The idea of a cultural icon differs from the way that the term icon is used in semiotics. In Piercian semiotics, an icon specifies a particular kind of symbol, the meaning of which is implied by its sensorial relationship (usually visual) to that for which it stands. For instance, the Pillsbury Dough Boy is an icon because he is a character made of dough and represents a product that is raw dough in a tube. Alternatively, a cultural icon is related to the conventional use of the term icon in art and design (e.g., the Eames LCW chair is an icon of mid-twentieth-century modern design). In this usage, a particular design is iconic when it becomes conventionally understood as a quintessential or exemplary design of a period or a style. So, like a cultural icon, the design serves as a metonym representing a broader set of ideas. Some design icons are also cultural icons (the Eames chair or the Volkswagen Beetle). But there are many design icons whose renown is based on aesthetic triumphs that bear little relation to their reflection of ideological currents of society.

This section is adapted from Douglas B. Holt, “Brands and Branding,” Note 9-503-045 (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2003).

Of course, individuals’ experiences with brands are more complicated. People routinely overlay the public construal of the brand with their own personalized stories, images, and other associations. These many stray stories that individuals weave into their consumption can occasionally add to and alter the conventions of the brand, but this is rare. This personalization process has been a central preoccupation of interpretive consumer research. In line with the dominant methodological individualism in American marketing departments, most studies of consumers and brands glorify the individual act of consumption while ignoring how the brand operates as a conventional symbol in public culture. However, since marketers are interested in aggregations of customers, these idiosyncratic meanings have little managerial relevance unless they aggregate to transform conventions.

See, for example, Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987); Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); and Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

All of the management books on branding that I reference in chapter 2 present one-size-fits-all models.

The pioneering academic version of this argument can be found in Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage, 1994).

An axiom is a self-evident principle, or a principle accepted as true without proof as the basis for argument. Because conventional branding models are so ubiquitous, managers use these models without questioning their underlying axioms. The purpose of chapters 1 and 2 is to surface these assumptions and specify when they are applicable and when they are not.

The foundational premise of the cultural branding model—that iconic brands perform national identity myths that resolve cultural contradictions—is informed by a variety of scholars who have studied the role of myth in modern societies, such as those listed in the “Selected Bibliography.” Especially helpful were Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Noonday Press, 1973); and Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).

Al Ries and Jack Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980).

Books by leading academics that advocate versions of mind share include: David A. Aaker, Managing Brand Equity (New York: Free Press, 1991); David A. Aaker, Building Strong Brands (New York: Free Press 1996); David A. Aaker and Eric Joachimsthaler, Brand Leadership (New York: Free Press, 2000); Kevin Lane Keller, Strategic Brand Management (New York: Prentice Hall, 1998); and Gerald Zaltman, How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).

Former Coca-Cola guru Sergio Zyman is the most zealous advocate of mind share among consultants today (The End of Marketing As We Know It [New York: HarperBusiness, 2000]).

Rohit Deshpande, Kirsten J. O’Neil-Massaro, and Gustavo A. Herrero, “Corona Beer (A),” Case 9-502-023 (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2001). Anheuser-Busch now owns 50 percent of Cervaseria Modelo, the brewer of Corona.

Viral processes were clearly central in Corona’s initial success. But noting that people talked about the brand is not an explanation. Many beer brands were circulating many different stories at this time. The question that viral models ignore is this: Why do certain cultural contents become so desirable (and thus tellable) at a particular historical moment? In this case we need to ask, Why was Corona’s myth circulated so promiscuously? The answer must reside in the resonance of the story in American society.

Mind-share models attempt to address how brands contribute to consumer identities. But extending mind-share assumptions to explain how identity value works leads to models that are incoherent and unconvincing. They treat consumers’ aspirational identities as yet other associations that a brand should try to own. “BMW conveys high status” and “Harley expresses masculinity” are common examples. The problem is that these descriptions of identity are so vague and historical that they don’t explain anything. For a more detailed critique of mind-share branding in academic theories, see Douglas B. Holt, “How Societies Desire Brands,” in Inside Consumption: Frontiers of Research on Consumer Motives, Goals, and Desires, eds. S. Ratneshwar and David Glen Mick (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).

