Brand's Cutural Potential

Rooted in cultural environments, brands are cultural agents, continuously interacting and affecting change. The cultural dimensions of brands are clearly emerging as the pillars of sustainable value creation in today’s economy.

This book Building Brand Culture : Unlock Your Brand's Cultural Potential aims at guiding brands who wish to develop their brand culture, a new way to consider brands as cultural agents which affects all of a company’s departments: all have to become aware that brand culture isn’t limited to products and speeches. A brand has multiple dimensions (historical, material, physiological…) which form a consistent cultural set. This realisation should enable brand culture to become the main pillar of companies’ strategies. 

The emergence of ? brand cultures ? and the prevalence of brands’ cultural dimensions derives from the realization that producing meaning has become as important as producing goods. Brands have moved beyond being exclusively commercial. They are no longer simply identifiers of products and services in the marketplace, but comprehensive realms, charged with meaning, poles of symbolic density, and cultural systems, with values and practices, behavior, creative content and even lifestyle rules emanating from them. Brands don’t only have culture, they exist within a culture. As explained by philosopher and semiologist Rapha?l Lellouche in the post-face: ? A brand is a transmedia cultural entity, which is manifest and structured by the media or medias ?. This definition pinpoints an essential aspect of brand culture, in that brands exist in an environment or culture that is greater than they are, on which they are reliant, and which extends well beyond them.

Culture : interactivity, collective identity and the daily experience

Understanding and managing brand culture presupposes agreeing on the definition of culture and determining which directions to apply the concept to brands.

 Anthropologically, culture designates a set of acquired behaviors in human societies. It is the way in which man lives in the world he has built, as opposed to animals who simply adapt to nature. All human acts culturally reconstruct a natural substrate. This ? culturalization ? of nature occurs through mediations which transform man’s relationship with his environment, such as using tools, weapons, techniques or symbols.

Addressing a brand as a culture requires digressions in the typical interpretation of brands’ roles and functions: firstly, considering brands as culture makes one realize that they are not immobile institutions, or simply a label on a product, but brands are a total process or activity. Thinking in terms of culture, leads us to imagine the brand as an entity that is alive, changing, built on substrates and in constant interaction with its environment - these interactions being constructed and made visible by the media.

UNESCO’s definition is as follows: ? Culture should be regarded as the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, and that it encompasses…? In other words, culture is the identity of a collective group, which is a second importang digression. This view is essential to understand that consumer buying or consumption functions as an expression of identity, requiring a common social foundation that gives one a sense of belonging to and recognition by a group.

Culture can also be considered philosophical and a concept linked to writing. Culture can be understood as characteristic of ? cultured ? people, as opposed to those who are not. This definition implies that ? high ? culture is acquired through learning or training, and is reserved for literate poeple able to understand and partake in literature, poetry, science and music. The others – peasants and blue collar workers, who either don’t know how or have time to read –  only get ? popular ? culture, often scorned and perceived as the absence of culture. The distinction between ? elite ? culture and ? popular ? culture has gradually eroded since the 19th Century, with certain aspects of ? popular ? culture – comics, rap music, advertising and even commercial culture – now considered ? respectable ? disciplines and part of universeity curricula. Alongside the historical development of technical media, this is being demonstrated with the advent of Cultural Studies. This research field emerged in the UK in the Sixties, looking at the culture of the ? poor people ? with the idea that all social activitiy is cultural, from work to community relations, and including consumption. Culture does not reach them through books, but through other media: clothes, songs, professional trades and crafts, social rites, etc. In this way, it makes more sense to consider the concept of culture as a social phenomenon, which makes up the experiences of daily living in contemporary societies. This theory is especially current in today’s media revolution, where printed material is increasingly losing ground to digitial and audio-visual technologies.

Applied to brands, this definition implies a third digression or enlargement beyond traditional brands, including attachments that are physiological, such as practices, actions, materials, sounds, colors, smells, etc. The sound of a Harley, and the Apple or Sony interfaces are an intrinsic part of the respective brands. This means that brand culture cannot be reduced to a few simple words, but that it is also made up of images, icons, objects and ways of doing things, etc.  

