Douglas B. Holt, How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Boston, Harvard Business School Press: 2004).
Every advertising pundit I've read, from Bob Garfield to Rosser Reeves, has united in condemning the sort of "creative" advertisement that could pass muster as a student film project for an MFA thesis, but utterly fails to tell the viewer anything about the actual product it is selling. Now, I read Douglas Holt's 2004 book on "cultural branding," and he tells me with equal confidence that the "artistic" advertisement is the only thing that has ever saved a company's branding.
No doubt the truth lies between these two extremes. It is in the interests of business writers trying to supplement their income with consulting gigs, after all, to polarize the issues. They say that everyone else who's writing on the subject is doing it exactly wrong, and that their approach is the only correct way to do it. Still, even if we find more value in the old principles of the "unique selling proposition" and "positioning," etc., than Holt is willing to concede, it is refreshing nonetheless to hear his alternative perspective. It is about time that someone spoke up for the much-maligned advertising creative—the liberal arts major who really just wants to tell a story, and is forced to do so through the medium of copy in order to put food on the table.
Perhaps there are some brands—and Holt suggests as much—where there simply aren't enough intrinsic differences between themselves and the competition to provide any compelling basis for the old USP approach; so they are forced to market themselves on the basis of social signaling. Holt calls these the "identity brands."
Holt's basic idea is as follows: identity brands that manage to achieve "iconic status" (the goal of every brand that depends on social signaling over intrinsic use value to establish its worth) do so by tapping into an "acute cultural tension" or "contradiction" in the prevailing society, and helping people achieve a symbolic resolution of that tension by presenting them with an alternative narrative about their identity.
At any given moment, says Holt, there will be ways in which the dominant national ideology—the narrative that those with social power tell themselves and others about what to expect from American life—departs from people's actual experience as they move through history. The cognitive dissonance that results creates a tension that people find threatening and destabilizing to their identity. Iconic brands are those that present a new "myth" that they can step into and that restores their sense of identity in a way more consistent with their actual experience.
The examples Holt provides require a sophisticated and empathetic inquiry into sociology and economic history. He describes how Budweiser, for instance, built its brand in the 1980s by encouraging blue collar working men to identify with the nation's success and its return to industrial prowess. By working hard and sacrificing, Bud told its customers, they made the national project a success. The beer they enjoyed at the end of the day was the well-earned fruit of their labors.
As the 1980s ended in recession, however, and as blue collar workers continued to be displaced, laid off, and shunted aside by automation and outsourcing—despite all their hard work and sacrifice—Bud's narrative needed to change. The old story of virtue rewarded no longer rang true. Instead, it felt like a mocking reminder of how the nation had failed to keep its promises to these workers. Bud needed a new identity myth that resonated with people's real experiences of the new economy: and so the old imagery was replaced with the myth of the cynical bystander, the "slacker" who opts out of the rat race entirely because he is wise enough to see that effort will not actually be rewarded. The Budweiser "lizard" and the "Whassup guys" followed (remember them)?
Holt similarly describes how Coke managed to reinvent its own "identity myth" twice in as many decades, while building off of the brand associations people already had with it each time. In the late 1960s, amid the social turmoil of Vietnam, the counterculture, and the generation gap, Coke presented a mythic reconciliation of these social divides through the "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" campaign. Twenty years later or so, they had another breakthrough advertisement. As industrial jobs started to disappear from the Black inner cities before anywhere else, and resources fled from these deprived areas, igniting social unrest, the country became consumed with racially-loaded paranoia about crime and urban riots. Coke's iconic "'Mean' Joe Greene" ad, Holt argues, provided a symbolic resolution of the nation's racial tensions.
In each case study, as I say, Holt digs deep into history and uncovers the structural source of social problems and their resulting cultural tensions—the disappearing industrial base that first affected Black workers in the inner cities, for instance, before eventually impacting all blue collar workers; then the lay-offs and restructuring that started to hit college-educated white collar workers as well in the 1990s, as the era of winner-take-all neoliberalism swung into high gear.
The inevitable sense of bathos comes, however, when—with each analysis—we find that the story can only end with companies exploiting these social tensions to sell people fizzy sugar water, or similar products. This is, after all, a marketing book. It isn't really trying to tell us how to fix our social problems. It is telling us how our social problems and the tensions they create can be leveraged to market consumer goods that will only symbolically address people's underlying concerns, not really mitigate their suffering.
In all of this, one feels Holt straining against the enforced superficiality of the medium. He would really like to write a book of socio-political analysis. His own identity tension and cultural dissonance appears to stem from being a humanist and social prophet trapped in the role of marketing guru by the need to earn a living (he tells us as much in the opening chapter: "Like many of my professional peers, I'm trapped between these two worlds: striving for professional success, yet trying to remain true to the creative humanist sensibilities that still lurk within"). When he describes the plight of the bourgeois bohemians, for instance, one feels that he is partly writing autobiography.
