Branding Discourse Research Articles

The territorial politics of nation branding: marketing education in the UK and Scotland

ABSTRACT This article advances a territorial politics perspective on nation branding, investigating it in contexts where territory and sovereignty are contested and where multiple national communities overlap. Focusing on the UK and Scotland and taking Brexit as a critical juncture in their territorial rescaling, the study examines government-led ‘education nation branding’ initiatives aimed at attracting international students. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of UK and Scottish policy discussions around education nation branding from 1999, when the UK's first education brand was developed, to 2023, the analysis traces the narratives around them and considers if and how these have shifted alongside the rescaling of the UK’s territorial arrangement. Findings point to different and shifting discourses both between and across the UK and Scottish cases, challenging the notion of nation branding as an isomorphic trend. The findings also suggest that territorial politics have a significant bearing on nation branding discourses. Ultimately, the study supports the need to overcome certain binaries in global politics, notably challenging the commonly contrived divide between economy and nation, and domestic and foreign policy.

For queer lovers and friends: an exploration of queer connection by design in the Lex Mobile App

ABSTRACT What does it mean for a dating app to be queer by design? In this article, I examine the extent to which Lex, the queer dating and social app, diverges from algorithmically heteronormative interface paradigms to express queer temporalities and relationalities. To do so, I analyze Lex’s 2019–2022 interface using the walkthrough method, which involves critically engaging with an app’s features and functionality, vision, operating model, and governance, to uncover embedded cultural meanings and assumptions. With walkthroughs, I analyze Lex’s software components, terms of use, privacy policy, community guidelines, and branding discourse, while considering the platform’s original references to archival personal ads. From this analysis, I argue that Lex’s affordances queer dating app design by resisting compulsory data collection, countering binary sorting and categorical definitions of gender and sexuality, and disengaging from economies of visibility through text-based interaction, highlighting situated histories of queer information networks amidst normative frameworks. I extend this work to characterize how queer affordances in digital infrastructures can encourage fluid identities and pluralistic modes of connecting that draw upon rich histories of resistance in queer information practices, reinforcing calls for increased intersectionality in interface design.

Characteristics of Japanese Social and Cultural Values from Harajuku Fashion

"Harajuku" is a representative fashion of Japanese street culture, and it has constructed the image of Japanese pop culture. This research analyzes the historical background and cultural causes behind Harajuku fashion and explains the internal and external causes of the formation and development of Harajuku fashion in terms of historical and economic backgrounds. So, the research analyzes the cultural characteristics of Japanese society from the perspective of fashion, and further reveals the logical interactions and intrinsic connections between the cultural representations and value theories. Through relevant research, it is concluded that there is a circular logical relationship between fashion characteristics and the social phenomena as their causes behind them, and it is also proposed that the establishment and dissemination of national characteristic cultural images require the operation of branding mechanisms and the value support of cultural genes. Overall, this study logically constructs and analyzes Harajuku fashion characteristics and cultural concepts, explains the national characteristics and cultural values of Japanese society from the social phenomenon, combines relevant fashion and social theories, and provides insights and reflections on the innovation and construction of the national and local cultural image and brand discourse.

Modernity, Aesthetics, and Nation Re-branding in Olympics: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the Opening Ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games

The paper examines the construction of China’s country image in the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games. It demonstrates how a country that has no winter sports tradition used the mega-event to showcase its national narrative and to promote winter sports industries. A semiotic framework is developed to model China’s country image as evaluative attributes and to elucidate how they are constructed through linguistic and visual resources in the theater, livestream, and video inserts. The analysis shows that the ceremony was narrated around four major themes—the world’s China, People’s China, the aesthetic China, and the modernized China. Instead of revealing a changeless, nostalgic and mythical China that speaks to a Western orientalistic imagination, these four themes work together to reshape a modern China identity, which brings the contrasting values of globalism, nationalism, Chinese traditional aesthetics, and neoliberalism into a coherent artistic performance. The characteristics of nation branding discourse reflect China’s urban regeneration policies on the one hand, and public diplomacies during the COVID-19 pandemic on the other.