Scott Bedbury with Stephen Fenichell, A New Brand World (New York: Viking Penguin, 2002) and Marc Gobe, Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People (New York: Allworth Press, 2001); also see Berndt Schmitt, Experiential Marketing (New York: Free Press, 1999) for a related argument. In the academic literature, a variant of this idea has been advocated by Susan Fournier, “Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research” Journal of Consumer Research 24, no. 4, 343–374, 1998.

Some experts have expanded the idea of relationships to look at communities that form around brands. Every branding expert loves Harley’s H.O.G. riders club and encourages managers to emulate it. Observing the active brand communities that have formed around brands like Apple and Harley, and given the Internet’s advantages in forming communities across space, experts now routinely advocate that managers should seed these communities through sponsorships and Web sites. Some of the more bombastic gurus have even compared powerful brands to cults in terms of their effectiveness in bringing people together in groups around a set of values. The same cause-versus-effect critique that I apply to emotional branding applies equally to the idea of brand communities. People form communities around a brand when the brand contains a powerful myth that is amplified by group activities. I develop the point later in this chapter in the Snapple genealogy, and in chapter 7 when I analyze Harley-Davidson.

Robert Scott, God is My Co-Pilot, quoted in Mark Pendergrast, For God, Country and Coca-Cola (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 206.

Pendergrast, For God, Country and Coca-Cola, 287–288.

My description of the making of this ad comes from Bill Backer, The Care and Feeding of Ideas (New York: Times Books, 1993). Backer was the legendary adman and lead partner in Backer Spielvogel Bates Worldwide who came up with the creative idea.

The Library of Congress publicizes its Coca-Cola advertising collection on-line in a feature entitled “Fifty Years of Coca-Cola Television Advertisements,” <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ccmphtml/colahome.html>. Both ads can be viewed at this Web site.

Sergio Zyman, The End of Marketing as We Know It, claims that neither “Hilltop” nor “Mean Joe Greene” ad helped Coke sales, though he presents no evidence to support his case. At the time, Pepsi was extremely successful in making inroads into Coke’s franchise with youth. Without these ads, it’s quite likely that Coke’s business would have headed south. Regardless, Coke’s key problem in this era was that its managers did not understand how these two ads worked, and so they were unable to build a campaign around the ideals they embodied. Rather these were both one-off ads that were broadcast amid a sea of conventional lifestyle Coke advertising. It is no wonder, then, that Coke did not realize strong sales gains.

See Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Vintage, 1992).

The nurturing of emotionally charged relationships with customers is central to the success of brands in several important sectors of the economy, especially business-to-business firms, services, retailers, and experiential offerings. These sectors create value in their face-to-face interactions with customers. But iconic brands are built differently. Customers’ emotional connections result from the effectiveness of the brand’s myth in resolving customers’ identity anxieties.

Major brands now cut to the chase and tell their audiences directly that the brand and its customers do indeed have an intense emotional connection. Chrysler, for instance, sank tens of millions of dollars into a campaign using the tag line “Drive = Love,” the premise of which was to show how much Celine Dion loved driving her Chrysler. Similarly, in 2004, McDonald’s launched a new global tag line, “I’m loving it.” Even the widely celebrated MINI campaign is not above reproach: A recent ad depicts a MINI owner getting a painful tattoo on his forearm, the design of which is supposed to match the customized MINI sitting in his garage. The mistaken assumption in all of these efforts is that claiming that customers have deep emotional connections with the brand will make it true.

