Brand Culture

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.

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.

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.

An Interdisciplinary Critique, 2008

ACR European Advances, 2011

This roundtable proposes to gather researchers interested in global brand culture to discuss current developments, research methods and interdisciplinary insights into how brands, consumers, and culture interact. Key issues that drive this discussion include: 1) conceptual and perhaps ideological tensions between global brand management and research into global brand culture, 2) theoretical issues of brands from interdisciplinary perspectives, 3) intense interest in how brands and consumer culture are evolving in transition economies, such as China, India, and post-Soviet Russia, and 4) debates over consumer agency, co-creation, and 'working consumers' within global brand culture.

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.

In the 2009 book, Brand Content: How Brands are Transformed in Media, we began with a simple observation : brand communication is not limited to advertising messages. Brands are also expressed by producing editorial content disseminated in the media. The production of brand content has increased considerably over recent years, enabling brands to engage in introspection and the explanation of their historical and techical heritage, myths and stories of their inception – all of which in fact, make up their culture. Editorial content is ever finding ways to express brands. Venues, interfaces, events, historical realities, the handing down of knowledge, know-how and techniques and sensorial experiences are all modes of expression that are beyond content and part of the broader concept that is culture. This observation leads us to develop the idea of « brand culture ». Because a brand’s strength lies not only in its sales, but increasingly in its cultural weight, i.e. its ability to grasp and re-articulate or construct a cultural environment as the extension of its products. Some brands provide a looking-glass mirror of surrounding ambient culture, which is part of their power of seduction. In this book, we will attempt to analyze this power of « cultural reverberation ».

Schroeder, J. E., Borgerson, J. L. and Wu, Z. (2015), A Brand Culture Approach to Chinese Cultural Heritage Brands, Journal of Brand Management, 22 (3), 261-279.

This research represents an effort to fill the gap between brand development studies focusing expressly on Western brands and their markets and culture-specific global brand development in emerging markets, such as China. Case studies are presented of two Chinese brands, Shanghai Tang and Shang Xia, which use cultural heritage in their branding strategy. A consumer perspective sheds light on how consumers co-create brand meaning for cultural heritage brands, and clarifies concepts of brand culture, cultural heritage, and brand heritage. A brand culture approach offers new perspectives on how brand actors co-create, circulate, and re-configure existing meanings of brands and cultures, and how Chinese brands become vehicles for meaning co-creation across national boundaries. Implications include the benefits of being prepared to compete with a new type of Chinese brand that taps into China’s rich cultural heritage, instead of relying on cheap mass production; connecting to ideas of Chineseness and drawing upon shared cultural knowledge to build brand values; engaging with cultural tensions, rather than sidestepping them; providing employees with in depth training about the cultural aspects of the brand in order to align branding strategy with operational identity; and engaging the co-creative stakeholders that play important roles in cultural heritage brands.

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.

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.