Branding discourses in transnational higher education in the era of hypercompetition: leveraging secondary brand associations

ABSTRACT Transnational higher education (TNHE) providers are a notable part of many domestic higher education systems. Historically, TNHE providers benefitted from the perceived value proposition of offering ‘something different’ or ‘something superior’ compared to local institutions, but nowadays the domestic provision of higher education poses a more significant threat for the TNHE providers. A particular challenger type of institution is the local, foreign-affiliated (branded) university, which represents a rather unexplored type of TNHE. This research compares international branch campuses and local, foreign-affiliated universities in different TNHE contexts, to identify how the institutions leverage secondary brand associations in branding. The study identified four shared branding discourses (grandiosity, third space, place brand, and boundary-spanning) and the common underlying secondary brand associations used in each branding rhetoric. The findings strengthen our understanding of the importance of authentic branding in the era of hypercompetition for the future of TNHE development.

Framing substance use as "recreational" is neither accurate nor helpful for prevention purposes.

This debate paper discusses six reasons why the term "recreational substance use" should be avoided. (1) Social norms and beliefs are drivers of behavior; therefore, the normalized use of the term conveys injunctive norms of a fully socially acceptable substance. Injunctive norms are the most important drivers of initiation into substance use. (2) The illusion of being in control, suggesting that if consumed for leisure and recreation it can easily be controlled; (3) Idealized social representations that fuel an idealized image of an alternative glamourous or mindful consumption culture; (4) Downplaying potential harms; (5) The implicit promise of everyday pleasure, the ever-growing potency of cannabis products does not fit the narrative of its use for recreation; (6) Industry as a trojan horse branding discourse of the concept of medical cannabis to normalize the image of non-medical use: to complement "therapeutic" with "recreational". "Recreational use" is a subjective ill-defined term. This debate paper aims to find a better terminological solution, honestly denominating with a neutral, unbiased, and objective connotation what is now called "recreational use". Thus, we propose using the term "non-therapeutic" use.

Selling feminist stories: Popular feminism, authenticity and happiness

By interviewing Swedish feminist activists who sell commodities to serve feminist purposes, this study focuses on how they articulate their engagement and make it intelligible. To untangle how articulations about feminist businesses may stabilise, reshape and challenge feminist values and engagement, we use theories of popular feminism alongside discourse theory to capture its contingencies. The analysis shows that, rather than enhancing sales by the use of feminism, the interviewees articulate an interest in spreading feminism through the sale of commodities. They understand their commodities to be ‘authentic’ and ‘truly’ feminist, thereby distancing themselves from corporations that use feminism to brand their products. However, this aligns precisely with the dominant contemporary corporate branding discourse of authenticity, understood as untainted by capitalism. The interviewees want to provide their customers with confidence, a dominant trait of popular feminism, through the display of feminist expression. A quest for visibility tends to absorb political aspects, which is further illustrated in the expressed wish to avoid an aggressive, provocative or explicitly political address. Understanding popular feminism as a discursive struggle, we conclude that the domination of a happy, confidence-building feminism will render more confrontational and radical versions of feminism less visible.

“Dream Now, Travel Tomorrow”: Communicating the Nation Branding of Indonesia through Tourism-Based Social Media

This study examines the use of tourism-based social media to communicate the idea of nation branding. By using Indonesia as a case study, this research aims to provide research contexts of demographic, historical, and contemporary challenges of social media and nation branding. The research project aims to answer three important objectives. Those are to investigate the pattern of tourism-based social media, the narratives behind the pattern, and the implications to the concept of nation brand of Indonesia. This study adopts a typology of photographic representations by using photos, videos, captions, and hashtags from tourism-based social media. The findings demonstrate the complexity and nuances of Indonesia’s nation branding from the narrative of a dreamy place through visual imageries and written texts, the discursive portrayals of people, place, and politics, and the trajectories of the past. This study implies that Indonesia’s brand is portrayed using tranquil and rural imageries, the exoticism of local identity, the symbols of authority in tourism, and the historical nuances of the nation. This concludes that the nation branding discourse and practices of Indonesia become a part of the dynamic struggle and negotiation of nation identity, culture, and governance, which define and redefine the collective and individual meanings of the country.

