Linguistic Geekery

I've been messing around with the idea that brands constitute a kind of language of their own.

I stole the idea from the structural anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss who argued that myths had to be a language of their own because myths had to be told to exist and because they feature the same structures as language, that can be broken down and reconstituted.

Elsewhere, Levi Strauss posits that:

It is likely that languages exist in which an entire myth can be expressed in a single word

And I think that the language of brands might constitute such a language, where the entire myth of Nike can be evoked with the one word. Brands function like the myths of modern culture, providing meaning for us 'meaning seeking creatures' [to steal from John Grant], and the myth is separate from the form as it can be expressed in numerous different ways without losing its essential structure.

To put it another way, Just Do It as a core brand thought can be executed in innumerable ways and yet always express the same thought.

And then I thought what about logos? How does the swoosh invoke the myth? Here's where it gets really geeky - linguistics identifies two kinds of written langauge:

1. Glottographic: writing that literally represents speech. Like all of this.
2. Semasiographic: writing that conveys meaning without reference to speech. Like the swoosh.

So the swoosh conveys the meaning without recourse to the word, which is the power of a great brand icon - it is abstract and so can encapsulate the complex bundle of meanings that the brand evokes without dragging it down to actual words. It is a symbol.

Which is perhaps why people shave it into their hair.