Between contractual and polemical: value and representativeness in marketing narratives

Abstract

In the contemporary networked media configuration, discourses previously consolidated by authorized voices, which were built by unidirectional relations, change to horizontal dimension, among the proliferation of subjects, which position themselves in the narrative dispute. Ordinary individuals and organized social groups, whose visibility used to be low, have had their competence of enunciation extended. Therefore, it increases the opposite discourses incidence. Facing this risk, important brands get back their authority position in advertisement, adopting the strategy of assuming polemical values in their narratives, as a way to achieve visibility. Some examples of this power structure are analyzed from the sociosemiotics perspective, based on Greimas’ semiotics.