How Societies Desire Brands: Using Cultural Theory to Explain Brand Symbolism (original) (raw)
Related papers
The cultural codes of branding
Marketing Theory, 2009
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.
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.
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 (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.
Brand Iconicity: a Shared Reality Perspective
2009
This research establishes brand iconicity as an important construct to better understand the cultural significance and identity value of brands. We define brand iconicity as the degree to which a brand symbolizes the values, needs, and aspirations of the members of a particular cultural group. High-iconicity brands have the power to connect diverse elements of cultural knowledge and can act as reminders of culturally-relevant values. In five studies, we developed a reliable and valid measure of brand iconicity, and also showed how consumers use iconic brands to manage their social identity and use social information to make brand iconicity judgments.
Give Them Something To Believe In: The Value of Brand Culture
We’ve been studying the marketing field, the best current practices, and the latest theories of branding to understand where this field of ours is going and what our clients need from us that they can’t get from just anyone. Our insights, together with our most recent client experiences, have led us to develop a new model of branding based on a concept we’re calling Brand Culture. Our understanding of Brand Culture has been deeply influenced by the latest anthropological studies of branding. Brand Culture replaces the current model of the external brand image. This new theory recognizes that people no longer merely consume products and services. Instead, people seek out brands which embody their own values, and adopt these brands as part of the statement of who they are and what they stand for.