Brand Mythology free essay sample

Brand Mythology| How Brands become Icons| By| Joseph Shiffin Joy| | Brands are an accepted part of our daily lives. But some brands seem to transcend their product or service categories to become part of the popular culture. What distinguishes these iconic brands from the rest of the pack, and what can marketers learn from them? | Acknowledgement First and foremost I would like to thank the almighty for giving me the strength in all aspects I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Mr. A. R Rajagopalan, Professor, MBA Dept, Amity University Dubai, for his pillared support, guidance and encouragement. His candid suggestion and appraisal invariably helped me in channeling my efforts. I would also like to sincerely thank other faculty members and non teaching staff of the Department of MBA, for extending help when needed. Contents What is a Brand? 3 Brands as Mythology4 What is an Iconic Brand? 6 1. A great brand is in it for the long haul. 15 2. A great brand can be anything. 16 3. A great brand knows itself. 16 4. A great brand invents or reinvents an entire category. 17 5. A great brand taps into emotions. 17 6. A great brand is a story thats never completely told. 8 7. A great brand has design consistency. 18 8. A great brand is relevant. 19 Objective People identify strongly with cultural icons and often rely on these symbols in their everyday lives. Icons serve as societys foundational compass points-anchors of meaning continually referenced in entertainment, journalism, politics, and advertising. The objective of the paper is a comparative look at how these brands enshrined themselves within the cultural fabric of society and the winning strategies for brands to become icons. - What is a Brand? The word brand is derived from the  Old Norse word  Ã¢â‚¬Ëœbrandr’  meaning ’to burn’. It refers to the practice of producers burning their mark (or brand) onto their products. A  brand  is basically a ‘name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one sellers good or service as distinct from those of other sellers’. Branding  began as a way to telling one persons cattle from another’s by means of a distinctive symbol burned into the animals skin with a  hot iron stamp, and was subsequently used in  business,  marketing  and  advertising. The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a ‘name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers’. The Italians were among the first to use brands, in the form of  watermarks  on paper in the 1200s The oldest generic Brand in the world, which is still in use, is from India, it is better known as â€Å"Chyawanprash† it is a herbal paste consumed for its health benefits and attributed to a revered  Rishi  (seer) named Chyawan. This brand was developed on an extinct Volcanic Hill in North India called  Dhosi Hill  in North India. Branding means more than the fancy logo. It means accurately communicating your values and delivering your Brand promises, it is the very embodiment of everything associated with your product, service or company, and it is more than just creating a fancy logo, proper branding shapes your company. It instills the corporate culture and values. When properly defined, developed and used, your brand can change the public perception of your company, its value and status, it also changes the way you communicate with your employees and customers. Brands as Mythology . What is a myth? ,  Ã¢â‚¬Å"Myths are narratives about divine or heroic beings, arranged in a coherent system, passed down traditionally, and linked to the spiritual or religious life of a community, endorsed by rulers or priests†. Most of us remember the mythology stories learnt in school (Zeus and Thor and the re st of the comic-like heroes. ) Myths allow us to project ourselves into their stories, to imagine interactions that never took place, to take whats important to us and live it out through the myth. We all love a good story. More important, we remember good stories. Good stories make things personal. We identify with characters and recall details associated with them. The effect is the same when characters are brands. Introduce a brand in the context of a good story, and the corporate entity gains personality. It becomes warm, friendly and personal, they inflect the human mind. This is the allure of a mythic brand, it help us transcend the realm of the of the ordinary into that of the extraordinary, people often like associating themselves with fantasy and things that are larger than life. Iconic or mythic brands help us achieve just that. So, while trying to invent a mythic brand, be sure to have a good story, not just a product or a pile of facts. The story would promise (and deliver) a heroic outcome. And there needs to be growth and mystery as well, so the user can fill in their own blank. The key word is  Ã¢â‚¬Ëœspiritual’. Mythological brands make a spiritual connection with the user, delivering something that we cant find on our own; or at the very least; giving us a slate we can use to write our own spirituality on, they inflect meaning by appealing to our bourgeois ideals and recycling themselves through cultural dialog. Secondary narcissism is our bourgeois ideal it is one part