Branding and Discourse: The Case of Cosmopolitan

Abstract

Like fast food and fizzy drinks, discourses are globally marketed by powerful multinational corporations. In this article we look at discourses about women which are distributed around the planet by the 44 different national versions of Cosmopolitan. These versions are localized, but still transmit the Cosmo brand, resulting in similarities between the versions. We apply a multimodal discourse analytic approach to understand this global branding, the type of analysis which is lacking in existing accounts of globalization, and ask, what exactly does remain the same across the localized versions? What this article offers is not an analysis of the magazine per se, but an analysis of the discourses that underpin it. We show how the magazine creates a fantasy world through the use of low modality images, which allow a particular kind of agency, mainly sex, to signify power. The multimodal realizations of Cosmo discourse enable women to signify their alignment with the Cosmo world through such things as the cafes they frequent, the clothes they wear and the way that they dance. Cosmo presents these not as real, but as playful fantasies, something which existing literature on women's magazines has missed. In these fantasies, women act alone and rely on acts of seduction and social manoeuvreing, rather than on intellect, to act in and on the world.