Lecture 5: Socio-Cultural Approaches to Branding

Branding as Cultural Strategy

• Rationalisation of global supply chain makes it more difficult to maintain advantage only through product

• Post-modern economy trades in symbols and experiences

• Multinational firms use brands to expand into new product/geographic markets

Principles of Cultural Engineering

• Engineering consumer desires through cautious and repetitive advertising guided by scientific principles.

• Paternal and didactic

• Companies act as cultural authorities

• Denial of freedom to choose

Post-Modern Branding

The post-modern branding paradigm is premised upon the idea that brands will be more valuable if they are offered not as cultural blueprints but as cultural resources, as useful ingredients to produce the self as one chooses

Post-Modern Branding Key Techniques

1. Ironic, Reflexive Brand Persona

2. Coat-tailing on Cultural Epicentres

3. Life World Emplacement

4. Stealth Branding

each technique creates the perception that brands provided consumers with original cultural resources untainted by instrumental motivations of sponsoring companies

Ironic, Reflexive Brand Persona

Aims to forge distance between the brand and its competitors’ hard sell commercialism

Life World Emplacement

The brand’s value emanates from disinterested everyday like situations far removed from commercial sponsorship

Stealth Branding

instead of direct branding efforts, companies seek out the allegiance of tastemakers who will use their influence to diffuse the idea that the firm’s brand has cultural value.

Coat-tailing on Cultural Epicentres

weave the brand into cultural epicenters, the wellsprings of new expressive culture

Three Branding Models

1. Mind-Share Branding

2. Emotional Branding

3. Viral Branding

Mind-Share Branding

• reiterating distinctive benefits of using the brand (rational, utility)

• Functional

• Creates low-involvement behaviour

• Consumers perceive the benefits when buying the product

Emotional Branding

• Emphasis on how to communicate the brand essence

• Brand should be emotive and deliver experiences

• Emphasizes personality

• Used to create interaction and build relationships

Viral Branding

• Focused on the spread of communication

• Consumers are encourage to share information about a company’s marketing offerings via the internet

Cultural Branding

The understand of changing societal mores and the application of cultural tropes to the brand’s communication rather than to any product superiority or technical advance over competitive brands.

• Brand’s values lies in the specific of the bran’s cultural expressions

• Cultural content of its myth

• Long term branding

Why Brands Should Try To Become Icons

The power of the brand lies in abstract associations that one finds when one “ladders" up from basic functional properties of the product to these softer values, thoughts, and feelings that consumers link to the brand

Why Cultural Branding

A brand will become an icon when it understand cultural contradictions (experiences as desires and anxieties of a time) and uses it in favour of the brand

Iconic Brand

• A powerful cultural symbol

• Brand champions ideology that resonates with people

• People use the brand in their everyday lives, an important component of their identities

• Iconic brand play an important role for consumers, have strong and durable brand loyalty, and are amongst most loved and respected brands

Outcomes of Cultural Branding

• Help revamp the brand

• Needs to be aligned with a certain cultural distraction/shift

How do Brands Interact with Culture

brands can be understood as communicative objects that the brand manger wants consumers to but into a symbolic universe, as defined (in part), by the brand identity