major weakness because, outside of certain technology- and service-driven
categories, where brands are built largely through reputation effects,
branding’s big stakes are decided increasingly by cultural symbolism.
Branding has been dominated by these psychological assumptions for
nearly four decades. In this view, which I call the mindshare model, the
brand is a set of valued associations in the individual consumer’s mind. So
branding is reduced to being actions that systematically reinforce these
associations. The American ad man Rosser Reeves developed the founda-
tional intuition for this idea in the 1950s with his idea that each brand
required a Unique Selling Proposition that should be repeated over and over
to install it in consumers’ minds. Al Ries and Jack Trout made this idea hege-
monic with the publication of a series of Ad Agearticles that culminated in
the 1980 publication of Positioning the Battle for your Mind. They intro-
duced a powerful metaphor that won over the marketers worldwide: we live
in a world that has far too many messages for people to process, so branding
is a battle for mental real estate. The firm needs to identify a cognitive gap in
the benefits and associations important to the product category and then
seek to own this mental real estate through ultra-simple ultra-consistent
brand communications. Beginning in the 1980s, consumer psychologists
have published scores of academic articles, textbooks and management
books that rely on this foundational intuition to advance a general theory of
branding that paralleled what Reeves, Ries, and Trout had previously
developed for practitioners. The goal of branding is to claim valued
cognitive associations in a product category, and consistently communicate
these associations in everything the brand does over time to sustain the
brand’s hold on this cognitive territory.
The mindshare model works fine for certain aspects of branding, but it is
fundamentally flawed as a theory of brand symbolism. Mindshare branding –
as well as its various New Age cousins such as emotional branding, brand
personality, brand archetypes, relationship branding – is but one model for
branding, as this book makes clear. The mindshare approach is a basic tool for
the day-to-day brand management of established brands – the incremental and
rote aspect of branding. When it comes to the most important, exciting and
strategically crucial role of branding – using branding to build extraordinary
new businesses and drive economic value – mindshare is a dead end.
To address this gap, I developed a cultural theory of branding. Cultural
branding is conceived specifically to explain how branding works as an
innovation engine, to drive significant new domains of customer value. To
do so requires an entirely different theory of consumer motivations and
desires: moving from the essentialist, static, individual-level constructs of
mindshare theory to social and cultural constructs that are grounded in
historical contexts. And the application of this new theory in practice
demands different research techniques and different conceptions of strategy.236 Seven brand approaches