23-03-2012, 04:41 PM
Brand Culture
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Introduction
Brands occupy an increasingly prominent place in the managerial mind as well as the
cultural landscape. Recent research has shown that brands are interpreted or read in
multiple ways, prompting an important and illuminating reconsideration of how branding
‘works’, and shifting attention from brand producers toward consumer response to
understand how branding creates meaning (e.g. Fournier 1998; Hirschman and Thompson
1997; Holt 2004; Muñiz and O’Guinn 2001; Ritson and Elliott 1999; Scott 1994).
Cultural codes, ideological discourse, consumers’ background knowledge, and rhetorical
processes have been cited as influences in branding and consumers’ relationships to
advertising, brands, and mass media. Consumers are seen to construct and perform
identities and self-concepts, trying out new roles and creating their identity within, and in
collaboration with, brand culture (e.g. Borgerson and Schroeder 2002; Solomon et al.
2002; Wikström 1996).
THE CULTURAL LIBRARY
As Stephen Brown discusses in Chapter 3, few concepts are as complicated as culture.
Writers have discussed myriad ways that culture interacts with commerce: advertising
culture (e.g. Nixon 2003); brand culture (Pettinger 2004); corporate culture (e.g. Deal and
Kennedy 1988); engineering culture (Kunda 1992); and organizational culture (e.g.
Martin 1992; Parker 1999). However, marketing has trailed other disciplines in adopting
a cultural perspective. Brands form part of culture, mediating between organizations and
consumers, yet branding scholars have seemed reluctant to embrace the cultural world’s
potential contributions to branding knowledge. This book is part of a larger call for
inclusion of cultural issues within the management and marketing research canon, joining
in the contention that culture and history can provide a necessary contextualizing
counterpoint to managerial and information processing views of branding’s interaction
with consumers (cf. Holt 2004).
TOWARD BRAND CULTURE
Brands have become a contested managerial, academic, and cultural arena. Management
models struggle over the relative importance of branding vs. customer relationship
management, branding vs. innovation, and brand identity vs. corporate identity. Scholars
from different disciplines squabble over who owns the brand management literature, with
marketing, management, corporate identity, and advertising academics squaring off for
dominance. Sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and even literary scholars have
joined the brand brigade and have set about to deconstruct brands and their relationships
with consumers, citizens, and culture. Furthermore, branding issues exacerbate cultural
differences—with Americans often at odds with Europeans, Anglos arguing with their
Latin colleagues, and quantitative modellers fighting with qualitative researchers over
how to measure brands, what research techniques are most important, and how brands
should be conceptualized.