Cultural Branding

By exploring the relationship between cultural studies and branding practices this paper seeks to present ethnographic research participation in construction and disclosure of brands. Recent works seem to agree that, in order to successfully develop their own pattern and their own cultural significance, companies must invest in research that seek in culture the answers for their branding tasks and innovation opportunities. This paper is an attempt to examine work undertaken the past years on the relationship between brand building and brand management with the culture research, provide a view of the complexities of the consumption processes and describe how culture influences in consumer behaviour. It presents the currently discussions about tools and methods for conducting the cultural research and, finally, intends to identify how ethnographic research can be inserted in branding processes as a tool to provide the necessary information in order to help building strong brands.

2006

Recent research has shifted attention from brand producers and products toward consumer response and services to understand brand value creation. Often missing from these insights, however, is a focus on cultural processes that affect contemporary brands, including historical context, ethical concerns, and representational conventions. A brand culture perspective reveals how branding has opened up to include interdisciplinary research that both complements and complicates economic and managerial analysis of branding. If brands exist as cultural, ideological, and political objects, then brand researchers require tools developed to understand culture, ideology, and politics, in conjunction with more typical branding concepts, such as equity, strategy, and value.

Marketing Theory, 2009

Recent research has shifted attention from brand producers and products toward consumer response and services to understand brand value creation. Often missing from these insights, however, is a focus on cultural processes that affect contemporary brands, including historical context, ethical concerns, and representational conventions. A brand culture perspective reveals how branding has opened up to include interdisciplinary research that both complements and complicates economic and managerial analysis of branding. If brands exist as cultural, ideological, and political objects, then brand researchers require tools developed to understand culture, ideology, and politics, in conjunction with more typical branding concepts, such as equity, strategy, and value.

Wasko/The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications, 2011

ABSTRACT

Let us begin with the idea that brands are steeped in culture: They develop based on a cultural foundation which defines them, yet goes beyond them. Brands are cultural concentrates Every brand is based on cultural references which predate them, and which are organized and combined in a unique way.

Journal of International Marketing, 2008

International marketing's commitment to a technical and universalizing approach to solving managerial problems has meant that researchers have adopted an ethnocentric approach to branding. This is becoming problematic as the global marketplace develops. The authors argue that to meet the theoretical and methodological challenges of global branding, international marketing scholars will need to revise some key premises and foundations. Branding research in the future will need to be contextually and historically grounded, polycentric in orientation, and acutely attuned to the symbolic significance of brands of all types. The authors offer some conceptual foundations for a culturally relative, contextually sensitive approach to international branding in which the construct of brand mythology is central.

Journal of International Marketing

International marketing’s commitment to a technical and universalizing approach to solving managerial problems has meant that researchers have adopted an ethnocentric approach to branding. This is becoming problematic as the global marketplace develops. The authors argue that to meet the theoretical and methodological challenges of global branding, international marketing scholars will need to revise some key premises and foundations. Branding research in the future will need to be contextually and historically grounded, polycentric in orientation, and acutely attuned to the symbolic significance of brands of all types. The authors offer some conceptual foundations for a culturally relative, contextually sensitive approach to international branding in which the construct of brand mythology is central.

Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2012

This paper will try to analyze the role played by branding communication in the "education" of the masses, on social responsibility and at a level of micro cultural trends. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the formation of symbolic meaning in brand to consumer communication starting from the concepts of brand identity and brand image. We advance the hypothesis that the meaning of brand communication depends to a large extent on the "culture" developed by a mark's symbolic functions.

Schroeder, J. E. (2014), Brands and Branding, in Wiley-­‐Blackwell Concise Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies, edited by Dan Cook and Michael J. Ryan, New York: Wiley and Sons.

Brands and branding have emerged as key concepts in marketing, management, and strategy, and the concept of branding, referring to the process of bringing attention to a product, company, concept, person, or cause, has become an everyday term. Research and thinking about brands and branding can be divided into four perspectives: corporate perspectives, consumer perspectives, cultural perspectives, and critical perspectives. These four perspectives demonstrate the growing interdisciplinary interest in brands and branding, and how brand research sheds light on basic issues of consumer agency, consumer behavior, and consumer culture.

Social Business, 2011

Brands, as actors participating in the marketplace's social discourse, have the ability to lower and, equally, raise social and cultural boundaries. As such, it is important to understand better effects of brand-related cultural cues on consumer vulnerability, especially given the unprecedented diversification of cultural contexts in society today.