For a Semiotic Model of Cultural Branding and the Dynamic Management of a Brandosphere in the Face of User-Generated Advertising

The aim of this paper is twice foundational. First, it aims at providing a sketchmap for a semiotically informed model of cultural branding that is currently lacking and second to identify how this model could be fruitfully applied for managing a brand's share of cultural representations, over and above its market share, as well as the textual sources of a brand language as (inter)textual formation. The propounded cultural branding model of the brandosphere is of inter-disciplinary orientation, spanning the relevant marketing and semiotic literatures, with an emphasis on Lotman's cultural/textual semiotics and social media, with an added focus on user-generated advertising (henceforth denoted as UGA). The brandosphere is envisioned as a marketing semiotic contester to the almost monopolizing cultural branding model of Douglas Holt (2004) in an attempt to demonstrate that marketing semiotics may constitute a standalone discipline that is capable of addressing, both conceptually and methodologically, various marketing-related research areas, rather than an ornamental add-on to consumer research