I differentiate here between viral branding—viral activities meant to increase the value of the brand—and the larger category of viral marketing. Viral marketing is simply the latest variant of what used to be referred to as word of mouth and the diffusion of innovation. Viral techniques are widely applicable in the diffusion process. They help get the word out on a new product, and socialize new consumption patterns, especially in the technology sectors. Here, however, I’m concerned with how viruses act as vehicles to create fashionability: the idea that the product’s user creates its au courant desirability. The most influential book has been Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2000). See also Emmanuel Rosen, The Anatomy of Buzz (New York: Doubleday, 2000); and Jonathan Bond and Richard Kirshenbaum, Under the Radar: Talking to Today’s Cynical Consumer (New York: Wiley, 1998).

Malcolm Gladwell broke the term in his article “The Coolhunt,” New Yorker, 17 May 1997. Trend-spotting consultancies have popped up all over, including Sputnik, whose principals wrote a book: Janine Lopiano-Misdom and Joanne De Luca, Street Trends (New York: Harper Business, 1996).

I discuss the historical development of branding based on the idea of consumer sovereignty in Douglas B. Holt, “Why Do Brands Cause Trouble?” Journal of Consumer Research, June 2002, vol. 29, 70–90.

An earlier version of the Snapple genealogy was published by Douglas B. Holt, “How to Build an Iconic Brand” Market Leader, June 2003.

John Deighton, “How Snapple Got Its Juice Back,” Harvard Business Review, January 2002, 47–52, makes an organizational culture argument for Snapple’s early success and partial recovery, maintaining that Snapple could succeed only when the company (the founders, and then again with Triarc) had a playful entrepreneurial culture. But this argument fails to account for Triarc’s inability to reignite Snapple’s identity value and why the new owner of Snapple, Cadbury-Schweppes, clearly a large bureaucratic company, has done just as well with Snapple as did Triarc. More generally, Deighton assumes that there is a tight coupling between corporate culture and branding. While this close relationship sometimes holds true (e.g., Harley and ESPN in my analyses) and has become a popular argument today (e.g., in Jesper Kunde, Corporate Religion (New York: FT Prentice Hall, 2000)), the empirical evidence suggests that such tight linkages are hardly necessary. Three of the five companies described in this book—PepsiCo (with Mountain Dew), Anheuser-Busch (with Budweiser), and Volkswagen—have built extraordinarily powerful brands worth many billions of dollars with management teams that have little affinity for the myth that the brand projects. As it turns out, the ad agency, rather than the client, usually serves as the primary cultural conduit. In my model, I argue that what is at stake is how brands forge authentic relationships to the populist worlds from which they draw. I distinguish between organizational populism (Harley, ESPN, Patagonia) and staged populism (Mountain Dew, Bud, Volkswagen).

Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), traces the breakdown of the classical top-down fashion model and the rise of a more heterogeneous, fragmented, and democratic fashion system.

Snapple’s newest brand owners, first Triarc and now Cadbury-Schweppes, have done their best to recapture the magic of Snapple’s halcyon days by echoing its original communications. Snapple’s myth of the company of amateurs, which took aim at the particular populist sentiments that erupted in the United States in the early 1990s, has now been distilled to a transcendental brand identity in the mind-share mode: Snapple is “quirky and alternative.” American culture and society have moved on, but Snapple performs a watered-down version of a story whose resonance peaked more than a decade ago. As a result, Snapple has become a conventional lifestyle brand. A strategy that has yanked Snapple out of history continues to dilute Snapple’s stature as an icon.

The same can be said for Snapple’s so-called cult status as the nucleus of a brand community. Although Snapple attracted a core of enthusiasts, the occasional gathering of people who like Snapple does not explain how the brand cultivated this affinity in the first place. Certainly, exaggerated analogies to religious cults do not help. Enjoying a Snapple with your lunch and laughing at the ads with your friends is something quite different from giving up your worldly belongings to live in isolation with fellow believers. Snapple developed a following because the drink made these people feel a little better about themselves and their place in the world. As sociologist Emile Durkheim taught us long ago, people routinely gather around shared sentiments to heighten the intensity of those sentiments. What’s strategically important isn’t the act of gathering, but the content of the shared sentiments that caused them to do so.

