‘Teach the world to sing’ the brand existed in the idea that in the hippie
counterculture could be found the seeds of peace and racial harmony. For
Snapple’s early 1990s breakthrough ‘100% natural’ campaign the brand was
centred in loud-mouthed Wendy telling silly stories of Snapple drinkers, and
in the barbed political soliloquies of Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh.
Abstracting these cultural expressions to ‘relaxation’ and ‘friendship’ and
‘quirky’, respectively, strips these brands of their most valuable assets.
The mindshare model abstracts away the messiness of society and history
in search of the brand’s purified essence. This distilled model denies the
brand a role as an historical actor in society. In its insistence that brands
forge a transcendental identity lodged in consumers’ minds the mindshare
model ignores that identity value is created and transformed in particular
historical contexts. A theory of brand symbolism must detail the brand’s
stakes in the transformation of culture and society and the particular cultural
expressions the brand uses to push for these transformations.
From transcendental consistency to historical fit
In the mindshare model the brand’s associations transcend time and space.
Therefore explanations of the evolution of brands boil down to whether or
not the brand maintains consistency in the face of organizational and
competitive pressures that push for zigging and zagging. Brand
management is about stewardship: finding the brand’s true ‘identity’ and
maintaining this compass point come hell or high water.
Yet the brands I have studied succeed by moving away from their initial
branding – their supposed DNA at the time – to address shifting currents in
American society. In fact, all of the iconic brands that I’ve studied, with
histories extending more than a decade, have had to make significant shifts
in order to remain iconic. Brands that haven’t adjusted properly – like Pepsi,
Levi’s, and Cadillac – have lost much of the brand equity. These reinterpre-
tations of the brand are necessary because, for a myth to generate identity
value, it must directly engage the most acute cultural tensions of the day.
Coke celebrated America’s triumphs against Nazi Germany in World War II
but then suddenly shifted to dramatize ways to heal internal strife around
war in the early 1970s and then racial divisions in the early 1980s. Corona,
originally a brand that represented collegiate hedonism, later was retooled to
provide a soothing antidote to the compression and anxieties of the
networked free agent work that came to a head in the 1990s.
Iconic brands are built using a philosophy the opposite of that espoused
by the mindshare model. The brand is an historical entity whose desirability
comes from performing myths that address the most important social
tensions that pulse through the nation. For iconic brands, success depends
upon how well the brand’s myth is modified to fit historical exigencies, not
by its consistency in the face of historical change.
The cultural approach 239