Table 1 : Culture and Brands

Consumers looking for meaning and uniqueness

Hailing from the United States, over the past decade, the topic of brand culture has become increasingly prevalent. The books How Brands Become Icons (2004), Brand Culture (2006), and Cultural Strategy (2010) converge towards the concept of a brands as a cultural emitter. Their authors point out how brands embody views on the world and express models of myths, symbolism, codes, ideologies, etc.

Why are brands expressing their cultural aspects so pervasively now? For Jean- No?l Kapferer, this current dimension is due to several factors: the end of ideologies, the existential void of a consumerism society overly focused on accumulating stuff, the economic crisis, and more…all converging to send consumers on a quest for meaning. In a society losing its values, people no longer consume just to meet basic needs, but rather to find structural points of reference. Thus culture provides people with meaning behind their existence and behaviors – and consequently to their consumer buying and habits. If brands wish to meet consumers’ needs to buy with greater meaning, culture is required. Brands must play a role well beyond consumer purchasing. They must grasp major existential issues, provide symbolic resources, offer models for people to build and assert their identity. Fundamentally human, consumers don’t only ask to have something, but to be someone. To meet this need, businesses must go well beyond identifying insights. They must delve deep into their brands’ culture resonance.

Globalization brings societies together faster and standardizes behavior, whilst accentuating brands’ cultural foundation. In a global market, with fierce competition and free-thinking, fickle consumers, culture contributes to a brand’s uniqueness and positioning. By stressing its existential dimensions, brands obtain greater public buy-in. In his analysis of globalization, philospher Gilles Lipovetsky reveals two parallel points at the core of brand culture : …We observe a dual process of the ? commercialization of culture ? on one hand, and the ? culturalization of commerce ? on the other. Long considered a marginal economic sector and defying the logic of profitibality, culture is quickly becoming a substantial and dynamic economic entity. Museums are exported like products; the economy of creative design, the entertainment market, the media and the internet have turned culture into a source of growth, revenus and jobs. Equally, the economic sphere is increasingly rampant with cultural signs. The economic sector is becoming ? culturalized ? as brands include a cultural dimension in their proposition. As CEO of DraftFCB and By Art, Nathalie Cogis points out: ?…Culture is fundamental because it is the fertile soil where our desires are forged: the desire to be oneself, to be accepted, to be recognized, to stand apart, to be fulfilled, to love…Culture is the bearer of our most powerful desires, as these desires are collective: the desires projected by a society and with which people identify ?.

The accelleration of innovations requires brands to likewise renew and update, whilst maintaining coherence and consistency. As such, culture offers brands an entire repertoire of meaning and sensory, emotional and intellectual pleasures as a source for updating products. In this ever-changing context of rapid obsolescence and technological innovations, culture is both a sorce of identity and creativity.

Table 2 : Culture as value creator

Content is a means, culture is the end

Consumers need to identify symbols, ideologies, practices, social and the psychological recommendations of the brands they frequent. Through content, brands can take on the advantages usually reserved to media, such as influence, audience, leading a community, long-term relationships and partnerships with other stakeholders. Creating and disseminating content provides brands[1] the opportunity to reveal their history, know-how, craftsmenship, story, and to illustrate their rich culture. It is a privileged way to build culture, express a world view and take on the role of cultural agent.

Jean-Marie Dru addresses this in his book Jet Lag by showing how content provides a means for brands to cultivate an intention or quest for meaning beyond just selling products or services, as illustrated by Pampers. ? Pampers has constantly stressed the functional benefits of a dry bottom and their contribution to babies’ physical and emotional development. ? Similarly as Picard (Frozen food producer) publishes a stylish recipe book featuring frozen ingredients, the brand uses content as a deeper ? communication engagement ? towards a culture of gourmet food, creating multiple initiatives. The ultimate goal of a content policy is to develop a cultural strategy rich in meaning.