Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation -- Grant McCracken (original) (raw)

From Brand Content to Brand Culture

In the 2009 book, Brand Content: How Brands are Transformed in Media, we began with a simple observation : brand communication is not limited to advertising messages. Brands are also expressed by producing editorial content disseminated in the media. The production of brand content has increased considerably over recent years, enabling brands to engage in introspection and the explanation of their historical and techical heritage, myths and stories of their inception – all of which in fact, make up their culture. Editorial content is ever finding ways to express brands. Venues, interfaces, events, historical realities, the handing down of knowledge, know-how and techniques and sensorial experiences are all modes of expression that are beyond content and part of the broader concept that is culture. This observation leads us to develop the idea of « brand culture ». Because a brand’s strength lies not only in its sales, but increasingly in its cultural weight, i.e. its ability to grasp and re-articulate or construct a cultural environment as the extension of its products. Some brands provide a looking-glass mirror of surrounding ambient culture, which is part of their power of seduction. In this book, we will attempt to analyze this power of « cultural reverberation ».

Culture and consumption II: Markets, meaning, and brand management

2005

Reviewed by John F. Sherry, Jr. Freakonomics, meet brandthropology. In this concise volume (a companion to his watershed 1998 effort) of articulate introspection and insightful ethnographic essays, the author exhorts anthropologists to take back their culture. This reclamation requires more than merely wresting control from the pundits, critics, and celebrities of the contemporary cultural scene. It demands a plumbing of the ontological status of consumer culture before engaging in reflexive critique. Such a project should be close to the heart of every museologist and material culture specialist.[1] Grant McCracken, a former curator, active industry consultant, and peripatetic professor, is an unrivalled stylist. His conversational eloquence, self-deprecating humor (he is, he admits, Canadian), and incisive wit engage the reader throughout the book. He has structured the volume to rock the reader from the intensely personal to the analytically universal. He anticipates the themes of his elegant interpretations-many reprinted from other sources-in his autobiographical musings as an active participant in consumer culture. It is little wonder that Business Week has recommended his blog (cultureby.com) to anyone who would comprehend contemporary consumer behavior. While Culture and Consumption II is not as intellectually dense as its predecessor, it is a more immediately accessible work that will reinvigorate interest in the original.

Brand culture

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.

Editorial: exploring cultural consumption and brands: evolving methods and insights

Arts and the Market

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Advertising and Promotional Culture: Case Histories

Advertising and Promotional Culture: Case Histories, 2018

This key textbook traces the development of advertising from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, providing connections with the past that illuminate present developments and point to future possibilities. Chapters take a variety of theoretical approaches to address four main themes: how advertising imagines the future through the promise of transformation; how tribalism creates a sense of collective identity organised around a product; how advertising builds engagement through participation/presumption; how the blurring of advertising, news, art, education and entertainment characterises the attention economy. P. David Marshall and Joanne Morreale expertly trace these themes back to the origins of consumer culture and demonstrate that, while they have adapted to accord with new technologies, they remain the central foci of advertising today. Ideal for researchers of Media Studies, Communication, Cultural Studies or Advertising at all levels, this is the essential guide to understanding the contemporary milieu and future directions for the advertising industry.