In the viral model, the content of the brand is not specified, since the authorship of the brand moves from the firm to the consumers. The rash application of this strategy to identity branding is a serious mistake. Iconic brands are valued because they perform myths that customers value. Of course, consumers adapt these myths and use them in all sorts of creative ways. Nevertheless, the brand owner should not abandon its leadership role in telling branded stories.

Marlboro is somewhat of an exception, largely because of the withdrawal of cigarette advertising on television in the early 1970s.

The idea that the middle class uses ideologically charged signs such as hillbilly (and later redneck and slacker) as epithets, which the working class flips upside down into terms of respect, is an example of what the seminal Soviet linguist Valentin Voloshinov termed multiaccentuality. See Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987).

Prior books have noted that brands are imbued with myths. But these books lack useful models for building brand myths because they fail to describe the specific characteristics of successful myths versus unsuccessful attempts. Like the mind-share model, these treatments do not examine branding activities in any detail. Further, these models fail to address why particular myths resonate at particular historical moments while others don’t. This is because the models conceive of myths as universal archetypes, rather than as stories that address particular social contradictions. See Randell Randozo, The Myth Makers (Chicago: Probus, 1995); and Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson, The Hero and the Outlaw (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001).

The idea that new expressive culture becomes especially valuable as a symbolic anchor during periods of tumultuous socioeconomic change is a common and long-standing idea in sociology and anthropology. In particular, see Clifford Geertz’s famous essay “Ideology as a Cultural System” in his book The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

Douglas B. Holt, “Mountain Dew: Selecting New Creative,” Case 9-502-040 (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2002).

This argument implies a very different sort of brand manager from those found in most companies today. I hint at the organizational entailments of this argument in chapter 9.

See Loren Baritz, The Good Life: The Meaning of Success for the American Middle Class (New York: Knopf, 1989).

Volkswagen was the first successful postmodern brand—a brand that offered up the product as a resource for individual creativity and self-fulfillment rather than as a collective badge. See Douglas B. Holt, “Why Do Brands Cause Trouble?” Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 29, June 2002, 70–90.

Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 62, offers one of the best historical treatments of the DDB campaign.

Thomas Frank has done a remarkable job of cataloging this appropriation of the 1960s revolution in One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Doubleday, 2000), and in his muckraking cultural journal, The Baffler.

David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

Two of the most respected acolytes of indie music were Ian Mackay and his band, Fugazi, and Steve Albini, producer and front man for various bands, including Big Black. These two indie celebrities derived enormous respect, at least as much for their strident advocacy of DIY culture as for their potent music. It’s no coincidence that, when Nirvana’s Nevermind became one of the top-grossing albums of the decade, Kurt Cobain sought out Albini to produce the sequel—an implicit pledge vowing his continued allegiance to DIY, especially since Albini would coax a sound from the band that would scare away all but the true believers.

Douglas Wolk, “Nick Drake’s Post-Posthumous Fame,” Salon.com, 19 June 2000. <http://dir.salon.com/ent/music/feature/2000/06/19/drake/index.html>, (accessed 19 February 2003).

While this spot shone, Volkswagen aired another ad during the same Super Bowl—a spoof in which a bear chases a VW in the forest—that came off as an insecure effort to win the Super Bowl audience with the formula of the day (animals and cheap laughs).

Here’s what film critic Jane Dark, “Village Voice Film Poll,” 2001, <http://www.villagevoice.com/take/three/title.php?title=1026546>, wrote about “Milky Way”:

The books by David A. Aaker cited in chapter two and Kevin Lane Keller, Strategic Brand Management (New York: Prentice Hall, 1998), argue this point explicitly. It is implicit in most other mind-share books.

