Trademarks produce a parasocial relationship between the brand and the consumer relying on the capital slave perpetuating and venerating these brands leading to the fetishization and submission to the trademark.

THE DEMATERIALIZATION OF BRAND¶ ¶ Because brand is thus everywhere, and yet nowhere, the phenomenon comes to be represented as an essentially immaterial form of mediation, a kind of globalized interdiscursivity, an indexical icon of the virtual nature of the global capitalist economy itself, which is often compared with virtual worlds on the Internet (Lury 2004, Arvidsson 2006). This virtualized brand starkly contrasts the messy materiality of “messages on bottles” as they are often encountered on the individual token level, illustrating a tendency toward what Robert Moore has dubbed the “dematerialization of brand” (R. Moore, personal communication). This tendency erases the “semiotic vulnerabilities” of brand, Moore argues, that come into view when the semiotic ideology of brand is confronted with the contingent world of its materializations (Moore 2003, p. 336). Because of the metaphysical expansiveness of brand discourse and its tendency toward dematerialization, it becomes difficult to decide where brand lives as a semiotic phenomenon:¶ How should a semiotic analysis of branding take account of the seemingly quite different ontological statuses of brands as such, versus branded products (as types), versus individual instances (tokens) of branded products, these last being what actual people engage with in activities of consumption, use, enjoyment, display, and so on? How can the concrete sensuous reality (e.g., color) of such tokens in use act as a relay for the more abstract associations (Young! Fresh! Edgy!) that branding professionals try to “encode” in consumer experience. (Moore 2003, p. 332)¶ The tendency for brand to be conceived as an immaterial form of mediation essentially identical to semiosis as such is partially due to the way that brand is defined in opposition to the product. “The product and the brand” (Gardner & Levy 1955) form a privileged doublet, expressed in popular marketing mantras such as “a product is made in a factory: a brand is bought by a consumer” (Wang 2007, p. 23; Lury 2004, pp. 31, 72). As mantras such as this show, the definition of brand develops over time by a kind of mystical via negativa, defining itself not so much by saying what brand is as what it is not: the product. By degrees, brand moves from being a “symbolic extension” of a product (Arvidsson 2006, p. 95; Askegard 2006, p. 100), as brand guru David Ogilvy put it in 1955, the “intangible sum of a product's attributes, its name, packaging, and price, its history, reputation, and the way it is advertised” (cited in Wang 2007, pp. 23–24), to leaving behind the dull, passive, generic, inert utility and materiality of the product entirely, taking on an “enchanting, sometimes religious character,” adding a “spiritual dimension to what used to be ‘merely a product’” (Askegard 2006, p. 96). The opposition brand/product condenses a folk-ontological opposition between immaterial/material, form/function, distinctive/descriptive, decorative/functional, symbolic/technical, properties of subjects/properties of objects; the pervasive dematerialization of brand recapitulating in broad outlines the dematerialization of meaning itself in western secular and religious discourse (Irvine 1989, Pfaffenberger 1992, Masuzawa 2000, Keane 2003, Manning & Meneley 2008).¶ In addition to the complementary schizmogenesis in which brand drifts away from the product, leading to a dematerialization of brand, brand undergoes several other parallel semiotic shifts. Earlier, primarily legal, discourses tend to treat brand as an arbitrary and distinctive trademark indexing a producer, whereas more recent marketing discourses tend to treat the essence of brand as a set of associations held in the minds of consumers (Hanby 1999, Moore 2003). This treatment is sometimes linked to an opposition between an earlier “positivistic,” “mechanistic” view of brands as “lifeless manipulable artefacts,” “inert physical objects,” which serve primarily as differentiating marks for products and which are “owner-oriented, reductionistic and grounded in economics” (Hanby 1999, p. 9; Csaba & Bengsston 2006, p. 121), and more recent quasi-animistic discourses that treat brand as a “person” (Lury 2004, p. 75) in which the pervasive associations based on the role brands play in consumers' lives are transformed into actual anthropomorphic characteristics imputed to brands understood as holistic, organic, living, growing entities with which consumers can form actual social relationships directly (Hanby 1999, Csaba & Bengsston 2006). We also see historical changes in which trademarks and brands move from being a category of communication to objects of property (Lury 2004, Bently 2008a). The discourse of brand is much addicted to epochalism so that in the 1960s we move from the “product era” to the “image era,” and in the 1980s the “brand image” gives way to a financially quantifiable “brand equity” (Arvidsson 2006, pp. 41–65; Wang 2007, pp. 23–25). All these shifts broadly recapitulate moves away from earlier Saussurean structuralist semiotic theories privileging the arbitrariness and distinctiveness of the sign to later poststructuralist accounts in which the omnivorous associationism of brand (for homologies between semiotic theories and trademark law, see Beebe 2004), not to mention rampant anthropomorphism, comes to approximate the fetish (Beebe 2004, p. 681; 2008, p. 52; Hearn 2008). However, the brand fetish is not easily assimilated to the Marxian “commodity fetish” to which it is frequently compared (Manning 2009, p. 926n6). Rather, I am taking the fetish here as a general semiotic figure “standing for an amorphous collection of ‘hybrid’ semiotic phenomena united only in their inability to be assimilated to the Saussurean ‘purification’ of the sign” (Manning & Meneley 2008, p. 292; on the semiotic polysemy of the fetish, see also Pietz 1985, Masuzawa 2000).¶ Whereas these different views of brand are often presented in epochal shifts globally affecting the imagination of brand, mechanistic views of brands as lifeless signs and organic views of brands as living persons are often mixed in contemporary marketing discourse (Hanby 1999, Csaba & Bengtsson 2006). As with other dichotomies such as nature/culture (Latour 1993 [1991]), if brand discourse seems preoccupied with ontological purification of brand from its connection, inter alia, to products, brand practice confronts us with a phenomenal proliferation of semiotic hybrids. Given these difficulties of analytic specification, I follow Moore (2003) by presenting the various semiotic moments of brand on the model of the communicative act itself, replacing speakers with producers, consumers with addressees, referents with products, and messages with the brand itself.