Lecture 5: Sociocultural Approach to Branding

A Cultural Approach to Branding

  • Rationalisation of the global supply chain makes it more difficult to maintain an advantage through only the produce

  • Post-modern economy trades in symbols and experiences

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

Modern Branding

In some ways, they were dictating cultures

Principle of Cultural Engineering

“…engineering consumer desires through cautious repetitive advertising guided by scientific principles”

  • Paternal and didactic

  • Companies acted as “cultural authorities“

  • Denial of freedom to choose

Post-Modern Branding

“a passionate, reflexive concern with existential freedom“

“from the 60s onward, people increasingly viewed consumption as an autonomous space in which they could pursue identities unencumbered by tradition, social circumstances, or societal institutions”

NOTE: “In a modern consumer culture, consumers looked to companies for cultural guidance. In a postmodern consumer culture, consumers strive to deflect the perceived paternalism of companies”

Branding was enmeshed with the merging consumer culture

“The postmodern 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“

Postmodern Brand Techniques

  1. Ironic, Reflexive Brand Persona

    1. The campaign often used irony and a reflexive acknowledgement that the point of the ads was to sell to forge distance between the brand and its competitor’s hard-sell commercialism

  2. Coat-tailing on Cultural Epicenters

    1. “weave the brand into cultural epicentres, the wellsprings of new expressive culture. These epicentres include arts and fashion communities, ethnic subcultures, professional communities, and consumption communities“

  3. Life World Emplacement

    1. “the brand’s value emanates from disinterested everyday life situations far removed from commercial sponsorship“

  4. Stealth Branding

    1. 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

Note: “Each technique creates the perception that brands provided consumers with original cultural resources untainted by instrumental motivations of sponsoring companies”

Megaphone Effect - when civilian consumers hold the megaphone and gain popularity from UGC.

Cultural Branding

Brand Culture

  • a brand culture perspective reveals how branding has opened up to include interdisciplinary research that both complements and complicates economic and managerial analysis of branding

  • if brands exist as cultural, ideological, and political objects, then brand researchers require tools developed to understand culture, ideology, and politics, in conjunction with more typical branding concepts, such as equity, strategy, and value

Brands are Embedded in Culture

  • Culture impacts consumption patterns

  • Successful brands have been able to adapt their brand strategies in line with this dominant cultural philosophy and weave cultural fibre

Since the 70s there have been three Branding Models

  1. Mind-Share Branding (70s)

    1. Many successful brands have been built on the reiteration of distinctive benefits

  2. Emotional Branding (90s)

    1. Emphasis on personality and intimate connection to its customers

    2. A brand should be emotive and deliver experiences

    3. Brand can capitalize on collective anxieteisof the time

  3. Viral Branding

    1. Branding focused on the spread of communication by lead consumers

    2. The goal is circulation

These three models account for nearly account for nearly every branding initiative today

Brand managers use them to build value with brand identity

These traditional models/ap

Iconic Brands

“The power of the brand lies in abstract associations that one finds when one “ladders” up from basic functional“


Cultural Branind

  • The understanding of chanign societal mores and the application of cultural tropes to the brands communication rather than to any product superiority or technical advances over competitive brands

  • A brand will become an icon when it understands cultural contradictions (experiences as desris and anxieties of a time) and uses in the favor brands