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First published October 2007

National pride, global capital: a social semiotic analysis of transnational visual branding in the airline industry

Crispin Thurlow and Giorgia AielloView all authors and affiliations
Volume 6, Issue 3
https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357207081002

Abstract

In this article we examine 561 different airline tailfin designs as a visual genre, revealing how the global-local binary may be managed and realized semiotically. Our analysis is organized into three strands: (a) a descriptive analysis identifies the strikingly restricted visual lexicon and dominant corporate aesthetic established by tailfin design; (b) an interpretive analysis considers the communicative strategies at play and the meaning potentials which underpin different visual resources; (c) a critical analysis links these decisions of design and branding to the political and cultural economies of globalism and the airline industry. Specifically, we show how airlines are able to service national identity concerns through the use of highly localized visual meanings while also appealing to the meaning systems of the international market in their pursuit of symbolic and economic capital. One key semiotic resource is the balancing of cultural symbolism and perceptual iconicity in the form of abstracted stylizations of kinetic effects. Although positioned unfairly in the global semioscape, airlines may resist straightforward cultural homogenization by strategically reworking existing design structures and exploiting possibly universal semiotic meaning potentials.

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1.
1. Margaret Thatcher is said to have declared, `We fly the British flag, not these awful things', while draping a handkerchief over a model of a newly-liveried BA plane (BBC News Online: [http://news.bbc. co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/198805.stm]).
2.
2. Commercial aircraft costs based on information available at the Boeing website [www.boeing.com/commercial/prices/].
3.
3. Hengi's (2000) listing is very similar to another comprehensive collection of airline trademarks and logos available online [www.aerosite.net].
4.
4. One of the world's oldest commercial airlines, Germany's flag-carrier Lufthansa (founded in 1926) is said to have also been the first to develop a company logo - in this case, the bird-and-sun motif which we found to be so ubiquitous in our corpus. In Figure 13, airline trademarks from the 1950s likewise indicate the origins of the standard lexicon in use today.
5.
5. It is worth noting that, in Mythologies, Roland Barthes (1972) interpreted the Citroën trademark (see Figure 2b earlier) in similarly kinetic terms: that it `was proceeding from the category of propulsion to that of spontaneous motion, from that of the engine to that of the organism' (p. 89). Other well-known examples where effects of motion are strategically deployed are DHL's combination of diagonalization and gradation (Figure 2c), and the darting and tapering of Nike's famous `swoosh' trademark (Figure 2a); FedEx (Figure 2d) meanwhile embeds a figurative arrow (between the `e' and `x').
6.
6. Livingstone (2002: 66) similarly discusses how `equiluminant colours' can be used to generate a sense of motion through the appearance of vibration. For a demonstration of this with reference specifically to Richard Anuszkiewicz's Plus Reversed, see [http://webexhibits.org/colorart/anuszkiewicz.html].
7.
7. Given arguments about - and the economic realities of - the deterritorialization of capital and the rise of multinational business, it is important to acknowledge that many of the larger international airlines are becoming increasingly detached from the nation-state, whether through privatization (e.g. BA), transnational mergers (e.g. Air France and KLM) or `global alliances' (e.g. oneworld, Sky Team and Star Alliance). As such, the notion of the `flag-carrier' is necessarily rendered more complex (e.g. in the wake of BA's World Images rebranding, Virgin Atlantic famously declared itself the British flag-carrier by marking its planes with the Union flag). Nonetheless, at the same time, smaller countries are still starting up publicly funded flag-carriers in their efforts to establish nationhood (e.g. Armenia, Yemen), just as countries like Switzerland have been prepared to continue investing and losing public money in order to sustain flag-carriers.
8.
8. A short account of the branding strategy behind the Thai Airways logo is available (25 July 2005) through the airline's website [www. thaiairways.com/About_Thai/Public_Information/Information/ THAI_logo.htm]. Replacing an earlier visual stereotype (a Thai classical dancer) used since 1960, the orchid logo was designed in 1975 by Landor Associates to `create a more international image'; in 2005, this too was tweaked for a `new look [that] not only has a refreshingly contemporary approach, [but which] will also help to promote THAI's brand image and impact in the many countries it serves.' This example shows nicely the constant re-evaluation of visual currencies (see Figure 14).
9.
9. In another case of globalizing aestheticization, Irish flag-carrier Aer Lingus faced a public outcry in 2003 after announcing that it was to drop, or at least deprioritize, the national emblem of the shamrock from its aeroplanes. (Guardian Unlimited [http:// observer. guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,915312,00.html])

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Published In

Volume 6, Issue 3
Pages: 305 - 344
Article first published: October 2007
Issue published: October 2007

Keywords

  1. corporate branding
  2. globalization
  3. perception
  4. kinetic stylization
  5. semioscape
  6. social semiotics
  7. universal iconicity

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Crispin Thurlow
University of Washington, Seattle, USA, [email protected]
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Giorgia Aiello
University of Washington, Seattle, USA, [email protected]
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