Stefania Borghini

American Girl and the Brand Gestalt: Closing the Loop on Sociocultural Branding Research

This article describes an investigation of the American Girl brand that provides a more complete and holistic understanding of sociocultural branding. Recent research on emotional branding, together with prior work on brands’ symbolic nature and their role as relationship partners, represents a significant shift in the way marketers think about brands and brand management. However, a full understanding of powerful and emotionally resonant brands has been elusive, in part because sociocultural branding knowledge has accumulated in a piecemeal way and lacks coherence and integrity. In addition, powerful brands are extraordinarily complex and multifaceted, but in general they have been studied from a single perspective in a single setting. On the basis of a qualitative exploration of the American Girl brand that is both deep and broad, the authors posit that an emotionally powerful brand is best understood as the product of a complex system, or gestalt, whose component parts are in continuous interplay and together constitute a whole greater than their sum. Studying American Girl from the perspectives of various stakeholder groups in many of the venues in which the brand is manifest, the authors attempt to close the sociocultural branding research loop and identify implications for brand management.

Street Art, Sweet Art? Reclaiming the "Public" in Public Place

Consumer research has paid scant attention to public goods, especially at a time when the contestation between categorizing public and private goods and controlling public goods is pronounced. In this multisited ethnography, we explore the ways in which active consumers negotiate meanings about the consumption of a particular public good, public space. Using the context of street art, we document four main ideologies of public space consumption that result from the interaction, both conflict and common intent, of urban dwellers and street artists. We show how public space can be contested as private and commercialized, or offered back as a collective good, where sense of belonging and dialogue restore it to a meaningful place. We demonstrate how the common nature of space both stimulates dialectical and dialogical exchanges across stakeholders and fuels forms of layered agency.

Symbiotic Postures of Commercial Advertising and Street Art

An ongoing tension between new ways of achieving novel, meaningful, and connected forms of expression is permeating the practice of advertising and igniting a lively academic debate. Novelty and social connection have long been preoccupations of art worlds. In this paper, we explore the creative tensions and synergies between countercultural and commercial communication forms of street art and advertising. Viewing each form as a species of rhetoric, we analyze a set of rhetorical practices employed by street artists that not only reflect, but might also be used to shape, commercial advertising in the near future.

I bambini e le marche. "Per vincere, emozionarsi, lievitare nell'aria, perché hanno un'anima"

Da decenni il dibattito sui bambini, la pubblicita e le marche coinvolge studiosi, operatori politici, responsabili di istituzioni educative e sociali. Nuove indagini ampliano continuamente l’orizzonte di conoscenza e rivelano aspetti inattesi che stimolano la ricerca scientifica a rivedere i paradigmi dominanti e a sviluppare metodi di studio a misura di bambino. In questo articolo gli autori esplorano come i bambini ri-elaborano e commentano la pubblicita delle marche che amano di piu. L’analisi empirica di 28 collage realizzati da gruppi di bambini rivela che i bambini hanno una chiara consapevolezza e persino una preferenza per i significati simbolici delle marche e della pubblicita, aprendo la strada per una riflessione piu critica sul fenomeno.