Branding a symbol: Context and meaning across cultures

Abstract

The advent of cybernetic technology and new digital technologies, together with the speed and effectiveness of their global reach, have undoubtedly impacted in unprecedented ways, quantitatively and qualitatively, on how visual phenomena are modified and transmitted and, in turn, on how we access and respond to them.

This new reality—the rise and dominance of imagery—is paralleled by an exponential growth of scholarship in visual studies, with implications for research agendas across a wide range of interrelated disciplines, such as visual semiotics, visual anthropology, visual arts, psychology, history, sociology and so on (see Barnhurst et al. 2004). This article is to be seen as part of that trend: we discuss images in this article; more precisely, symbol as image, from a cross-cultural perspective. Our approach is perhaps unusual in that it is primed by Linguistic Pragmatics.

The study has practical implications for cross-cultural design because it illustrates some of the issues facing graphic designers who seek to reassign and transmit meanings across cultures.