Brand Evolution and Cultural Production: A Mission-Oriented Framework for Understanding Contemporary Market Actors

Contemporary brands operate not merely as commercial entities but as cultural infrastructure—shaping collective meanings, mediating social participation, and increasingly, determining the conditions under which cultural production itself occurs. This paper develops a three-phase evolutionary framework (Brand 1.0/2.0/3.0) that situates brand transformation within broader cultural and technological shifts, drawing on Sacco's cultural evolution model (2011, 2018) and entrepreneurial scholarship (Gehman & Soublière, 2017). Through examining cases spanning luxury heritage houses to algorithmic platforms, we demonstrate that brands have transitioned from centralized cultural producers to distributed infrastructures where value emerges through participatory dynamics. This shift raises critical questions about who captures value in platform-mediated cultural ecosystems and whether current arrangements serve genuine collective flourishing or merely concentrate power under the guise of participation.