The article analyses firm strategies in auto industry and focuses three main issues. First: building an specific brand requires close interaction between material and functional aspects, from one side, and symbolic aspects, from the other, articulating strategic actions in productive, commercial and communicative spheres; the coherence of those actions produces positive synergies allowing brand to work as a symbolic operator bindingcorporation and market actors. Second: once a particular brand has been consolidated, this symbolic operator can improve, or impede, a specific corporation to occupy segments in the market. Third: the meaning of consolidated brands and its impacts on corporation aims reflect social strategies of differentiation and identities construction. M. Sahlins, J. Baudrillard e C. Castoriadis ideas are influential on shaping those arguments.
Brands; Corporate strategies; Automobiles