The Double Invention. A Communicative Prototype of Food Industry

The Case of Star

Abstract

The central hypothesis is that the industry itself is, in effect, a source of communication, a place that also produces communication, a center able to establish specific communicative models and to coordinate in time all the necessary informative flows. The birth of some products is necessarily, a double innovation: they affect both the production plan in the strict sense and the communicative plan. In this sense, it must be recognized to them a clear value of prototype. The case Star is that of an industry that participates to the complex communicative strategy of the Fifties, when the end of food insecurity was bring to completion, also in term of collective imagination. The process of industrial food sector iconicization passes then for a domestic face, for family appearance: active of an iconography of foundation, very similar to the one made at the dawn of the art of advertising: the value systems around the consumer product are translated through a process of personification, now transferred on the narrative plan of domesticity.