BRAND THEORY REVISITED
2.1 What Is a Brand?
group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs” [UNESCO, 2002].
Wikipedia also notes, however:
While these two definitions range widely, they do not exhaust the many uses of this concept – in 1952 Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of more than 200 different definitions of culture in their book, Culture:
A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions [Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952].
Most definitions of culture – including the two just quoted – blur the boundaries between external manifestations and ideas in people’s heads.
Neither means much without the other. It is not much use having road signs, books or art without people thinking about them.
This internal/external culture duality is an essential feature of human nature. The ideas are shared – otherwise they literally have no agreed meaning – and yet they are experienced as our own ideas. When we stand before a painting and get something from it, it is as if we had painted it our- selves; we get the same “ahah!” This is the starting point for a lot of (mostly French) philosophy, psychoanalysis and literary theory.
I like the term cultural ideabecause it hovers on this dividing line – “cul- tural” meaning it must be shared, “idea” meaning it is got in a personal, internal way.
Seeing brands as made up of cultural ideas allows us to revisit the claims made by advertising agencies for their primary role in creating brands. Advertisements can be powerful and influential too, but they are just one of many kinds of cultural ideas that shape brands. Volkswagen as a brand was made up of a rich cluster of cultural ideas. Writing in the early 1960s, Ernest Dichter (a Vienna-trained psychoanalyst and one of the founders of modern qualitative research) explained brands like VW as follows:
Perhaps the strongest appeal that the small foreign car made to that segment of the population, which first bought it, was its appeal to individuality. A
minority of well-educated and well-to-do intellectuals, chafing at the general conformity in their own suburbanised living patterns and in the general climate of life in America, found in the small foreign car a symbol and an outlet for their revolution against a common and ostentatious taste – repre- sented by Detroit.2
That seems a credible explanation. It is like the place the mountain bike has taken in today’s culture, in opposition to the (eco-unfriendly, corporate and conformist) connotations of car ownership. Dichter went on to discuss “other psychological considerations which are almost as important”:
A. The feeling of fun (in driving).
B. A social introduction (attracting attention, being part of a fraternity).
C. A well-defined category (as the antithesis of American cars).
D. Contagion. “Their interest was originally aroused, not by advertising, but by actual exposure to the car” which was “followed by interest in advertising”.
Most of what Dichter said about the VW could be put more simply as a cultural idea:
VOLKSWAGEN WAS THE BEATNIK BRAND
DDB caught some of the spirit of this (already booming) brand and wrote what could easily be described as
BEATNIK ADVERTISING
The advertising was pithy, downbeat, ironic, clever and subversive; a lot like the Beats. It could have played a role in translating the appeal of the car to the mainstream mood of the 1960s – making it “cool” (a word that also went mainstream, from its origin in cool jazz, the 1950s of Greenwich Village and San Francisco).
Similarly, the Nike brand evolved through a series of cultural ideas:
W H AT I S A B R A N D ? 29
THE ATHLETE’S SHOE THE JOGGING SHOE
THE URBAN GHETTO SHOE
As we saw in Chapter 1, Levi’s is another interesting story of both cultural success and decline. According to commentators in the fashion industry, the brand’s current woes in its once-thriving UK market can be understood as follows:
“For a period in the late Nineties denim became unfashionable,” said Louise Foster, of the fashion trade magazine Draper’s Record. “501 s – Levi’s flagship brand – in particular suffered from the so-called ‘Jeremy Clarkson effect’, the association with men in middle youth. But when demand for denim returned Levi’s found itself caught between cheap jeans and cooler, more expensive designer brands such as Diesel.”3
That whole tragedy unfolded while the advertising went from strength to strength, with two of the company’s most popular TV commercials – “Flat Eric” in 1999 (glove puppet and a rumbling techno track) and “Odyssey” in 2002 (two lovers leap through walls to escape what looks like a mental asylum, before running up trees to jump towards the moon).
So what gives? It appears it is possible to have some of the best ads in the world (judging by their success in international awards) and still be out of fashion. Levi’s was short of a cultural idea – a reason for having a vital role in people’s lives.
Rewind the tape to the 1980s. The advertising community’s version says that the ads changed history:
Kamen’s “Launderette” was shown for the first time on Boxing Day 1985.
