In this final post of my adventure called “Logo and Imago”, I would like to present to you, my dear reader, the topic for my research. At the beginning, I thought it would be quite hard to actually write a 3000-word report (I have not even started it, so still not sure about that), but while doing my own research at the topic, which I am going to reveal to you real soon, I got so excited that I could not even believe it. The different topics, which we had all been looking at, suddenly became so real just by looking at the said example. As a business student, at the beginning of the course I was not sure how those theories can actually be applied to the reality, but it as it seems, they can. And the possibility to dive into it even more makes me strangely happy. After my rambling, I can get to the main topic.
What I want to do in my final paper is to perform an analysis on the brand Lush, and more specifically on the marketing that it is using since it is something I have never seen before. I will do so by looking at:
- introduction of the brand and its history;
- what does the brand stand for?
- main marketing practices, where I will talk about social media and viral marketing and make an assessment of whether the marketing campaigns of the brand can be considered spreadable or not;
- a semiotics analysis on different poster ads of the brand;
- a short discourse analysis II on the store ambiance, as it is one of the most remarkable things of the brand;
- conclusion, answering the research question;
Speaking of the research question, my aim of this final paper is to examine whether all these different aspects – the values of the brand, its social media presence, the store, the ads, etc. – are consistent with each other and whether they manage to make a coherent story out of their brand, closing the loop with culture branding. Therefore, my research question is “Do the managers of Lush manage to tell a consistent story?”.
I plan on doing this by conducting research on the already available information on Lush and the topics of interest to me. Whatever is not available, I plan to base my own conclusions on different articles on semiotics, discourse analysis and marketing.