaiian Lands Company” – in particular, KB, KJ, KD, DC, and CB. This paper is a rework of one of my dissertation chapters (Koh 2010). All errors are my own.

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Published Online: 2015-7-17

Published in Print: 2015-10-1

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https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2015-0055

Keywords for this article

brand; commens; corporation; prolepsis; semiotic communication; semiotic ideology