The brand as a service with its own vision: a semiotic approach to brand architectures

Since the mid-1990s, brand management specialists have used a variety of highly institutionalized and little-contested brand strategies. However, a semiotic examination of these strategies can lead to questioning the way in which these architectures are constructed. The aim of this article is to highlight the semiotic contradictions of some of these strategies in order, on the one hand, to propose a semiotically based model of brand architecture, and, on the other hand, to offer a renewed definition of the concept of brand, as "a service with its own vision". In addition, this article invites us to always consider two types of services when undertaking strategic thinking on brands: "sovereign services" and "adjunct services". This "belonging relationship" between services makes it possible to grasp all possible brand relationships between companies, subsidiaries, products, lines, ranges, offers, etc. More generally, this article aims to promote the use of Greimassian (post)structural semiotics to enrich reflection and improve practices in the field of brand management.