Culture Switch and Culture Brands

Abstract

Culture brands arise from appealing to culture switches if not clashes in ways designed to be as affectively sensible as they are intellectually restrained. Affectively, brands address a public seeking to catch an understanding of itself; intellectually, the same public is one among others and therefore has to accommodate to a society of many publics. To understand the polemical nature of brands we need to consider a public more as a kind of a switching device than as a stable measure sitting there to document its own orientation. We need to understand the affective nature of any kind of social integration. We have to conceive of a cultural policy of a given cultural organization required to embed the profile on which it has to focus within a global culture highly alert to clashes which somehow have both to be respected (“diversity” is good) and to be avoided (“clash” is bad). And we have to look at cultural organizations that must also internally handle the paradox of an integration paid for in terms of differentiation. We will here pursue the thesis that a brand is the eigen-value of communication between an organization and its public, between an organization and its stakeholders, and within the organization. Thus a brand is rich in structure and dilemmas, therefore difficult in strategy but fascinating in its dependence on the path of its own fine-tuned history.

Keywords: Brand, Culture