Ethos in Sound Design for Brand Advertisement

Traditionally advertising has aimed to influence purchasing by affecting beliefs about the consequences of consuming a product. With the rise of brand marketing, the focus shifted from products to brands viewed as symbolic universes endowed with values and meanings that circulate in the imagination of a society. The paper explores the use of sound in syncretic multimodal advertising product as a bearer of brand and rhetorical meanings. A conceptual framework is proposed that addresses this issues by integrating the perspective of Design Theory and Transmedia Storytelling. In this context, two different senses of Ethos emerged and are discussed. A selected set of video commercials produced by Lancôme in the period 1990-2010 is used as a concrete example to show how the proposed framework can be used to analyze how sound features have been consistently exploited to communicate symbolic meanings.