Aside from Budweiser, the full-calorie, premium-beer segment—once the vast majority of beer consumption—had all but disappeared in the 1990s. Most of this share of stomach shifted to light beers, and a smaller percentage to imports. In response, Anheuser-Busch has gradually repositioned Bud alongside imports like Heineken and Corona as a superpremium beer. In effect, Anheuser-Busch responded to the demise of the old American premium segment by jumping up to the pricier tier. But to sell the same product at a higher price point required that the company enhance Bud’s identity value to its customers. The strategy couldn’t have worked had the company not revitalized Bud as an icon with the “Lizards” and “Whassup?!” campaigns.

In this cultural battle, Miller’s myth—and not Bud’s—stood out. Miller High Life’s name reflects its original positioning as a luxury premium beer for middle-class men. Phillip Morris bought the brand in the early 1970s and assigned Backer Spielvogel to the account. Bill Backer and his team designed a new campaign built around the idea that tough working men deserved a time of their own—Miller Time—to celebrate after the end of a hard day’s work. Had the Phillip Morris management supported this idea appropriately, Miller could well have taken over category leadership. Instead, Phillip Morris stumbled with inconsistent communiqués, allowing Anheuser-Busch to move in, swipe the Backer idea, and improve upon it.

David M. Gordon, Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial “Downsizing” (New York: Free Press, 1996), 31. See also Kevin Phillips, Boiling Point: Democrats, Republicans, and the Decline of Middle-Class Prosperity (New York: Random House, 1993).

David A. Aaker and Eric Joachimsthaler, Brand Leadership (New York: Free Press, 2000), also include brand loyalty in their definition of brand assets, but this is a tautology. Loyalty is the desired outcome produced by a strong brand, not a characteristic of it. Companies that manage their brands as assets based on mind-share principles seek to improve performance on these metrics. They invest communications budgets with the goal of increasing the percentage of consumers who remember the brand without prompting and who think of the appropriate associations when they’re asked to think about the brand. These measures don’t come close to capturing what makes identity brands such valuable assets.

Anheuser-Busch routinely borrows ideas and moves them back and forth between Bud and Bud Light. The company took the myth treatment from “Lizards”—centered on mocking the man-of-action ideal—and recrafted it into an enormously successful radio campaign for Bud Light. In each spot, a ridiculous job, such as ripping ticket stubs at theaters, is celebrated with the same epic voice of “This Bud’s for You,” though now Anheuser-Busch’s tongue rests firmly in its cheek. The firm then took this campaign to television, promoting Bud in the United Kingdom. On the heels of great success there, Anheuser-Busch has returned to the United States with a television version.

Bud reconnected with working men by developing a different kind of myth. “This Bud’s for You” was an affirmative myth, a myth that allowed Bud drinkers to perceive themselves as part of the American comeback project in the 1980s. The brand’s artisan myth aligned with Reagan’s national ideology. In contrast, the laconic brotherhood myth, paved by “Lizards” and then spun in “Whassup?!” was a myth of resistance. Like Mountain Dew’s, this was a myth that championed ideals that directly challenged the national ideology. Budweiser had followed its constituents and done a political flip-flop by changing the kind of myth it championed.

Populist worlds are the cultural raw materials that a nation uses to reimagine itself. They are the symbolic resources that citizens draw from both to sustain the country’s ideals (in affirmative myths) and to challenge those ideals (in myths of resistance). Budweiser demonstrates that a brand can rejuvenate its iconic power by moving from one type of myth to another when the identity politics of its core constituency shifts.

I was hired in 2000 by a major media company (not ESPN) to analyze sports television consumption among American men. I conducted lengthy, unstructured interviews in the Chicago and Los Angeles homes of twenty-three men who were active sports spectators.

Douglas B. Holt and J. Craig Thompson, “Man-of-Action Heroes: The Pursuit of Heroic Masculinity in Everyday Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research (forthcoming), gives an academic account of this mythology and how it was consumed by American men in everyday life during the 1990s.

