Becoming the King’s Men – the Semiotic Molecule of Luxury Brand Heritage

In a spontaneous comparison, one might come to the conclusion that Savile Row shops sell real luxury, while on New Bond Street they simply sell expensive products. This conclusion includes reasons that can be understood by analyzing a typical traditional bespoke tailor shop with semiotic approaches. In our analysis, we applied Charles Peirce’s semiotic trichotomies to classify the signs of brand heritage, focusing on presented brand identities that appear in a structured construct that we call the molecule of the brand. Hence, the analysis leads to conclusions regarding what kind of signs produce a unique brand identity and how they refer to this identity concretely. Our findings offer a precise determination and evaluation of a luxury brand’s heritage management and presentation as well as a new understanding of heritage branding, the identity of brands, and the context in which they are created.

Keywords: Brand semiotics; Luxury brand management; Brand heritage; Brand identity; Luxury consumption; Myth; Framing