Preface and Acknowledgments
I grew up in Rockford, Illinois, a small industrial city that boasted one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates in the late 1970s, right up there with Flint, Michigan. While Rockford always seemed to end up around 297 on lists of the top 300 livable cities, for teens who didn’t yet have to hustle up a job, the city could still be a good time.
Like most guys I knew, I was a rock-and-roll kid. I bought albums, played air guitar, attended dozens of concerts, made my own cassettes, and took hundreds of concert photos. When famous Chicago radio deejay Steve Dahl blew up a dumpster full of disco records at Comiskey Park before a baseball game, I cheered. As a high-schooler, I loved many bands—at first Boston and Kiss, and then Styx, Aerosmith, and Ted Nugent. But my heart belonged to the hometown heroes—Rockford’s own Cheap Trick.
My hero was Cheap Trick’s lead guitarist, Rick Nielsen. I even dressed like him for Halloween parties. Nielsen felled every stereotype in the rock handbook. At a time when rock guitarists had long hair, wore tight pants, showed chest hair, and played their guitars as if they were Freudian appendages, Nielsen dressed like a nerdy teenager. With his cardigan sweater, short hair, and baseball cap, he pranced around stage, kicking his legs in the air like a Las Vegas chorus girl, plying the crowd with strange, cartoonish expressions. Yet his guitar sound was even tougher and more inventive than those heavy metal heroes; he did them one better but without the testosterone. I thought this was very cool (but had no idea why).
Cheap Trick made four amazing records (as every rock fan knows), and then someone pulled the plug. The band started pumping out album after album of trite, melodramatic songs. I stopped listening to them over twenty years ago, and I was not alone. But for me, as for millions of American teens, Cheap Trick mattered a lot for those precious few years of the late 1970s.
Fast-forward twenty-five years. I’m seated in an office that could be a movie set for a corporate drama. The oversized room is overflowing with white furniture. The New York skyline beckons through the long row of windows. Two senior executives of PepsiCo’s ad agency BBDO New York join me to discuss Mountain Dew. Before we begin, one of them pops in a video of a competitive ad that has just arrived. It’s for Diet Coke. A new campaign had just launched; the spots were quirky, slice-of-life ads with celebrity voice-overs.
One of the ads centered on the song “I Want You to Want Me”—a number one hit by Cheap Trick in 1979. In a scene seemingly inspired by Hitchcock’s Rear Window, an attractive young woman (with voice-over by Renee Zellweger) watches a less attractive young man in the apartment directly across from hers. “I watch this guy in his bathroom when he’s getting ready for work,” she says. We cut to the guy in his bathroom flossing his teeth and, with neither shame nor pitch, belting lyrics to the Cheap Trick hit. The slightly nerdy guy sways as he sings, totally involved. “He’s really not my type,” she says. “He flosses too much. But you can’t rule out a guy who knows all the lyrics to one of the greatest songs of all time.” We’re left with the new tag line for Diet Coke, “That certain something.”
The ad tugged at me. I identified with the guy. Not because this was some sort of consumer truth: I never sing unless I’m forced to! Nor was this an automatic, emotional triggering of a song I had once loved. In fact, I don’t particularly like the song. I tolerate the extremely catchy tune only because it’s by Cheap Trick. And I didn’t respond because of nostalgia. I certainly don’t yearn to be a teenager in Rockford again, for sure.
Rather, this ad touched me because Diet Coke had grabbed familiar cultural source material and used it to tell a story about manhood, a story I wanted to believe in. The story tells us that guys caught up in frivolous pop music, guys so immersed in their music that they find spiritual moments in the most mundane of tasks, are endearing, even cool in a way. His humanity, though quirky and off-tune, shined through, and the beautiful woman loved him for that. In casting judgment on what makes for an attractive man, Zellweger’s voice rejects its opposite: guys who are wrapped up in making money rather than enjoying themselves, guys too instrumental to lose themselves in their morning flossing, guys who have so deeply internalized impression management skills that they’d be too embarrassed to sing out loud, even by themselves in front of a mirror.
When you’re seventeen, you do these kinds of things. (Even air guitar!) When you’re forty, you’re not supposed to be so frivolous and expressive unless you work in the creative professions or have rejected the carefully measured life of middle-class work for a more bohemian existence. Like many of my professional peers, I’m caught between these two worlds: striving for professional success, yet trying to remain true to the creative humanist sensibilities that still lurk within. The Diet Coke ad provided me with a little ammunition to manage this contradiction, encouraging me not to lose track of the latter.
The Cheap Trick tune worked as source material for this myth because it’s a shorthand way to bring me, and many others of my generation, into the story. Moreover, the song was an ideal choice because it dredged up images of Nielsen and the other band members. Not unlike our ad hero, these cartoonish rocksters defied rock’s macho stereotypes. An Aerosmith song wouldn’t have worked.