The semiotics of social-distance branding during the post-coronavirus crisis

Abstract Social distance, as a non-static cognitive attribute of acceptance among particular groups across different contexts, has been resemioticized during the coronavirus crisis and legalized worldwide to reduce global strain on healthcare systems and prevent deaths. Concerning this, brand designers have tried to persuade the brand community to benefit from products or services safely by staying away from others as much as possible instead of in-person contact. This research was conducted to discover the semiosis process of social-distancing resemioticization through creating values of brands during the post-coronavirus crisis. The corpus consists of 124 brands – all sampled purposely from 2019 to 2021 – which was investigated via a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods using an integrated model in a functional perspective. All the results highlight the fact that, although brand designers have attempted to creatively resemioticize social-distancing during the coronavirus crisis as a means of increasing or enriching brand values, still some semiosis layers of brand discourse have been overlooked. Pertaining to this, the authors try to apply a new perspective of marketing semiotics to appraise consumer investments in light of a socio-cultural setting by conducting an inquiry about the semiosis of individual brand discourses to manage consumer perceptions regarding brand equity.

How to brand a border despite its wall? A social semiotics approach to cross-border place branding

This paper explores the ways in which borders are likely to be used as a semiotic resource in cross-border place branding. We develop a conceptual framework, distinguishing two meaning-making strategies: one that seeks to valorize borders as assets for cross-border place branding and another that relies on their invisibilization in order to promote, implicitly, the legitimacy of a seamless cross-border regional imaginary. For each meaning-making strategy, specific border discourses are identified. Based on a social semiotics approach, we analyze the case of Cali Baja, a place branding initiative that seeks to promote a bi-national mega-region straddling the US-Mexico border between San Diego and Tijuana. Despite the militarization of the border and the highly visible physical wall that divides Cali Baja, a selective branding discourse framed around favorable border images and representations is brought to the fore. It is therefore at the cost of the partial (in)visibilization of the border that the mega-region can be given value and promoted on the international scene, but it is also the discrepancy with the identity of the bi-national region that precipitated the failure of this place branding initiative.

Публічний імідж України в умовах невизначеності

The publication outlines the trends of global changes and development trends of modern Ukraine – conditions of uncertainty – in which territories at all levels compete for influence on the process of world resources redistribution. It has been proved that place branding "from above" – by developing a strategy for its promotion by special authorities with the possible involvement of non-governmental actors is ineffective due to the inflexibility of this approach and limited state influence on external information space. The author clarifies the content of such key categories of branding discourse as strategic communications, public diplomacy, brand, image, reputation, visions, narratives. The publication demonstrates author’s attempt to build a model of stages for correction of the existing state public image through the tools of strategic communications, including public diplomacy, and to prove the feasibility of systematizing successful cases of public diplomacy "from below", because the future is in local place branding. A correlation is established between the stages of public image promotion, purposeful interactions of all subjects of public diplomacy and their results. The conclusion is made about the expected result of state strategic communications, which is in fixing the loyalty of the state – a high degree of trust, devotion and reliability of relationships that can become valuable, can spread interpersonal trust in society, institutional trust between states and act as a resource of a generalized trust in the process of territory self-organization and prospects of its brand. Such form of generalized trust as the loyalty capital is a serious basis for the competitiveness of the state in a new world order and the consolidation of the nation in conditions of uncertainty.

A Critical Framework for Examining Sustainability Claims of the Sharing Economy: Exploring the Tensions Within Platform Brand Discourses

The sharing economy represents a market-driven response to the perceived inefficient resource use arising from materialism, and as such, offers the possibility of a more environmentally sustainable form of consumption. However, the sustainability benefits attributed to the sharing economy remain contentious and fraught with paradox. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of three sharing economy brands (Lime, Rent the Runway and BlaBlaCar) we identify that sustainability discourses compete with claims arising from the espoused benefits of immateriality and platform brands’ desire for rapid growth. We identify and explore three platform brand discourses (disrupting unsustainable leaders, guilt-free choice, and non-commercial appeals) and their associated practices. In doing so we identify that tensions between these discourses and practices give rise to three sustainability-related contradictions: displacement of sustainable alternatives, hidden materiality, and creeping usage. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the sharing economy and its role in sustainability.

