Consumer-brand assemblages in advertising: an analysis of skin, identity, and tattoos in ads

• Published in: Consumption, markets and culture Vol. 16; no. 3; pp. 223 - 239
• Main Authors: Bjerrisgaard, Sofie Møller, Kjeldgaard, Dannie, Bengtsson, Anders
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 01.09.2013; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Advertisements; Advertising; advertising practices; brand culture; brand extended; branding; consumer subjectivity; consumer-brand assemblage; entanglement; Market strategy; Studies; Subcultures; Symbolism; Tattoos
• ISSN: 1025-3866; 1477-223X
• DOI: 10.1080/10253866.2012.738067

This paper discusses how the use of tattoos in advertising renders diverse brand-consumer assemblages visible. In considering advertising practitioners as professionals of entanglement, the paper emphasizes the embeddedness of practitioners' use of tattoo symbolism in institutionalized marketing systems and in the cultural history of tattooing. In accordance with the recent emphasis on the importance of material devices for understanding contemporary sociality, this paper presents a semiotic analysis of a convenience sample of advertisements depicting tattoos. Tattoos are productive for the study of brand-consumer assemblages because they are situated on the human skin, which is a mediator between the individual and the socio-material world. Furthermore, tattoos reproduce discourses of both mainstream fashion and deviant subcultural identification, which imbue tattoo symbolism with communicative potency. This analysis demonstrates how the emergence of brand tattoos in advertising challenges the dominant consumer centrism in consumer research and suggests a networked, emerging understanding of the subject in which agency is distributed in socio-technical assemblages.