See, for example, Susan Fournier, “Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research,” Journal of Consumer Research 24, no. 4, 343–374, 1998.

The particular characteristics of the insider-brand relationship depends on the relative centrality of the brand to the populist world. Some iconic brands emerge out of populist worlds (Nike, Patagonia, Harley), while others are mass market products that seek to borrow from the populist world (Bud, Mountain Dew, VW, ESPN). In the case of ESPN, the channel initiated a leadership position in sports in competition with a long-standing cadre of insiders. Hence, insiders were less willing to grant ESPN an authoritative role. Alternatively, for brands like Harley-Davidson, in which the brand’s iconic power was initiated within the populist world, the brand retains extraordinary authority among insiders.

R. W. Marriott, “How to Spot a Biker Wannabe,” <http://www.saintjohn.nbcc.nb.ca/~marriott/Wannabe.htm> (accessed 17 February 2003).

I am synthesizing the Harley success story as told by Robert E. Wayland and Paul M. Cole, Customer Connections: New Strategies for Growth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Sam Hill and Glenn Rifkin, Radical Marketing (New York: Harper Business, 1999); and David A. Aaker, Building Strong Brands (New York: Free Press, 1996).

The Harley-Davidson Company commissioned brand research that used mind-share assumptions. This research identified the Harley DNA as consisting of three values: American patriotism, machismo, and personal freedom. See John Schouten and James McAlexander, “Subcultures of Consumption: An Ethnography of the New Bikers,” Journal of Consumer Research 22 (June 1995); 43–61. Aaker, Building Strong Brands, draws on this research in his discussion of Harley.

Harley forcibly took over the very successful clubs started by its customers in the 1970s. Vaughn Beals did not start them, as suggested by authors like Jesper Kunde (Corporate Religion (New York: FT Prentice Hall, 2000)) and Aaker (Building Strong Brands). Further, the timing of the club takeover (1984) does not coincide with Harley’s extraordinary rise in desirability (early 1990s). Likewise, Harley’s product improvement also happened in the early 1980s and merely caught up to the Japanese quality standards. So neither explanation holds up to empirical examination.

For this reason, as mentioned in the appendix, this chapter has a methodological goal in addition to its analytical focus. To push cultural strategy beyond just advertising, I chose to look at Harley as a negative case. The Harley genealogy provides evidence for the robustness of the cultural branding model, extending the model beyond the television advertisements examined in prior chapters. Many accounts of Harley’s success have been published; most of them tell roughly the same story. In no account is advertising an important player. Consequently, Harley, as one of the most potent iconic brands in recent history and with little significant advertising, offers a challenging test of the power of the cultural branding framework.

Synthesized from Daniel R. Wolf, The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996); and Ralph “Sonny” Barger, Hell’s Angel (New York: William Morrow, 2000).

As reported in Brock Yates, Outlaw Machine: Harley-Davidson and the Search for the American Soul (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1999).

Brando’s bike was a Triumph. In retrospect, because of Harley’s later domination, most people assume Brando must have ridden a Harley.

Thompson, Hell’s Angels, 53.

Easy Rider (Columbia/Tristar Studios, 1969).

Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (New York: Doubleday, 1987).

Richard Slotkin has conducted an exhaustive historical investigation to show that the gunfighter has been the pivotal archetype in American ideology since the closing of the American frontier at the end of the nineteenth century. Slotkin has written the definitive analysis of the American frontier myth, discussing how the myth has evolved over four hundred years of American history. See especially Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).

Factiva lists: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsday, USA Today, Washington Post, Globe and Mail, AP Newswire, and the Houston Chronicle. John A. Conway, “Harley Back in Gear,” Forbes, 20 April 1987, noted that the Reagan visit was a public relations coup for Harley.

Martin Jack Rosenblum, “Praise Our Ladies.” See <http://www.members.tripod.com/~holyranger/>, excerpted from The Holy Ranger: Harley-Davidson Poems, Milwaukee: Lion Publishing, 1989.