Urban Shopping Malls and Sustainability Approaches in Chilean Cities: Relations between Environmental Impacts of Buildings and Greenwashing Branding Discourses

This article seeks to discuss the recent discrepancies between the environmental effects of large retail buildings located in urban centers and the media and corporate discourses that these retailers have on the environment and sustainability to the public and to local authorities. By using mixed methods of quantitative and qualitative data analysis of two of the biggest shopping centers in Santiago de Chile, this exploratory research seeks to inaugurate an interdisciplinary academic discussion on the relevance of comparing the media discourses about sustainability issued by urban developers and the physical effects that massive private buildings create in their surroundings. By using the retail resilience theoretical framework, this research seeks to understand the disruption in retail systems, both from socio-economic and environmental indicators. Comparing the environmentally sensitive discourses promoted by Chilean retailers in advertising campaigns and corporate speeches with the environmental effects that large retail buildings brought to the surrounding areas in terms of urban deforestation and increasing superficial temperature, this paper probes that greenwashing campaign are not only used to impact corporate legitimacy with consumers and investors but also to deliberately diminish the environmental responsibilities of private developers in vulnerable urban areas.

Emotional Branding of China’s State-Owned Enterprises on Sina Weibo

In order to provide the interpersonal, rhetoric and semiotic insights for studying corporate emotional branding discourse on social media, this study attempts to target China’s state-owned enterprises which represent the pillars of national economy with Chinese characteristics and shed light on the discourse realizations of their emotional branding strategies from the textual and interpersonal perspectives. Specifically, the present study focuses on the two kinds of textual and interpersonal representations on China-based Sina Weibo: 1) the use of stylistic features; 2) the use of attitudinal appeals. A corpus of forty-day updates of the three giant Chinese state-owned enterprises on Sina Weibo is retrieved and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The results suggest the prevalence of involving stylistic features, the proliferation of affect and judgment appeals and the hybridization of appreciation and affect/judgment, which posits interdiscursivity and intertextuality in communicative functions. China’s state-owned enterprises communicate to forge emotional bonding with the public other than promote their products. This pragmatic shift towards solidarity facework is indicative of a transcultural phenomenon elicited by digital globalization and the neoliberalist trend in China’s national economy.

Identity, lifestyle, and face-mask branding: A social semiotic multimodal discourse analysis

The massive introduction of face-masks across the world after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed how they are designed and branded. Instead of merely focusing on functional qualities, face-mask producers have started to draw upon symbolic values in their branding discourse. Against this background, the present study investigates how face-masks are branded in Hong Kong by analyzing the design, packaging and websites for face-mask products, as well as the design of offline franchised stores using a social semiotic approach. Analysis of the multimodal data of four leading Hong Kong brands, with a focus on the use of verbal evaluation, iconography, typography, color, and materiality, reveals three symbolic meanings that are used in face-mask branding: (1) professionalism, which refers to the representation of face-masks as a symbol of advanced technology, (2) Hong Kong identity, which includes evoking pride in the past economy and exploiting the cultural symbol of the Lion Rock, and (3) fashion lifestyle, in which face-masks are associated with the values of stylishness, individuality, and luxuriousness. The exploitation of symbolic values and multimodal design in face-mask branding reflects the influence of the neoliberal ideology in the highly marketized Hong Kong society.

History, modernity, and city branding in China: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of Xi’an’s promotional videos on social media

ABSTRACT In the digital age, cities around the world are mobilizing various symbolic resources to rebrand their images through social media. Against this background, this study investigates how Xi’an, a second-tier developing city in China, constructs its digitalized urban imaginary using the popular social media platform of TikTok. A semiotic framework is developed to model Xi’an’s urban imaginary as evaluative attributes and to elucidate how they are constructed through linguistic and visual resources in short videos on TikTok. The analysis of 294 videos shows that Xi’an highlights its dual identity as a modern metropolis and a historical city. The modern metropolis image is characterized by the personification of Xi’an as a stylish, young, popular, and international microcelebrity; the historical city image is constructed through recreating the Great Tang dynasty and revitalizing local folk art. The characteristics of city branding discourse reflect China’s wanghong economy, urban policies and the affordances of social media.

Resilience as a City Brand: The Cases of the Comuna 13 and Moravia in Medellin, Colombia

In Medellin, during this last decade, the municipality and the private sector have been very active in the reconstruction of the city’s war-torn image. With the acknowledged objective of attracting foreign investments and tourists, the second city of Colombia has been consecutively branded as “innovative”, “smart”, “sustainable” and lately as a “resilient city”. Since 2016 and the integration of the city as one of the first members of the “100 Resilient Cities” network pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, Medellin’s authorities have emphasised “urban resilience” as a core value of the city and its residents. Until now, few studies have put into perspective the notion of “branding” with that of “resilience”. By looking closely at discourses on the promotion of the city, as well as its burgeoning tourism sector, this article aims to fill this gap by providing a thorough analysis of the way urban resilience is used as a city-brand in a city still struggling to overcome high levels of violence. This study aims to show that antagonists’ visions of resilience are at stake when comparing the branding discourses of public authorities and the representations of self-settled communities who are at the centre of these narratives. While branding discourses praise the resilience of Medellin communities, many in these same communities tend to reject this vision of resilience as self-reliance (adaptation) and instead call for structural changes (transformation).

