Biglietti d'invito

What a strange discipline marketing is: it has to do with numbers, product distribution, sales strategies, positioning and all those techniques that serve to optimize the commercial yield of some kind of good, but it is forced to include among its levers communication, whose effectiveness eludes all forms of measurement. One among many, certainly, but by far the most problematic, if only because it is certainly one of the most powerful. Especially in a time like the present when all it takes to speak to the world is a web connection and some familiarity with sharing platforms. Hence the usual division between apocalyptic and integrated, that is, between those who believe that the power of communication is a disease of the commercial system and those who argue that it can be considered the panacea of all its evils. An opposition that Douglas Holt's Cultural Branding challenges. What we will do is to show what semiotics can offer to this approach. To do this we must start with some key words and conceptual models that Holt uses in a not infrequently implicit way to try to amplify their effectiveness. The words are easy to identify: myth, culture, icon, and of course symbol.