It occurs to me, though, that if there is any truth to the approach Holt is laying out, and that the whole thing is not just about his attempts to resolve his own identity conflicts as a creative type teaching in a business school, then these principles could be used to do things other that sell sugar water. If one could understand the mechanism of what makes certain brands "iconic," it might help one understand how to promote nonprofit ventures or social enterprises that aim at actually solving the social problems from which cultural tensions arise. Put another way, if it is possible to sell Coke based on the idea that it can bring about racial healing and address social injustice—how much more possible it must be to use the same principles to market ventures that aim directly at achieving socially progressive ends.
Thus, it is worth learning from Holt, even if one works in the nonprofit sector (and indeed, this was why I started reading advertising books a few years ago—I wanted to figure out how the same techniques that are used to market soap and vacuum cleaners might or might not help me in the work I did every day trying to create communications for a human rights agency that would prompt people to take action for a cause).
Of course, like any good idea, Holt's advice can be woefully misapplied. When I was describing the book's thesis to a friend, the first thing that came to mind for us both was the ill-fated 2017 Pepsi advertisement, "Live for Now," which featured Kylie Jenner using a cold soda—Mean Joe Greene style—to achieve reconciliation between Black Lives Matter protesters and cops in riot gear. One has the strong impression, thinking back to the ad (which had to be pulled due to backlash, and is widely regarded as one of advertising's more memorable snafus), that some advertising creative or freshly-minted MBA in the marketing department had just read the first chapter or two of Holt's book—got as far as the Mean Joe Greene anecdote—and decided to apply it to present Pepsi as a salve for contemporary racial and political tensions.
If this was indeed the ad's genesis, however, it doesn't so much impugn Holt's approach as it just goes to show how important it is to read past the first chapter. Holt has other advice that, if heeded, might have forestalled the Kylie Jenner debacle. After all, it's not like any brand can just assert that it solves social tensions, Holt tells us. It has to establish that it has "cultural authority" to credibly present an identity myth that reconciles these tensions. Its particular identity myth has to be rooted in some way in the associations people already have with the brand. And it needs to draw upon a particular "populist world" with which it can establish some authentic fluency.
My friend also pointed out the other key difference that makes "'Mean' Joe Greene" a success and "Live for Now" an abject failure: the latter is just far too on-the-nose. "'Mean' Joe Greene" operates at a symbolic level; it has "plausible deniability," as my friend put it. One can watch it without being consciously aware that it is really trying to tell us something so absurd and trivializing as that Coke is the answer to the American racial divide. The Kylie Jenner ad, by contrast, just directly and brazenly asserts what should only be implied at a symbolic level: Pepsi, it says, is the answer to contemporary debates over police brutality and accountability.
There are things other than soda in the world, however—policies, for instance, like abolishing qualified immunity—that actually aim at addressing police violence. These policies also need to be "marketed" to the public in some way, if we take that term simply to mean an effort at persuasion. If nonprofits and activists refuse categorically to learn from the business disciplines, they will cut themselves off from a powerful source of insight and advice about how to succeed in this task.
Particularly in the present, I am struck that the people who seem to be having the most success applying Holt's methods are the far-right, the MAGA movement. They are tapping into society's cultural dissonance and its status and identity anxieties—the sense that "elites" told us one story about what to expect from American life, and yet we are growing up to experience something very different. They are presenting identity myths that provide a symbolic resolution of these tensions; they happen to be extremely reactionary, exclusionary, and quasi-fascist ones.
If liberals and leftists don't figure out how to understand the mechanisms of these same cultural dynamics, and how to leverage them to advocate and persuade, we will never be able to present alternative narratives that affirm people's sense of identity, while also being compatible with democracy, multiculturalism, feminism, and the other gains of social progress and inclusion that we wish to preserve.
These are the reasons why Holt's book is worth reading. Since I'd like to see it stay in print for many years to come, I note the following errata (plus my own marginal comments) in the HBS Press edition:
p. 51 "daring-do"—I mean, this spelling makes more sense; but shouldn't it be "derring-do"?
p. 52 "Richard Linklater's documentary [sic] Slacker"—the film (one of the all-time greats) is actually a scripted feature, not a documentary, albeit a non-linear and highly unconventional one.
p. 72 "delivered on the same striking, minimalism in a television spot"—extraneous comma
p. 85 "The genesis of cool is to lead culture as part of an artistic vanguard. If you have to hunt it, you're not cool" (I am reminded of D.H. Lawrence: "Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness")
p. 109 "whose mouths were imperfectly synched to open and close to the [sic] match their words"
p. 110 "The ads seemed to go [out] of their way to slam..."—missing the "out"
p. 124 "begs a crucial question"—I've become a pedantic stickler about the use of this phrase. It should denote a particular logical fallacy of assuming the conclusion one wishes to reach, not a synonym for "raises a question"
p. 128 "daring-do" again
p. 135 "The campaign satired" (sic, should be satirized)
p. 168 "the new role male model"—I guess this might not be technically an error, but it is certainly not the typical word order for this phrase
p. 177 "John Bly's runaway best-selling book Iron John" Sic—should be Robert Bly
p. 221 "beg the question" again
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