Introduction: Market Medi(t)ations

The economy of brands truly came into being in the mid-19th century as a way for manufacturers to transform bulk sales and commodities markets into product markets with high added value. A brand that was already established as a sign of identification and differentiation thus became a driver of social mediation to form a fictional relationship between companies and their products’ end users. Initially, and in the end, the brand served to change the power relationships structuring the commodities markets, where products were sold in bulk. An unbranded market is a commodities market in which a manufacturer has difficulty creating added value because the products are largely undifferentiated. It is also a market where the manufacturer is completely dependent upon the distributor as well as on the wholesaler, who can choose his suppliers. Next come the retailers, who endorse the products they sell. A brand thus involves shifting the source of authority from the seller to the product and then on to the brand. In other words, a brand allows the enterprise to bypass the seller, as per the expression “silent salesman” that Vance Packard forged in his seminal book, The Hidden Persuaders, which remains the best introduction to marketing to date. A brand presupposes a means of symbolic mediation has been put in place, one through which the product can speak for itself and call out to the end customer’s nose and the beard of the seller. It serves to substitute symbolic mediation for human mediation, hence the importance of the phenomena of anthropomorphization, especially through the appearance of the brand spokesmen, whose role is to give life and an identity to the brand to increase its potential to attract.