SYMBOLIC IMAGE AND SOCIAL IMAGINARY IN THE LUXURY BRANDS COMMUNICATION AND MARKETING
SYMBOLIC IMAGE AND SOCIAL IMAGINARY IN THE LUXURY BRANDS COMMUNICATION AND MARKETING

Summary/Abstract: Complex but vague notion, related to taste, refinement and elegance, rarity and excellence, as well as to expense, excess and extreme, oscillating between the ostentation and the well-being and exceeding the common by the dream or by the provocation, luxury can be considered as a matter of collective representation, as a production of the imaginary having a major anthropological dimension. It answers to the existential anxiety about time and death, trying to overcome it and to improve the situation of man in the world. Luxury is image above all, image that the brand projects on the brain of its customers. The luxury brand has a mythical dimension and the luxury product, endowed with this singular glow specific to magic objects, has a very strong symbolic value. Therefore, image and imaginary are closely related to the luxury industry and marketing. The brand image is the main production of the luxury industry and its first marketing tool. The communication of the luxury brand takes inspiration from the myths to tell its legend, relies on the power of the symbolic image to make consumers dream and exploits the fantasies and the archetypes of the unconscious that underlie their desires. This article examines the place of the image and the imaginary in the new culture of luxury and the meeting of luxury and marketing, outlining an analysis of some luxury advertisments, with special focus on the particular imaginary in which the brand is inscribed, on the archetypes and the symbolic images through which it communicates.

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