This kind of identification is forged by advertising that presents meaningful stories, myths that work as salves for contradictions in the nation’s culture. Such ads are the most important means by which brands create identity value for their customers. Yet today’s conventional branding principles, dominated by what I call the mind-share model, would find this ad incoherent. (The BBDO executive suggested as much, but then, his job was to belittle the competitor’s work.) Diet Coke’s approach isn’t an anomaly. Rather, this kind of identity myth has been a central feature of branding for many decades. Conventional branding models, however, ensconced in psychological assumptions, have entirely ignored the role of identity myths in building brands.
Unearthing Cultural Branding Strategies
This book offers the first systematic, empirical research on some of the most powerful identity brands of the past half century, brands commonly called iconic brands. I analyze these brands historically to uncover the principles that account for their success—what I call cultural branding. This research combines the case research methodology typical of theory-building research in the social sciences and the cultural analysis techniques practiced in the humanities.
Cultural branding efforts, even the most successful ones, have not been guided by formal strategic initiatives. In my research, I’ve yet to find a cultural brand strategy articulated in formal documents like marketing plans, brand bibles, and creative briefs. The language of mind share dominates, especially among brand managers, account managers and planners at ad agencies, and conventional market researchers. Strategy documents are full of “onion” models that describe the brand in terms of rational benefits, emotional benefits, personality, and user associations. Junior managers with newly minted M.B.A.’s talk about mind share with gusto largely because we (professors at business schools) have taught them to speak this way. The idea of mind share holds such rhetorical strength that managers routinely reinterpret the most cultural of brands in mind-share terms.
Cultural branding strategies have lurked primarily in the gut feel of ad-agency creatives and other commercial artists hired by brand managers. Creatives developed powerful identity myths from the practical knowledge they gained after many years of searching for a cultural sweet spot for the brand. And despite their commitment to a cultural approach to branding, even creatives rely heavily on mind-share language to explain their own efforts. After many interactions with clients, creatives recognize that this language sells work and explains the work’s effectiveness to the outside world.
It is surprising that cultural brand campaigns have been developed in this seemingly contradictory organizational environment. Iconic brands have delivered powerful myths guided by formal strategic documents that were supposed to push the branding in different directions. Managers try to guide their brands and interpret their own actions in mind-share terms, even while their branding activities routinely defy these principles. As a result of this contradiction, even the most successful iconic brands routinely move away from their effective mythmaking activities, sometimes for decades at a time.
Iconic brands are thus the hodgepodge result of the cultural intuition of commercial artists who have “sneaked” in cultural content to strategies that asked them simply to deliver on benefits in a creative, entertaining, and memorable manner. As part of this process, the clients are willing to go along for the ride and consequently give their artists wide latitude. Unfortunately, most creatives aren’t usually focused on aligning the brand in culture. Instead, they race to be the most creative among their peers. Most attempts at cultural branding badly misfire. This book seeks to unearth the principles behind the best creative instincts—which are really cultural instincts rather than just random creativity—and using these principles to create a strategic language that can be used to build iconic brands.
Acknowledgments
The origins of this book stretch back to my days as a doctoral student at Northwestern University in the late 1980s. My initial curiosity about brand symbolism was sparked by my department chair, Sidney Levy, one of the pioneers in the field, and further provoked by my advisor, anthropologist John Sherry.
The cultural branding framework I develop in this book is informed by theories advanced in sociology, mass communications, history, anthropology, and cultural studies. My intellectual debts here are too numerous to list. But the authors who have had the most significant influence on my thinking are listed in the reference section at the end of the book.
In marketing, two people in particular pushed me in the right direction. Linda Scott’s seminal articles outlining a cultural approach to the study of advertising changed how I looked at ads. Her work first got me thinking about the advantages of studying brands from an historical perspective. And I am particularly indebted to my friend and intellectual sparring partner Craig Thompson. Our ongoing conversations over the past decade have stimulated many of the ideas here. The discussion of how brands tap into ideals of American masculinity is a direct product of our collaboration.
My research assistant Michael Genett dug up valuable research material on both the ESPN and Harley-Davidson cases and also provided excellent editorial support throughout the book. I am also grateful to the many people who have given me useful feedback on my analyses, including Doug Cameron, Al Silk, and Tuba Ustuner, as well as the participants in a variety of seminars where I presented sections of the book. My editor Kirsten Sandberg pushed me to communicate sometimes complicated ideas in an accessible style, and patiently tolerated several lengthy delays.
The Harvard Business School generously provided the financial support for this project. I am also indebted to the many managers at Anheuser-Busch, PepsiCo, DDB–Chicago, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Arnold Worldwide, BBDO New York, and Kirshenbaum & Bond for graciously opening up their advertising archives and discussing their past work. In particular, I owe special thanks to Dave Burwick, Jeff Goodby, Lance Jensen, Bob Lachky, Ron Lawner, Ted Sann, Bob Scarpelli, and Steve Wilhite, who were all extremely generous with their time, given busy schedules.