Brands, Interactivity, and Contested Fields: Exploring Production and Consumption in Cadillac and Infiniti Automobile Advertising Campaigns

Abstract

Brands mediate relations between production and consumption in capitalism. This essay aims to expand current discussions about brands by looking at the nature of interactivity between producers and consumers as a symbolic field of negotiation that can be contested. We argue that interactivity involves layers of representation and interpretation in the process of qualifying and requalifying products in the marketplace. The authors analyze two past advertising campaigns for luxury cars, Cadillac and Infiniti, to show how these brands were stabilized as cultural forms at one moment in time and why one was accepted and the other rejected by consumers. Our analysis concludes that objects of material culture in the highly reflexive branding practices of advanced capitalism reflect a dialectic embedded in an ongoing process of producers reading the consumer, and consumers assessing imagery communicated by the producer. At the heart of interactivity lies the contested and negotiated meaning of things in lived experience. This dialectic between producers and consumers indicates agency as mutually interactive on both the supply and the demand sides of capitalist activity.

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