Cultural branding overview
To build the cultural branding model, I conducted detailed cultural histories
(i.e. brand genealogies) of many iconic brands, including Budweiser,
Marlboro, Volkswagen, Mountain Dew, Nike, ESPN, Jack Daniels, Coca-
cola, Corona, Snapple, and Patagonia. Most of these brands are American,
but I have expanded the research since then to Europe, Japan, Latin
America, and also global brands.
Brand symbolism delivers customer value by providing culturally
resonant stories and images that groups of consumers use to buttress their
identities. The collective need for such stories arises in response to major
shifts in society. Cultural theorists term stories that provide this functional
role a myth. The most important and valued brand stories respond to – and
often help to lead – major shifts in society and culture. My theory seeks to
explain why particular branded stories and images are so valued at particular
historical junctures.
Brands establish powerful durable symbolism (i.e. become iconic) when
they perform powerful identity myths: simple fictions that address cultural
anxieties from afar, from imaginary worlds rather than from worlds that the
consumer lives in. Identity myths are useful fictions that stitch back together
otherwise damaging tears in the cultural fabric of the nation. These tears are
experienced by people in their everyday life as tensions or anxieties. People
use myths to smooth over these collective tensions, helping them to create
purpose in their lives, to cement their desired identity in place when it is
under stress. Academic research has demonstrated that the extraordinary
appeal of the most successful cultural products has been due to their mythic
qualities—from Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches dime novels of the nine-
teenth century to John Wayne westerns, to Harlequin romance novels, to the
action-adventure films of Willis, Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Iconic
brands work the same way.
Brands become iconic when they address societal desires, not individual
ones. Iconic brands perform myths (through any customer touchpoint) that
symbolically resolve the identity desires and anxieties stemming from an
important cultural tension. Iconic brands earn extraordinary value because
they address the collective anxieties and desires of the nation (and sometimes
beyond). We experience our identities – our self-understandings and aspira-
tions – as intensely personal quests. But, when scholars examine consumer
identities in the aggregate, they find that identity desires and anxieties are
widely shared across a broad swathe of a nation’s citizens. These similarities
result because, even though they may come from different walks of life,
people construct their identities in response to the same historical changes
that impact the entire nation, and sometimes regions or the entire globe.
Over time, as the brand performs its myth, consumers come to perceive
that the myth resides in the product. The brand becomes a symbol, a material
The cultural approach 237