It’s important to distinguish between the use of brands as symbols of a subculture, which rarely happens, and the hijacking of brands by subcultures as ephemeral subversive fashion items, which happens routinely. In the United States, the most obvious instances of hijacking have occurred in urban African American neighborhoods, where brands like Adidas, Puma, Nike, North Face, Mercedes, BMW, Hilfiger, Polo, and Timberland have all been grabbed and had their meanings repackaged via their subcultural use.

The shift was in part motivated by an actor’s guild strike, as well as difficulties in coming to contract terms with the campaign’s actors, who had become celebrities due to the campaign’s success.

Developing these techniques in detail is beyond the scope of this chapter and book; they are familiar to all commercial artists, people who tell stories for a living. The cultural studies literature, such as those works listed in the “Selected Bibliography,” provide academic treatments.

Interestingly, at roughly the same time Nike, jumping on the same third-wave feminist/riot grrl bandwagon, concocted an even more brilliant ad, following the same creative technique, but with a more politicized choice. For its soundtrack, the ad relied on a punked-up version of Helen Reddy’s feminist anthem from the early 1970s: “I Am Woman,” performed to sound just like the Breeders (a leading indie punk outfit headed by two sisters).

The slacker and indie populist worlds overlap to some extent in their shared appreciation for do-it-yourself culture. Another way to think about these two populist worlds is that they’re two tangents of the same countercultural fabric. Volkswagen selectively culled the more bohemian aspects of the counterculture, whereas Mountain Dew focused on its cynical resistance to middle-class life. Populist worlds are not discrete groups or places (though they always reference “real” social life, either contemporary or historic). Rather, they are categories created in mass culture—discourses, in academic terminology.

To communicate these ideas, I have described the path to building an iconic brand as a linear process. But in reality such brands are never built in a straight line from blueprint to firmament. Rather, managers iterate between gathering knowledge, composing the strategy, and experimenting with executions.

Niall Fitzgerald, speech to Publicity Club, London, Media Week (UK), 27 November 2003 (synopsized by World Advertising Research Center <http://www.warc.com/> in their “World Advertising and Marketing News” feature).

A primary weakness of existing brand strategies is that they are derived from snapshot profiles of brands. For example, consider the widely used branding scheme devised by Young & Rubicam, which it calls Brandvaluator. The agency has assembled reams of brand metric data from around the world and put the information into an algorithm that derives the factors in common for strong brands: Strong brands tend to be well known, distinctive, and relevant. But what is the strategic advice that flows from this observation? That one should emphasize the brand’s memorability, distinctiveness, and relevance? The problem is that metrics are not explanations. We need to know the mechanisms that lead these brands to achieve such glowing report cards.

Management books on branding usually trade on the apt anecdote: They either rely on a whirlwind of short, secondhand snippets or else use quick, I-wasthere insider briefings to demand that the reader accept their arguments. From an academic viewpoint, what is troubling about these books (some of which have been written by academics) is that the empirical data that the authors summon is so thin that they cannot possibly develop an explanatory model. The recommendations that flow out of these models are so vague that it is impossible to distinguish between the activities of the best brands and the most mediocre. Further, much of the “data” that drive the findings in these books are actually assembled from predistilled stories reported in the trade press. So rather than careful primary research, most authors are simply repeating stories that the protagonists (the client and agency) want to tell about their brands. The average analysis of a brand in most of these books extends all of two or three pages, satisfactory for cocktail conversation and not much else.

The primary intellectual influences informing the brand genealogy are listed in the “Selected Bibliography.”

This selection process is extremely challenging, given that each ad is a complex combination of signs and communication codes plucked from public culture. Because the ad’s authors learn through trial and error, their choices lead them down blind alleys quite often. But, for the most successful iconic brands, the brand teams eventually triangulate on the right combination of signs and codes and then extend this combination over time.