Cultural Branding

One of the fatal mistakes any marketeer, media researcher or a simple consumer can make is to underestimate the power of a brand. Brands are deeply rooted in the landscape of our world and, unnoticeably for an ordinary people, influence and control our mundane. The reason for that would be the fact, that brands crossed the line of being simple representative image of a company and turned to being cultural icons.

Holt refers to the cultural icon as  “a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol, especially of a culture or a movement; a person or an institution considered worthy of admiration or re- spect.” (Holt, 2004, p.1) Therefore, in the case of brands, they, allegedly, would represent a cultural iconic image or identity,  that company has build around the company. It is obviously raises the question on what this brand cultural icon is build? The answer would be both simple and complex – it is build on identity myth. These myths are, basically, a specific story around any brand with which consumers tend to associated it. Yet, this story is produced by the company itself, therefore, the role of branding is to create a powerful brand story that would not only make the company to stand out from the competitors, but create a certain level of awareness and loyalty. Yet, companies are not the only actors of brand construction. It is a mutual process which involves “companies, the culture industries, intermediaries (such as critics and retail salespeople), and customers (particularly when they form communities)”. (ibid, p.3).

Nowadays companies are extremely interested in maintaining their brands strength and awareness. Strong identity of a brand, frequently, is a key to a long term success of a company, because a product of a well-known brand contains identity value and can be called an identity brand. In this case customers do not only value the product itself, but stories brand has put behind them. When a story behind the brand matches the characteristics that are valuable for customers in construction of their own identities, a product of this brand becomes a representation of who customers want to be (Holt, p. 4). Each identity brand has a potential to become an iconic brand (like Nike, Apple, Coca Cola), if the story behind it is powerful enough, that it becomes a symbol of culture, movement, a way of self-expression. In other words, it happens when identity brand becomes a cultural icon.

Appearance of these powerful iconic brans has led Holt to distinguish a new form of branding – cultural branding (ibid., p. 5). Yet, as he mentions, cultural branding is applicable to every category of products which is connected to means of expressing identity or personality. There are different techniques and strategies a brand may follow to build an identity myth that is powerful enough to make it iconic. Therefore, Holt distinguishes 3 typical cultural branding models (or strategies): mind-share branding, emotional branding, viral branding.

Mind-share branding refers to those brands, which product (or product category) is associated with a distinctive benefit, cultural image, emotions or personality attributes (ibid., p. 15). Emotional branding, operates as a sort of a development of mind-share branding, focusing on the building emotional ties between the brand and consumer, rather than developing and maintaining a myth surrounding a certain product. Last type viral branding is the most recent out of all strategies. It relies on the consumer to spread the message about the brand, its product and values it represents.

Even though, number of businesses is growing exponentially year after year, there are very few iconic brands that dominate in one or another cultural niche, age or gender category. One of the most famous and powerful brands on the market is, undoubtedly, Nike. The company started in 1962 under a different name “Blue Ribbon Sports” as a distributor of Tiger sneakers from the Japanese company – Onitsuka (Out of nowhere). Fifty years later it finds itself to be one of the most recognisable and the most powerful sport brands on the global market. One of the reasons why it managed to gain so much influence is the identity myth it created around itself, which is rooted in the “philosophy” of Nike’s co-founder and *** – Bill Bowerman. As a running coach who trained more than 30 Olympic winning athletes he believed, that “If you have a body you are an athlete”. His ideas rooted in the very core of Nike’s identity myth, however, the reason why they managed to stay on top through the course of time, is the fact that remained true to what Bowerman commanded in companies early years. The message Nike puts in all its commercials, marketing offline and online materials hasn’t changed a bit since the very first commercial in 1982. The quality has increased dramatically; dialogs vary in every add; more and more signed sportsmen and celebrities are represented by Nike appear in commercials each year. The packaging may be different, yet the core principles behind them stay the same. Theses principles, this identity myth behind Nike is simple. Everyone, no matter where you were born, what age or gender you are, what religion you practice or what income you have, everyone can be an athlete.

At the beginning Nike barely used any marketing tools and limited their advertisement activity to simply signing representation contracts with sportsmen and sport teams. It worked perfectly well, while Nike was just a running company and there were no serious competitors in their field. As soon as Nike decided to expand to other sports categories, it had to exploit new marketing techniques. However, Nike did not turn to notable sport celebrities to introduce itself to public. The very first Nike’s commercials was released in 1982 and featured primitive people running in the field, hunting; as well as simply people that ran just for the sake of running. The core message there was, that people were born to be runners and, therefore, athletes and Nike’s goal is to provide the best product to make running safer, faster and improve the results of every runner to “make them run faster, as if their life was dependent on it”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_xozTo6wrU

Nike running advertisement which presented the one and only slogan “Just do it”, featured only one 80 years old man who runs 17 miles. Every single morning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEX7KhIA3bU

Nike’s Olympic campaign “Unlimited” started with showed people at the very beginning of their sports journey. Off-screen voice followed each of them and said that each of them will “run a marathon”, “score every time she has the ball”, “all of these athletes are terrible now, but they will do big thing one day”. And they did. But the heroes of the commercial did not stop there, they wanted more. The man off-screen is terrified and saying that everyone “is going way to far”, that a girl “can’t out-sprint a sprinter” or a boy “can’t be the star of every sport”. But the point is – they can.

At least Nike believes they can. Nike believes that each consumer is an athlete and can achieve amazing things. And that is the base of their emotional branding. Nike’s commitment to it’s principles throughout whole 50 years of companies existence intensified this emotional bond with consumer. People associate Nike with results, achievement, greatness and the though that they can do everything.

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