Zimolu semiotika
Brand Semiotics

Summary/Abstract: Brands have become a vital part of our social reality. They contain cultural and social codes of the contemporary consumer society. Moreover, according to French theoretician Jean Baudrillard, these signs can become the sole reality. This brings forth a question - how to navigate around in this world and how to speak about it. A solution offered by Frederic Jameson is a new social and cognitive cartography that is, putting new, consumption related signs onto our mental maps. As one of the first thinkers who had tried to accomplish such kind of mapping is Walter Benjamin's "The Arcades Project". Fie stresses such important features of consumption as idleness, boredom, perpetual presence, illustrative perception of reality. For him those features represent deeper economical, social and cultural processes. The postmodern theorists both radicalize and subvert them, and even reduce them to empty signs (signifiers without signified). Brand semiotics is the branch of knowledge that deals with brands as the specific language. To disclose possible tasks and work of brand semiotics the author of the present paper offers to start investigation in place where the highest concentration of brands is to be found. In this case it is a shopping mall Alfa. The author invites readers along to three journeys to Alfa - the first, to branded world; the second - to theme and amusement part; and the third - to mythical space. In the first journey the guidebooks are postmodern theories of consumption by J. Baudrillard and F. Jameson, as well as works on semiotics by U. Eco and R. Barthes; in the second - the article by R. Simons on the shopping mall as formal garden of the twentieth century; in the third - R. Barthes's book "Mythologies".

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