Performing brand identity: situating branding in discursive-ideological landscapes

Through a discourse-analytic case study, this paper traces the socio-historical development of Singapore to examine how the branding trajectory and discourse of Singapore’s university sector from the 1990s to the present day have been shaped by an evolving local and transnational discursive-ideological landscape. It provides an empirical demonstration of the unfolding of the logic of neoliberal marketization seen across the globe, but here, particularly, as instantiated in Singapore and its university landscape, played out in and through the lexicogrammatical features and visual semiotic choices that constitute the universities’ branding discourse. The paper shows that particular brands at the intersections of marketing and state/capital regulation are effective barometers of political ethos, governance and direction in the context of a strong state simultaneously subject to a broader neoliberal governmentality, as well as sites where (shifting) relations of power and negotiations of identity play out in times of sociocultural change and ideological contention.