This paper discusses how a Hawaiian corporation planned to redevelop an existing town by using a community-based approach to urban design. It examines how local residents were enlisted into the corporate work procedures in the capacity of authors and how their ideas and beliefs expressed were semiotically transformed and inscribed into design renderings of the future town. Analyses focus on how the corporation discursively positions itself as a person relative to the locals, and how various ideas expressed linguistically regarding the town are used to visually draw specific town design features. What is shown is that in taking into account and synthesizing the views of both the corporation and the local residents (i.e., customers), a design of the future town emerges as representation of a corporate brand community. It is argued that developed in this manner, the town as a commodity is one in which it is prefigured as a sign of the corporate status and social role within the community, and also that which has the capacity to yield future returns to the corporation in both the metaphorical (i.e., brand mediation) and actual (i.e., leases and sales) sense.

This article discusses the variable construal that brand fractions exhibit in social practices around the world and their implications for the study of brand semiosis in social life. Whereas brands are sometimes imagined to be unitary objects with inherent power, the discussion shows that the significance of distinct brand fractions is formulated by distinct metasemiotic practices, only some of which are the practices of brand corporations. When brand fractions like trademarks are taken up in distinct social practices around the world, their significance is routinely reanalyzed through locale-specific metasemiotic frameworks, which formulate varied forms of life in societies around the world.