ABSTRACT
Author : Raphaël LLORCA (2024)
The study "L'imaginaire territorial des marques" ( 2024), carried out by Raphaël LLORCA for the Institut Terram and the Fondation Jean Jaurès, explores how commercial brands are helping to reconfigure representations of territories in France. It shows that from the 2020s onwards, brands began to integrate geographical and territorial references into their advertising, exploiting the "local" and "terroir" to meet consumers' growing demand for proximity. This trend, dubbed the "territorial turn of brands", can be seen in a variety of sectors, from supermarkets to services such as Airbnb and Netflix, which are adopting local strategies to boost their acceptability and relevance.
The study also points out that these territorial imaginaries, which are often stereotyped or fixed, influence the way the public perceives territories. Brands tend to recycle traditional symbols, which limits the diversity of representations and locks territories into fixed, conservative images. Finally, the study concludes that the power to represent and narrate territories is becoming an issue of "narrative sovereignty", raising questions about who controls the identity and representation of places in France.
Beyond their obviously commercial nature, the territorial imaginaries secreted by brands produce socio-political effects. Their discourse, imagery and graphic universe influence the way in which the general public perceives the reality of a given territory."
Source: excerpt from the study (p. 52)
Keywords: brand, branding, communication, image, imaginary, label, local, commercial brand, territorial brand, marketing, territorial marketing, advertising, narration, representation, reputation, storytelling, territories, terroir.
Illustration: Institut Terram X Fondation Jean Jaurès © Illustration courtesy of ChatGPT and Midjourney.