Thought up by John Hegarty and Barbara Noakes of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the ad campaign was designed to try and save Levi’s flagging fortunes; the company was under attack from all sorts of other fashionable brands. In short, Levi’s (which has been going since the 1850s) were becoming the sort of jeans worn by people’s dads . . . Research showed that the intended target audience for Levi’s 501s – 15- to 19-year-olds – saw the United States of the fifties and
sixties as a cool time and place in history. James Dean, Elvis Presley and Sam Cooke all belonged to this mythical, wondrous world.4
That’s not how I remember it. Secondhand Levi’s were already the height of fashion before the campaign broke. You had to have ones with the right stitching to get into certain trendy clubs. I asked my friend Ted, a fashion anthropologist (curator of the Streetstyle exhibition at the V&A), whether Levi’s had reallystarted the whole craze for vintage American clothing:
I do recall vast piles of retro jeans (esp from the USA) at retro shops like Flip in Covent Garden. If my memory is right this would have been late 70s/early 80s. The big thing wasn’t just that they were retro but specifically that they were American. The same era when Ed’s Easy Diner started. Certainly this pro- American retro thing had nothing to do with marketing and predated any such attempts. American Graffiti had something to do with it. As an American in the UK I was going back to the States with my first wife Lynn and we were hitting on my more eccentric relatives for their old clothes, in 1976. I remem- ber on one such trip running into the guy who owned Flip at the airport and he was saying how he was spending his life flying back and forth to the US to buy up clothes from charity shops and bring them back to the UK.5
Volkswagen, Levi’s and Nike are the brands that every agency would point to as shining examples of brand image. It looks like brand bandwagonwould be a better statement of their actual role. It was the cultural ideas they rep- resented that really mattered, and their success and decline rest not on the qualities of brand image advertising, but the broader context and reception of these ideas.
Where my brand definition (as cultural ideas) comes into its own is explaining how it is possible to use other means than advertising to get established.
eBay is a case in point. Its cultural idea was:
THE PEOPLE’S MARKET
Given that the internet was new and the media and public were hungry for success stories, eBay had all sorts of hooks and sub-ideas:
W H AT I S A B R A N D ? 31
THE BUZZ ABOUT eBAY COLLECTING
HOBBY BUSINESSES SECONDHAND GOODS
BELONGING – BEING AN eBAYER eBAY BEING ADDICTIVE
THE UNIQUE PROCESS (WATCHING, BUYITNOW ETC.) eBAY LANGUAGE, e.g. *MINT*
STAR RATINGS SELF-POLICING
WEIRD AUCTIONS (e.g. “GIRLFRIEND FOR A YEAR”) THE FASTEST-GROWING COMPANY ON EARTH
eBay is easy, albeit extensive, to describe as a culture – like a tribe, which has its own way of doing things. It would have to be reckoned one of the strongest brands on earth. Yet it does not fit into the old model, it hardly advertises, its graphic design is generic (it looks just like other web brands:
Yahoo, Google etc.), its image or brand personality is hard to define (folksy?).
Another case in point is Red Bull. In the UK this brand was created through sampling at festivals and outside clubs, student bars and selective sponsorship, to become:
THE UNDERGROUND ENERGY DRINK The ideas that contributed to this include:
THE PRODUCT “RUSH” (LIKE A DRUG) SAMPLING FROM BRANDED JEEPS
ADVERTISING INSIDE CULT VIDEO GAME WIPEOUT THE STOLLY BOLLY(RED BULL AND VODKA)
INITIAL DISTRIBUTION IN UNLIKELY PLACES, e.g. GARAGES BEING ADOPTED BY RAVERS, STUDENTS (AND TRUCK
DRIVERS)
SPREADING BY WORD OF MOUTH AND IMITATION
This whole book will develop the notion of brand as (made up of) cul- tural ideas. A key implication is that just as cultural ideas are diverse, so types of brand ingredient are diverse. A strong brand can be a community, a rumour, a habit, a quasi-religious or artistic experience, eroticised, cog- nitive . . . and many other things. There are different forms of brand. And if you accept that, you have a much wider palette of potential brand ideas to paint with.