Cultural Branding: Icons and Culture. The case of IKEA

Corporations produce brands, not products. That is what Klein claims in her book No Logo published in 1999. But that has not always been the case, she also specifies. Indeed, it all began with the rise of factories. Factories started to produce “uniform mass-produced products” (Klein, p.27) that didn’t really present any characteristic difference to one another. When the products are more or less all the same, competitive branding becomes necessary in order to construct an appealing image around  one particular “version of a product” (Klein, p.27). But how does the branding of a corporation develop? The key aspect of branding is the corporation relation to culture, that is why we talk about ‘cultural branding’. When they felt the need to find a specific identity for each brand, agencies started to realize that it was necessary to move away from the specific product and focus on the ties with culture and people it could develop. In his article, How Brands Become Icons (2004), Douglas Holt goes through the three different principles that had been followed in less recent years in order to create brands. Those conventional models, he states, can help to create a brand but they do not contribute to the creation of an iconic brand. Those three principles are namely: mind-share branding, emotional branding and viral branding (Holt, 2004). While owning associations, building relationships with the customers or spreading virtual viruses, those strategies alone fail in creating a unique iconic brand, as for example IKEA can be considered to be.

What is it then to make an iconic brand the icon it is? Holt simply answers with two words: identity myths. He claims that the previously cited conventional models, are not outdated. Yet, they were believed to be the means to rise a brand to an iconic brand but they turned out to only be a consequence. It is not IKEA’s emotional branding to make of IKEA an iconic brand, but it is rather its being a myth which also creates an emotional attachment in the customers. As cited in Holt’s paper, the Oxford English Dictionary definition of cultural icon is “a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol, especially of a culture or a movement” (Holt, p.1). For a brand to be an icon, it is then necessary for it to become a symbol representing a particular kind of story that can be lived by the consumers and used to address their own identity. What they carry is a symbolic weight. In order to remain an icon, brands need to adapt to society’s need for myths, which shift over time. The new aim of agencies and brands is then to fill names, logos and designs with customer experiences so to become icons of particular values. As Holt underlines “the aspiration expressed in these myths are an imaginative, rather than literal expression of the audience’s aspired identity”.

Let’s take a practical example. IKEA was named by Forbes in 2013 among the “10 most culturally vibrant brands” and ranking in 2015 among the top 50’s world most valuable brands.

This is one of the most recent IKEA’s commercials. Except for the very last few seconds of the ad, furnitures are not showed, and even then, they aren’t really important. The product itself looses the focus because what matters is the brand and what it symbolizes at a specific time in history. The commercial addresses to those who feel caught in a stressful social schedule which demands social approval even in relation to food. IKEA plays the role of the icon saying that it is okay to just relax and eat without taking a snapshot before. That what really matters is family, cozyness and conviviality. This message indeed only acquires meaning in present days. Moreover, we are not entirely sure that such intimacy is literally what we as modern society are aiming to, but surely the myth of it is. And IKEA gets it. IKEA, like other iconic brands like Nike, is selling a lifestyle before a product. In this case the lifestyle of simple familiar intimacy, humbleness and smart solutions. This ‘soul’ of the brand is spread from the product and its cost, to the way of doing marketing, the design of the shops and everything else the brand is. IKEA is not a table or a couch, but an experience of its own type. That is why it can be spread to different fields, and as Klein wrote “if a brand was not a product, it could be anything!”. Yes, also an Airline. The punch line of the article published by Loyalty Lobby says it all: “IKEA, the Swedish furniture retailer known for its meatballs, today announced that it would launch a new low-cost airline called FLIKEA”. Being an icon brand, IKEA can range from meatballs, which have become the IKEA meatballs, to airplanes.

Cultural branding then, works by “soaking up cultural ideas and iconography” and “projecting these ideas and images back on the culture as extensions of their brands” (Klein, 1999). The line between iconic brands and culture, becomes then more and more blurry.

 

 

 

 

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