The Paronym Economy: How Branding Replaced Production as the Engine of Capitalism

By Eric Zhang Sep. 13, 2025

The modern economy no longer sells things — it sells names. From sneakers to smartphones to software, what drives value is not material composition but linguistic construction. In a world saturated with abundance, the economic unit has shifted from the product to the paronym — the word that stands near another word, borrowing its prestige, ambiguity, or aura. “Apple” is no longer a fruit, “Meta” no longer an adjective, and “X” no longer a letter. The market now trades in language as much as labor.

According to Interbrand’s 2024 Global Brand Value Index, the top 100 brands collectively hold over US$3.2 trillion in intangible value — more than the GDP of the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, the tangible assets of major corporations continue to decline as a share of total capitalization. In 1975, physical assets represented over 80 percent of the S&P 500’s market value; by 2024, they accounted for less than 10 percent (Ocean Tomo Intangible Asset Market Study, 2024). The real economy has become an echo — sound without substance, identity without industry.

The Linguistic Turn in Capitalism

Every economic era has its medium. The industrial age monetized matter; the digital age monetizes meaning. When production costs fall to near zero — as with music, media, or digital services — differentiation must come from story, symbol, or sound. What we call “marketing” is simply semiotics with a balance sheet.

Consider fashion. The marginal cost of producing a T-shirt in Bangladesh averages US$1.20; that same shirt, once stamped with a logo, sells for US$120 in New York. The difference is linguistic — the distance between “cotton” and “Chanel.” Even tech, supposedly grounded in engineering, depends on wordplay. “Cloud,” “Edge,” “Neural,” and “Quantum” are not technical necessities but branding metaphors that make computation feel celestial.

The economy has become a thesaurus, endlessly rephrasing itself to maintain novelty.

Inflation of Meaning

This linguistic inflation mirrors monetary inflation. When every company claims “innovation,” “sustainability,” or “AI integration,” the semantic value of these words collapses. A 2024 PwC Corporate Language Audit of S&P 500 annual reports found that 93 percent included the term “sustainability,” but only 21 percent contained measurable environmental targets. Language is now leveraged as credit — borrowed clarity without collateral.

Investors participate willingly. ESG funds, for example, manage US$40 trillion globally (Morningstar, 2024), yet half of their portfolios overlap with traditional index funds. The market trades not in performance but in perception. Like subprime mortgages, symbolic value is bundled and resold until its referent evaporates.

The danger of the paronym economy is semantic default — when words no longer secure belief.

Labor in a Word-Made World

In earlier industrial epochs, workers produced material goods; in the current one, they produce narrative goods. Job titles reveal the transformation: brand storyteller, content strategist, community architect. The 2024 LinkedIn Workforce Report shows that “communications” and “creative strategy” roles have grown 3.5 times faster than manufacturing jobs since 2010. The economy’s most valuable output is no longer utility but interpretation.

This redefinition of labor has ambiguous consequences. On one hand, it democratizes creativity; on the other, it commodifies authenticity. Workers must perform identity as much as function — curating online presence, corporate voice, and personal brand. The line between employment and advertisement blurs until life itself becomes copy.

The worker becomes not a producer but a paronym: a name adjacent to value, never quite identical to it.

Capital Without Corporeality

Financial markets thrive on this disembodiment. The value of a company like Nike derives less from shoes than from narrative cohesion — its brand ecosystem functions as an idea supply chain. Each partnership, campaign, and slogan adds another linguistic derivative.

In this system, capital is linguistic liquidity — the capacity to circulate words faster than others can verify them. Cryptocurrencies literalized this condition: value without anchor, secured by consensus, not utility. Bitcoin and luxury branding share the same grammar — scarcity by story.

Economists call this shift “intangible capitalism.” But it might be more accurately described as fictional capitalism: a mode of production where stories generate revenue faster than factories ever could.

The Political Consequence of Branding

The paronym economy does not end at commerce. Politics, too, has become a marketplace of signifiers. “Brexit,” “Make America Great Again,” and “Build Back Better” are not policies — they are brands, semantically engineered for viral memorability. As sociologist Benjamin Moffitt argues, populism thrives in this semiotic marketplace because slogans outperform substance.

Public policy now competes on the same terrain as consumer marketing — measured in clicks, reach, and slogan resonance. The electorate becomes an audience; governance, a campaign that never ends. Words no longer describe; they perform.

When everything becomes branding, democracy becomes public relations.

The Cost of Linguistic Capital

The paronym economy’s brilliance is also its curse: it turns all meaning into currency. The more the system rewards attention, the more attention fragments. Information overload — the economic byproduct of infinite naming — drives volatility in both markets and minds.

Cultural theorists have begun calling this “semantic burnout”: the exhaustion caused by constant linguistic stimulation. It manifests economically as short-termism — firms chasing quarterly virality rather than long-term value. The Harvard Business Review (2024) found that the average lifespan of a publicly traded company has fallen from 61 years in 1958 to under 18 years today. Words move faster than institutions can endure.

Capitalism’s grammar has become unstable; syntax collapses into slogans.

A Post-Linguistic Economy

What comes after branding? Possibly silence — or at least, substance. As information saturates, scarcity shifts toward attention and trust. The future economy may reward those who say less but mean more. Companies like Patagonia, which voluntarily limit advertising, or the Japanese firm Muji, which literally brands itself as “no brand,” suggest that minimalism may become the new differentiation.

In that sense, post-brand capitalism will not abolish language but restore its weight. In a world where every word has been sold, authenticity itself becomes the rarest asset.

The paronym economy may have perfected capitalism’s illusion: infinite value from finite language. But as every brand eventually learns, even words depreciate. What follows may not be a collapse, but a quiet — the moment after the slogan fades, when the world must once again decide what it actually means.

Works Cited

“Global Brand Value Index 2024.” Interbrand, 2024, www.interbrand.com.

 “Intangible Asset Market Study 2024.” Ocean Tomo, 2024, www.oceantomo.com.

 “Corporate Language Audit 2024.” PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), 2024, www.pwc.com.

 “Global Sustainable Investment Review 2024.” Morningstar Research, 2024, www.morningstar.com.

 “LinkedIn Workforce Report 2024.” LinkedIn Economic Graph, 2024, www.linkedin.com.

 “Corporate Longevity Report 2024.” Harvard Business Review, 2024, www.hbr.org.

 Moffitt, Benjamin. Populism and the Mediated Performance of Politics. Polity Press, 2023.