Symbolic infrastructure: Governing brand communication in platformised markets

Brand communication increasingly depends not only on what brands say, but on the environments that make messages visible, shareable, and emotionally durable. While marketing scholarship has extensively examined what brands communicate, the aesthetic, algorithmic, and affective arrangements that shape how brand communications become visible, circulate, and endure remain under-theorised. The objective of this conceptual paper is to explain how symbolic infrastructure governs brand communication in platformised markets by conditioning visibility, circulation, and affective attachment. Drawing on consumer culture theory, platform studies, affect theory, and governmentality perspectives, we develop a theoretical framework comprising three interrelated dimensions: aesthetic arrangements that organise perceptual salience, algorithmic systems that regulate visibility and circulation, and affective conditions that stabilise emotional attachment. Sportainment serves as a conceptual observatory, with illustrative examples used to clarify the framework rather than empirically test it. The framework conditions, rather than determines, communication outcomes, while preserving consumer agency within structured environments. By foregrounding how communicative environments are organised, the paper advances marketing communication scholarship and provides marketing communicators with a diagnostic framework for assessing aesthetic coherence, algorithmic discoverability, and affective durability in platformised markets.