Symbolic Brands: A Brand’s First Duty is to Create Meaning

What’s the connection between Michael Jordan, meanings and the symbolic age of branding? Let’s see how it feels to be in someone else’s shoes.

A brand's first challenge is creating meaning for the people seeking it in their lives. The product, service or system comes second. We live in this age of branding and marketing: the age of symbolism. This has been cooking for a while now with approaches and philosophies like Brand Positioning and Value Proposition. It has been quite a while since Jack Trout and Al Ries wrote the founding books of this approach and established the space for semiotic and symbolic branding in the form of positioning the brand into a material or symbolic space.

If you need to become more familiar with the term, brand positioning refers to the mental space that a brand occupies in the minds of those who come across that brand. That's why brands communicate what they communicate in every single communication effort, big or small, sales or image, campaign or PR. They aim to…