The cultural codes of branding (original) (raw)
Related papers
2006
Recent research has shifted attention from brand producers and products toward consumer response and services to understand brand value creation. Often missing from these insights, however, is a focus on cultural processes that affect contemporary brands, including historical context, ethical concerns, and representational conventions. 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.
A cultural approach to branding in the global marketplace
Journal of International Marketing, 2008
International marketing's commitment to a technical and universalizing approach to solving managerial problems has meant that researchers have adopted an ethnocentric approach to branding. This is becoming problematic as the global marketplace develops. The authors argue that to meet the theoretical and methodological challenges of global branding, international marketing scholars will need to revise some key premises and foundations. Branding research in the future will need to be contextually and historically grounded, polycentric in orientation, and acutely attuned to the symbolic significance of brands of all types. The authors offer some conceptual foundations for a culturally relative, contextually sensitive approach to international branding in which the construct of brand mythology is central.
Cultural analysis and branding practices
By exploring the relationship between cultural studies and branding practices this paper seeks to present ethnographic research participation in construction and disclosure of brands. Recent works seem to agree that, in order to successfully develop their own pattern and their own cultural significance, companies must invest in research that seek in culture the answers for their branding tasks and innovation opportunities. This paper is an attempt to examine work undertaken the past years on the relationship between brand building and brand management with the culture research, provide a view of the complexities of the consumption processes and describe how culture influences in consumer behaviour. It presents the currently discussions about tools and methods for conducting the cultural research and, finally, intends to identify how ethnographic research can be inserted in branding processes as a tool to provide the necessary information in order to help building strong brands.
A Cultural Approach to Branding in the Global Marketplace (JIM)
Journal of International Marketing
International marketing’s commitment to a technical and universalizing approach to solving managerial problems has meant that researchers have adopted an ethnocentric approach to branding. This is becoming problematic as the global marketplace develops. The authors argue that to meet the theoretical and methodological challenges of global branding, international marketing scholars will need to revise some key premises and foundations. Branding research in the future will need to be contextually and historically grounded, polycentric in orientation, and acutely attuned to the symbolic significance of brands of all types. The authors offer some conceptual foundations for a culturally relative, contextually sensitive approach to international branding in which the construct of brand mythology is central.
Journal of Business Research, 2019
The subject of branding, customer-brand relationships, brand equity strategies, and branding as a societal institution has become so controversial that an anti-branding movement has become widespread across several continents. This movement maintains that branding is not just problematic, but ethically wrong. This article uses the Hunt-Vitell theory of ethics to provide a framework for explicating people's personal moral codes, which in turn, helps us to understand the ethical controversy over branding. The article (1) provides a brief discussion of the nature of branding, (2) identifies major arguments that support the view that branding is morally wrong, (3) overviews the H-V theory of marketing ethics, (4) explicates the H-V theory's "personal moral codes" framework, and (5) shows how it provides a starting point for those who seek to understand, evaluate, and investigate the ethics of branding. The morality of free markets derives from the opportunity to exercise personal prerogative. The morality of marketing organizations derives from the potential of one group of people to satisfy the wants and needs of another. It is important that we not indict, and attempt to curtail, the processes that foster consumer choice when our quarrel is actually with the choices consumers freely make. (Debra Jones Ringold, 2006, p. 66) 2. The nature of branding and how it promotes competition The American Marketing Association defines "brand" as: A name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies
Brand Cultures: Between Identity and Image
Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2012
This paper will try to analyze the role played by branding communication in the "education" of the masses, on social responsibility and at a level of micro cultural trends. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the formation of symbolic meaning in brand to consumer communication starting from the concepts of brand identity and brand image. We advance the hypothesis that the meaning of brand communication depends to a large extent on the "culture" developed by a mark's symbolic functions.
Brands: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
2014
Branding has emerged as a cornerstone of marketing practice and corporate strategy. This book brings together a curated selection of the most influential and thought-provoking papers on brands and branding from Consumption Markets and Culture, reflecting the wide-ranging, interdisciplinary interest in the topic, accompanied by new introductions from leading brand scholars, including Giana Eckhardt, John F. Sherry, Jr., Sydney Levy, and Morris Holbrook.
Schroeder, J. E. (2014), Brands and Branding, in Wiley-‐Blackwell Concise Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies, edited by Dan Cook and Michael J. Ryan, New York: Wiley and Sons.
Brands and branding have emerged as key concepts in marketing, management, and strategy, and the concept of branding, referring to the process of bringing attention to a product, company, concept, person, or cause, has become an everyday term. Research and thinking about brands and branding can be divided into four perspectives: corporate perspectives, consumer perspectives, cultural perspectives, and critical perspectives. These four perspectives demonstrate the growing interdisciplinary interest in brands and branding, and how brand research sheds light on basic issues of consumer agency, consumer behavior, and consumer culture.