Symbols in brand storytelling

Abstract

The article highlights the role of symbols in digital storytelling that is becoming an effective marketing strategy. Digital technologies made storytelling on websites and social media platforms multimedia and multimodal and opening up new creativity horizons. The research is based on the analysis of storytelling of famous jewelry maisons – Cartie, Tiffany, Boucheron, Van Cleef & Arpels, Harry Winston – on their websites. These brands creations are symbols of obsession, of great dreams, idée fixe for millions of people. Stories have become an essential component of textual and visual information on the websites thus providing access to the brand history, timeline, heritage and values for the wider, global audience. Luxury brands’ logos are easily recognized symbols associated with exclusive design, unrivalled creativity, refined taste, high social status. Culture-specific symbols pertaining to different civilizations are efficiently integrated into jewelry design. Some creations become emblematic of the maisons and symbolize the brands. Jewelry pieces of luxury brands can turn into symbols – magical elements of flora and fauna, cosmos, human world. The maisons prescribe symbolic value to their creations in their advertising and marketing campaigns. Symbols turn out to be pivotal for meaning making in the storytelling techniques, both visually and textually, spanning the most important facts of the brands founders’ personal and professional lives, the history of the brand, acquisition of unique gemstones and creation of iconic jewelry items that become the milestones in the brands' development. The stories about the brands and their creations visualize symbols. Culture-relevant symbols are aptly integrated into jewelry pieces design and visualized in multiplе stories on official websites. High Jewelry items and luxury jewelry items become brand-specific symbols. Luxury brands creations become iconic and might symbolize nature world, cosmos, human life and activities. Symbolic storytelling is interlaced with complicated cognitive and semiotic processes, interdiscursivity, diverse implications what makes meaning making and decoding more sophisticated and fascinating.