ABSTRACT
Much of contemporary branding works to forge affinity to engender favourable stakeholder/audience dispositions towards the organisation and its brand, through the use of multimodal brand artefacts and communicative platforms to enact appealing brand identities and “personalities”. While brand managers and marketers make such brand enactment decisions autonomously, these choices are not independent of the larger discursive-ideological terrain within which certain brand meanings, attributes and values might have more resonance than others. Branding, as such, is a situated and negotiated process contingent on broader cultural, social, political and economic forces, producing and shaping brands that speak to the pragmatic, identity, emotional and social needs of addressees in specific contexts. The COVID-19 pandemic represents a moment of sociocultural destabilisation, necessitating brands to recalibrate their identities for an evolved discursive-ideological milieu with changed socio-consumption practices. Taking a social semiotics-informed approach, this chapter looks at one of the industries most affected by the coronavirus outbreak, examining how airline companies activate and semiotise an affect of solidarity, empathy, care and obligation in their multimodal brand communications. Such enactments help to perform socially conscious brand personalities, with brands not only presenting themselves as responsible corporate actors, but also social citizens attending to the distress of fellow citizens.
