Pink PP as Cultural Branding:How Luxury Brands Extract Community Meaning into Commercial Value

Abstract

This article examines how Valentino's Pink PP campaign transforms cultural significance into commercial value within luxury branding. Pink's symbolic meaning was not invented by the brand, but emerged through history, identity politics, and online community practices. This paper adopts a conceptual case study approach, synthesising a four-stage model from existing literature with Pink PP as an explanatory case. Based on the McCracken (1986) meaning transfer model, this paper proposes a four-stage conceptual framework: communities generate meaning; the brand extracts emotional value and reconstructs it through aesthetic language; digital communities amplify and disseminate this meaning; and the brand ultimately captures commercial value. This paper's original contribution lies in two added dimensions: digital community amplification and asymmetric value distribution. Taking Pink PP as an explanatory example, this study explains how the model operates in practice: Pink PP keeps the emotional core of identity politics but weakens its political context. Collective struggle becomes personal expression and visual participation. Digital communication helps the campaign travel further, but the communities involved do not receive equal returns. This paper reveals the internal tension between symbolic inclusion and commercial extraction.