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The cultural approach 237 Cultural branding overview To build the cultural branding model, I conducted detailed cultural histories (i.e. brand genealogies) of many iconic brands, including Budweiser, Marlboro, Volkswagen, Mountain Dew, Nike, ESPN, Jack Daniels, Cocacola, Corona, Snapple, and Patagonia. Most of these brands are American, but I have expanded the research since then to Europe, Japan, Latin America, and also global brands.

Brand symbolism delivers customer value by providing culturally resonant stories and images that groups of consumers use to buttress their identities. The collective need for such stories arises in response to major shifts in society. Cultural theorists term stories that provide this functional role a myth. The most important and valued brand stories respond to – and often help to lead – major shifts in society and culture. My theory seeks to explain why particular branded stories and images are so valued at particular historical junctures.

Brands establish powerful durable symbolism (i.e. become iconic) when they perform powerful identity myths: simple fictions that address cultural anxieties from afar, from imaginary worlds rather than from worlds that the consumer lives in. Identity myths are useful fictions that stitch back together otherwise damaging tears in the cultural fabric of the nation. These tears are experienced by people in their everyday life as tensions or anxieties. People use myths to smooth over these collective tensions, helping them to create purpose in their lives, to cement their desired identity in place when it is under stress. Academic research has demonstrated that the extraordinary appeal of the most successful cultural products has been due to their mythic qualities—from Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches dime novels of the nineteenth century to John Wayne westerns, to Harlequin romance novels, to the action-adventure films of Willis, Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Iconic brands work the same way.

Brands become iconic when they address societal desires, not individual ones. Iconic brands perform myths (through any customer touchpoint) that symbolically resolve the identity desires and anxieties stemming from an important cultural tension. Iconic brands earn extraordinary value because they address the collective anxieties and desires of the nation (and sometimes beyond). We experience our identities – our self-understandings and aspirations – as intensely personal quests. But, when scholars examine consumer identities in the aggregate, they find that identity desires and anxieties are widely shared across a broad swathe of a nation’s citizens. These similarities result because, even though they may come from different walks of life, people construct their identities in response to the same historical changes that impact the entire nation, and sometimes regions or the entire globe.

Over time, as the brand performs its myth, consumers come to perceive that the myth resides in the product. The brand becomes a symbol, a material