Public value-driven place branding. The way forward?

While competing for tourists, business and foreign talent has been the focal point of place branding strategies for the past decades, in many cases it also produced negative externalities for the place residents. As more examples of the adverse effects of the marketization of places come to light, a stronger consideration for the results that branding brings to citizens becomes necessary in scholarly and practical thinking about places. The current paper presents a proposal of the paradigm shift in the place branding discourse, by adopting the public value (PV) approach. It calls for the replacement of competition-oriented and demand-driven perspective on place brand building with activities centred around creating value for the place residents. As a concept embedded in public policy and management literature and one that emerged from the critique of New Public Management approach, PV is here discussed in the context of the evolution of public administration models. The relevance of PV to place branding is then explained with reference to the collective, relational and experiential nature of a place brand. The authors posit that place branding can become an enabler of public value creation in a threefold manner: as a means of PV expression, as the enhancer of social relationships, and as a moderator of social behaviour.

“LITTLE VIENNA” OR “EUROPEAN AVANT-GARDE CITY”? BRANDING NARRATIVES IN A ROMANIAN CITY

By connecting the literature on urban development processes in post-socialist cities with debates from the area of place branding, this paper critically examines recent narratives of city branding in Timișoara, Romania. The aim is to investigate one specific case in the reproduction and adaptation of global urban development policies and to examine its relevance for the context of post-socialist urban politics. Our findings indicate a specific circularity between city branding and urban development, which is used to align the city to the regional inter-urban economic competition and to promote it as a space of rapid development. The outcome is a mélange of different narratives, based on disparate histories and representations of the city, which are assembled in ad-hoc and often contradictory branding discourses.

The language of luxury fashion advertising: technology of the self and spectacle

PurposeUbiquitous Internet access and social media make visual consumption possibly the most vital characteristic of the experience economy. A cumulative, integrative framework for the analysis of visual artefacts has thus been called for as existing analytical tools and theoretical frameworks (such as semiotics, discourse analysis, content analysis, iconography, rhetoric and so on) each provide in isolation only a restricted perspective. To advance best practice towards shaping brand perception and consumer engagement, this paper provides a crucial analytical tool to uncover the unique and specific characteristics of identitary luxury fashion brand discourse by introducing and applying such an integrative framework.Design/methodology/approachA rigorous grounded theory approach was applied to a corpus of primary data, print advertising in Vogue (UK and US) and Vanity Fair (UK). Outcomes were distilled to first principles of meaning-making and aggregated in a framework which also integrates long-existing classics from diverse fields of knowledge to present a broad cumulative perspective for the analysis of visual discursive practice. This paper demonstrates the methodological rigour and validity of the framework, that is, its practical adequacy and explanatory power in uncovering the identitary brand discourse of luxury fashion.FindingsAn application of the integrative framework breaks new ground in uncovering the discreet identitary characteristics of the discursive practice of the luxury brands under investigation, Chanel and Gucci, which can be encapsulated as gendered technology of the confident self (Foucault) and spectacle (Debord), respectively.Research limitations/implicationsTo advance theory that illuminates understanding and shaping of brand perception and consumer engagement with luxury fashion brands, the proposed framework is the first to integrate insight from a rigorous analysis of primary data with long-existing classics from salient fields of knowledge. It, thus, provides a broader, more inclusive perspective that elucidates the multifaceted layers of meaning of luxury fashion discourse in a new and comprehensive way which existing approaches with focus on an isolated dimension such as semiotics or nonverbal behaviour and so on would not have been able to reveal.Practical implicationsThe inclusive, practicable theoretical framework provides a parsimonious and practical tool that can be applied by non-experts across disciplines to unlock meaning in fashion discourse as a route to shaping brand image and engaging consumers.Originality/valueThe paper provides a new perspective on the communication practice of luxury fashion advertising as the new integrative framework illuminates layers of meaning crucial to understanding the intricacies of identitary brand discourse and to shaping brand perception and engaging consumers.