Introduction

The title of this book clearly explains the fundamental idea of my research activity and it can be considered a sort of key-word of the specific methodology of analysis, that I developed in the Universities La Sapienza and Roma Tre.

Indeed, it highlights that the brand is a text difficult to understand and that it is impossible to reduce all its facets, as well as every single aspect of its various elements and functions, in a single definition. It is better “reading” it and observing its specific characteristics from different points of view, as those historical or anthropological, psychological or communicative and, of course linguistic.

It is just the linguistic perspective that is considered primary, even if not exclusive, in this book, that aims to describe and to explain the unbelievable richness of denominations and forms of the trademarks. The reasons of the vast heterogeneity of this important sector of our onomasiological activity are linked to the constraints of originality, established by national laws and international agreements, but many other aspects are connected to single histories or to the prevalent trends of an age, to a series of accidents or to a particular individual or collective desire.

In general consumers (i.e. the primary receivers of the brands and the messages on the brands) do not know the reason for which an abbreviation has been preferred to a compound, a single grapheme to whole sentences or to a series of original blends. In the same way, they ignore why an Old Greek or Latin word form has been chosen or replaced by an exotic loanword.

In many cases the options have a motivation: as shown by Bluemelhuber-Carter-Lambe (2007), for example, the exotic element is frequently linked to a marketing strategy and to the opportunity of adding the traits “natural” and “genuine” and a positive evaluation

to the western products, that appear adulterated in the collective imagery. Vice versa, for the eastern or local products, an Italian or English noun can represent a positive connotation and a quality stamp, being considered as a factor of internationalization and vector in the global market.

Nevertheless, a trend of this kind and its perception can rapidly change, as other matters of tastes, influenced by mass media and social networks, and so the first cause of a naming preference remains obscure as other aspects. What about the visual aspects, for example, its color, its elements or style?

It is well known, instead, that besides being multilingual, the brands are marked by other kinds of hybridism, as that iconic and verbal. In many cases the boundaries between figurative code and linguistic elements are totally reconfigured and defined through original amalgams and shapes, in which the combination of designatum and disegnatum sets up unexpected expressive solutions. The difficulty in reading and understanding a brand is all due to these aspects and they are the principal focus of this book, that is divided in four parts. The first is a short description of the brand’s different definitions and the various approaches of analysis, necessary to show its social and legal functions (Franceschelli 1960; Sirotti Gaudenzi 2012). In the second chapter, the brand is studied as a linguistic object, with its grammar and specific rules. In the third part, I explain the ways used to gather the data, to create a motivated and representative corpus and to study it, considering some specific examples (i.e., brands of departments stores, fashion and wine), and those of the Italy Expo, collected and described by Giorgia Gazzelloni, in the subsequent chapter. In the last but not least chapter, a new suggestion of analysis and of readability evaluation of the brands is described in the light of two linguistic parameters, that can be adopted for every kind of text and semiotic process. In particular, considering that the number of invisible information communicated by a brand is always higher, than that of its perceptible elements, ratio between data and their respective units is assumed as primary parameter. The index of synthesis and fusion are measurable and both of them can

explain the reason of the different levels of comprehension, as well as in every code without a sequential and compositional structure. From the fil rouge of our discourse, it is evident that every trademark tells a story, and it does this using a code that we can define syncretic and sincratic. The term syncretic has its roots in an ancient alliance. In Old Greek, indeed, the word synkrētismos (from syn-‘together’, and Krēt) means ‘federation of Cretan cities’. In many contexts (as in the cases of syncretic religions, syncretic societies, or syncretic music) the adjective is adopted for describing things influenced by two or more theories, styles or traditions. In linguistics, the word has a specified technical sense, and it refers to a series of distinct functional occurrences of the same word, or morpheme. For example, the pronoun you is identical for subject and direct/ indirect complement, while for other persons (i.e. I, she, he, they) the forms change. In many cases, the brand names are common nouns (as lancia ‘spear’), that can be, at the same time, proper nouns, that become something else. But in this book, as in the semiotic theory of Greimas and Courtés (1986) the term also refers to the fusion of different forms of communicative codes, as those visual and verbal. The narration of this fusion is a feature common to every corpus or kind of brands, and this is the reason for which I have chosen a title that evokes one of the most famous universal literacy works. At the same time, brandnames often are blends of different codes, languages and discoursive levels, and in this sense they also are idiosyncratic (from the Greek syn, “with” and krasis, “government”), namely different kinds of combinations, mixings and contractions. My suggestion is that the readability of these anomalous words, or better pseudo-words, is closely linked to their different index of fusion and synthesis.

As mentioned, my idea is the result of many years of research and didactic activity. For this reason I acknowledge my collaborators and my students: for me they and their enthusiasm for this topic belong to a chapter of the history of the brands, but also to that of our collaboration, a series of events that, for obvious reasons, I cannot illustrate here, although they are very interesting.

In the end and in conclusions the textual perspective and a design theory are presented as a new possible schema for brands evaluation, not based on data as the frequency of a trademark into the Internet interactions and the social media power. These parameters are prevalent in the marketing models, but we are convinced that there is a previous level, interfaced with our cognitive device, our perceptions and ways of conceptualizing, that is important for understanding the elaboration and decoding of the trademarks. Centre of gravity in this semantic process are the words, «un système de ressemblances qui exigent un signature, car nulle d’entre elles ne poutrait être remarquée si elle n’était lisiblement marquèe» (Foucault 1967).