Recently, traditional cultural resources (TCRs) have become a core part of enterprise clothing branding strategies. Such clothes, expressed in traditional culture, are widely accepted and recognized by audiences. Unfortunately, industry has leveraged these brands poorly and created ones that lack sign-cognition of TCRs. This has resulted in products reflecting shallow traditional cultural patterns (sign-form) rather than deeper adapted cultural expressions. The negative association resulting from this shallow and generic patterning in branding can be harmful for TCRs and damage the image of a brand in the minds of the people, thereby threatening the survival and long-term development of the brand. In order to solve this problem, this study divides the solution into three steps: (1) defining and understanding sign-meaning and sign-function in TCRs from the context of existing literature; (2) assessing, evaluating and breaking down sign-meanings, via in-depth interviews, into several sign-production sub-categories: (a) cultural attribution orientation; (b) knowledge perception orientation; and (c) stakeholders orientation; (3) Utilizing a typical brand development case study to demonstrate how these sign-meaning sub-categories can be help a brand better communicate with its audience. Firstly, it is noted that cultural attribution orientation: (a) expands the notion of brand culture; (b) promotes the movement of the design language of a brand from a dependent development into an independent development; and (c) connects the brand with potential audiences through a cultural gene transmission. Secondly, it is noted that knowledge perception orientation not only expands the foundation of expert groups but also provides TCRs-related to platforms of learning for audiences (e.g., to convey the brand’s social reputation of responsibility through educational communication). Thirdly, stakeholder orientations provide a foundation for brand integration with commercial resources and thus transform the brand to combine with social, commercial and industrial forms of collaboration. Beyond these three sub-categorizations, the study shows that sign-functions of TCRs can have an influence on cultural transformation, academic cohesion and social connection for clothing brands. This study provides a new perspective on TCRs with respect to sign-meaning and sign-function. TCRs can help clothing brands expand to reach audiences of traditional communication media, such as fashion shows. They can also help establish a more stable community mode of communication for non-commercial purposes.

Although archaized blocks have good development prospects as tourist destinations that reshape local characteristics in cities, they have been criticized by academic circles, and most of them are underperforming due to poor management. Therefore, facing the marginalization of the existing archaized streets in various cities, it is urgent to recognize their image and value and find out the strategies that can guide their sustainable development. First of all, we changed the traditional perspective of looking at archaized block cultural attractions through the comparison of a literature review and confirmed that the archaized block should connote a sense of community, fluidity, and publicity and highlight the foundation of local culture and field development. Secondly, we selected a case as the main object and compared the correspondence between the communicative and perceptive images of local residents to construct the connection map of the relationship between local residents and the case field. This part consists of two stages: (1) Through the official information and the intervention of Means–End Chain, we confirm the communicative image and perceptive image of this field, including 13 attributes, 12 consequences, and 11 values; and (2) The collected contents of attributes, consequences, and values were merged and converted into 36 variables to form the evaluation basis for the perceptive images of local residents. Finally, we conducted descriptive statistics, factor analysis, correlation analysis, and multiple linear regression through SPSS 20.0, constructed the A–C–V relation link diagram for the relationship between the field of the case with the local residents, and interpreted the content that should be focused on and the logic behind the constructed image of the field. In addition, the analysis has shown that the archaized block’s function is not only meant for tourism, but it also acts as a network information center combining local people, local knowledge, and local cultural resources, thus highlighting the diversity and value of the archaized block. This research not only provides suggestions for the marketing and design organizations of the archaized block to improve the image of the destination, but also to help the inheritance of urban culture.