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Legitimacy and Foundations of Authority Through Media Appropriation
The media are the legitimate means of expression in the social space. We then understand the interest of brand managers in appropriating media discourse to communicate in a different way. While the discursive struggle to position oneself in the market involves affirmations to assert one’s existence and offering, it consists also of trying to master their voice. The media influence for brands is becoming a major issue in this context. In light of the interconnectivity – of day-to-day systems – of corporate marketing departments and of media companies, the balance of relationships incorporates pressure and the search for control.
1.1. Speaking out: power
Being an author means you have found your authority or you are at least creating it. In the example of the great figures of centuries past, we can identify the fundamentals, but we risk taking a long, meandering path. Here, I prefer to borrow from a literature specialist and then apply the concepts he illuminates, to my field of observation.
Antoine Compagnon, when expressing himself on the specificities of the author, takes up the etymological origin of authority:
The true meaning of augeo would be to promote, and auctor still testifies to that meaning: the auctor is the one who promotes, who takes an initiative, who is the first to produce some activity, the founder, the guarantor and finally the author. The notion then diversifies, but it is related to the first meaning of augeo, to get out, to promote. This explains the extremely high value of the abstract auctoritas: it is the act of production, the quality of the high magistrate, the validity of the testimony, the power of initiative. (Compagnon 2014)
Founding and promoting… Who is the author in the media coverage of the brands I examine?
To affirm brand values, describe a product, evoke a universe of consumption in a medium and, moreover, in a media space that is not at first sight a space rented for advertising, is to give them a particular asperity because a certain authority is attached to journalistic speech. This very important idea in information and communication sciences has also been identified by sociologists and, in particular, by Bourdieu in his “economy of linguistic exchanges”.
Without being expressly mentioned, it is part of the continuation of Veblen’s (1979) work, which underlined the importance of language as social capital, capable of generating forms of domination, to emphasize the social foundation of such speeches:
The authorized spokesperson can only act by word of mouth on other agents and, through their work, on the very things themselves, because his word focuses the symbolic capital accumulated by the group that mandated him and for which he is the proxy. (Bourdieu 1986, p. 109)
By giving themselves the opportunity to speak on behalf of the brands they manage in the media, the managers engage in a linguistic capitalization: the one who speaks for his or her brand gives it a place in the public space without having been authorized to do so. This gesture is qualified differently in the social space, in terms of the statements with which it is associated.
This capitalization of speech deserves to be qualified by Pierre Achard’s work, as in the commentary produced by Claire Oger (2013) on this issue, which provides an interpretation of Achard’s critical reading of Bourdieu. This linguist criticized the reductive nature of the Bourdieuian perspective in order to enrich it. If language is also “the sign of power from elsewhere” for him, reinforcing Bourdieu’s vision of a symbolic effect activated thanks to the social instances in which language acts are born and developed, Achard (1984) highlights language as “the place where power is exercised”.
In this, he opposes Bourdieu for whom “as soon as we treat language as an autonomous object […], we condemn ourselves to seek the power of words in words, that is, where it is not”. Or even:
The power of words is nothing other than the delegated power of the spokesperson, and his words – that is, the material of his speech and his way of speaking – are at most a testimony and one among many others of the guarantee of delegation with which he is entrusted. (Bourdieu 1986, p. 105)
Indeed, for Pierre Achard, quoted by Leimdorfer (2007), language exists by itself: “it has an active and structural role and not the simple value of a symptom”; it acts in social processes, it has a materiality.
Its function of taking charge of statements distributes positions, and modalizes, fixes and circulates representations. Taking this materiality into account underestimates or even makes obsolete the approaches that give pride of place to “magic” and “charism”. For the analysis of devices, gestures and words, rhetoric makes it possible to deconstruct that which underlies the indescribability of magical thought, even if everything that composes it cannot be determined. The illusion of reducing reality to its components seems to me to be an equally fantastic end. Nevertheless, the social magic mentioned by Bourdieu, while it is not purely linguistic, is not purely social either.
Whether we refer to media production around a brand or to the imitation of a cultural form instituted to serve a brand, both are speeches and social acts embedded in a materiality. They are not similar, but what they have in common is that they are communications, a characteristic that intimately links the semiotic and social aspects. This proximity explains why the semiotizations around logos are attributed to brands as if they were the producers.
The whole of this first theoretical path explains the choices made, the course of action chosen to address the phenomena of building authority around brands, the observations and analyses of which will follow. While the question of the speaker’s status is central, it is combined with that of the materiality of the medium of expression and the generic, rhetorical and semiotic choices that constitute it.
In the following pages, I have chosen to focus on the press as an example for analysis, because it is a sensitive field for observing the ambition of brands and what their appropriation involves. It goes without saying that what I am pointing out in this context is necessarily fragmented, and I do not claim to give a complete picture of media appropriations for brands.
The empowerment I describe, translated by the investment of a particular media form, has sometimes taken the form of a multi-media production with a branded magazine and a branded webzine (for Danone or Unilever for example) or, in more rare cases, a magazine and a webzine and a short television program (also called sponsorship) and a television channel, as was the case with Leroy Merlin.
In the latter case, the company pursued its objective of seeking sectoral hegemony by translating it into the display of a media brand. Different characteristics of the brand are thus highlighted according to the media regime invested in, as the aesthetic virtues of the layout are, for example, more valued by television programming than by the webzine, which is more focused on technical explanations.
Whatever the modalities of media appropriation, the same logic prevails. The following path is based on the specific example of the press, but can be transposed to other media, its vocation being to shed in-depth light on a communicative logic.
1.2. The porosity of the boundary between advertising and journalism: a tradition
The historical detour I am making puts communication transformations in perspective; it seems necessary to me on several levels:
– it resists the ideology of change held professionals who tend to euphemie for permanence and praise novelty, to the point of turning it into an ideology that sometimes presents recycled ideas as innovations;
– it is the affirmation of transformations that are not based on suddenness and revolutions, but that result from changes of several kinds – generally technical and social – and based on permanent adjustments between practices and consumption patterns;
– it is the fruit of a personal intellectual