The Case Study Of The Brand Building Of Yunnan Ethnic Cultural Commodities Under The Vision Of Power

In the modern market, the shaping of the brand image of the ethnic cultural commodities is an important premise for such commodities to obtain vast economic and cultural representation space as well as to achieve sustainable development. Yunnan Province, which was the first province in China to propose the initiative of "constructing a great province with ethnic cultural", has established the guiding principles and measures for prioritizing the development of the cultural industry since early 21st Century. Yunnan Province also started the campaign to support the featured ethnic cultural brands and has listed the campaign in the development agenda of the province. The brands of ethnic cultural commodities including Cunfabiao Silver Art, Duanguoliang Wood Carving, Impression of Yunnan Show, as well as Naxi Classic Music have emerged with the rise of the self-expressive local image of Yunnan Province and have had important economic and cultural impact nationwide.This paper takes the above four ethnic cultural commodity brands of Yunnan as typical cases for study. With the ethnography method, this study intends to represent the process of brand building of the above commodities. The theories of politics, economics and consumption power in sociology and anthropology are also applied to explore the process of brand building and brand development of the ethnic cultural commodities in the intertwining global and local discourses.The focus of this paper is on the key factors influencing the brand building and brand development of such commodities as well as their mechanism. The introduction of the "power" concept and theoretical framework in sociology and anthropology is conducive to gaining insights into the interaction and paralleling of the social control power and the power beyond social control in the brand building process. At the same time, the concept and theory can also be used to analyze the unification, balancing and gaming of various powers in the process of brand development, including the power of the elites, power of the policies and institutions, power of consumption and the abstract cultural power endowed to the brands of the commodities. The functions of these powers in the brand building process are the themes of the four case studies in this article.Based on Foucault’s theory of power-knowledge relation, we can find that commodities, as the core of the brand building strategy of the cultural industry, realize their power through the formation of the brand knowledge. In the case study of Cunfabiao Silver Art, these is a mutually inclusive relation between the power of brand and the knowledge of brand; the sustaining constructing of the power-knowledge relation is the basis for establishing the brand; Giddens’analysis of power and social agent’s actions is conducive to the interpretation of the brand building of Duanguoliang Wood Carving; Bourdieu’s theory of cultural activities and power field is the key to the analysis of the Impression of Yunnan Show; and Hobsbawm and the related researchers’ interpretation of the power of "tradition" helps with the analysis of the dialectical logic between individual elite power and the power of market consumption culture which is represented in the brand development of Naxi Classic Music.Through the above case studies on Yunnan ethnic cultural commodity brand building, we can see that in the background of universal connectivity of economy caused by the globalization, various ethnic groups and economic entities can only secure the conditions for self-protection and survival by progressively participating in the globalization. The ethnic cultural commodities which used to be at a disadvantage must now follow principles of market economy to create its unique brand image and achieve development. The study of this paper proves that the successful brand image is born out of the support of the local cultural and economic power, and the development of ethnic cultural brand embodies the self-expressive trials of the local ethnic culture of China; therefore the exploration of such brand development process is conducive to understanding the economic, social and cultural transformation and transition of the ethnic regions of China.