self love, one part self hatred, one part self aggression and one part self displacement. - What is an Iconic Brand? From Nelson Mandela to Ronald Reagan, from Steve Jobs to Sam Walton,from Oprah Winfrey to Martha Stewart, from Michael Jordan to Mohammed Ali, from Andy Warhol to Bruce Springsteen,cultural icons dominate our world. These Icons can be fictional characters as well as real people Archie Bunker, superman and Rambo have all been American Icons. Moreover cultural icons need’nt be human,companies like disney and apple, NGO’s like Greenpeace and Amnesty international and universities like Harvard and Oxford have been cultural icons. People identify strongly with cultural icons and often rely on these symbols in their everyday lives. Icons serve as society’s foundational pass points. The crux of iconicity is that the person or the thing is widely regarded as the most compelling symbol of a set of ideas or values that a society deems important. James Dean was quintessential 1950’s American Rebel. More than anyone else, he represented the idea that men should live an autonomous life, following their own whims rather than succumbing to corporate work and suburban family. A brand emerges as various â€Å"authors† tell stories that involve the brand. Four primary types of authors are involved: companies, the culture industries, intermediaries and customers. The relative influence of these authors varies considerably across product categories. Brand stories have plot and charcters and rely heavily on metaphors to communicate and to spur our imaginations. As these collide in everyday social life, conventions eventually form. Sometimes a single common story emerges as a consensus view. Most often, those different stories circulate widely in society. A brand emerges when these collective understanding become firmly established. Iconic brands do just that. They address acute contradictions in society by tapping into a collective desire or anxiety; iconic brands develop a status that transcends functional benefits. They challenge people, either directly or subtly, to reconsider accepted thinking and behavior. The famous Coca-Cola ad from 1971, Id Like to Teach the World to Sing, voiced a desire to overcome the deep divisions in American society created by the Vietnam War. Iconic brands develop identity myths that address these desires and anxieties. By creating imaginary worlds, they offer escape from everyday reality. Iconic brands are deep rooted in society they are engraved in the minds of their fans and loyalists. The Marlboro man represents the values of the Western frontier: strong, independent and capable. Over time the brand comes to embody the myth. It becomes a shorthand symbol that represents far more than just a brand of cigarette. I have been able to identify the various elements that make the Marlboro Man such a pervasive icon in todays society. When Philip Morris decided to reposition Marlboro as a mans filtered cigarette, the creative people asked themselves, Whats the best masculine image in America? Although a cab driver was a close runner-up, Gils Collins suggestion of the cowboy received the most agreement. So from the start, the Marlboro Man was set up to symbolize ideal masculinity. How exactly is this concept achieved through the use of the cowboy imagery and the inviting country landscape? Many people would argue that the Marlboro Man represents a return to our original heritage; that he is the last free American. While there are now many expensive watches to choose from, Rolex still symbolizes success and status around the world. Iconic brands inspire an enduring form of affection that any marketer would want for his brand. But iconic status which has traditionally been built over decades is enjoyed by relatively few brands. What we can learn from these brand icons might be useful to all brand marketers today. In his book, entitled ‘Legendary brands’,Laurence Vincent suggests that â€Å"legendary brands forge deep bonds with consumers through narrative devices. They are storytellers, drawing from a library of timeless narratives†¦ to captivate consumers and sustain meaning across cultural borders. It is the narrative of the Legendary Brand that generates and sustains customer affinity†. Let’s consider the example of the iconic whiskey brand â€Å"Jack Daniels† or JD as it is popularly called, is a brand of  sour mash  Tennessee whiskey  that is the highest selling American whiskey in the world. There is a particular aura surrounding Jack Daniels, a rockstar aura, it mixes better with distorted music chords than with anything else in a bartenders arsenal, it is in other words the unofficial rockstar drink, Why is this? What are the factors that lead to this and what are the circumstances that led to or in other words built the mystery and aura surrounding Jack Daniels and its association with Rock music? The hard rock era began somewhere near the end of the â€Å"hippie† movement that peaked in the late 1960’s. Hippies were about peace and love, sexual liberation, collectivism, social change, idealism, and mind-altering drugs. Artistically, they gravitated towards psychedelic motifs that eschewed the Modernist trends popular in Europe in favor of rainbow color palletes, expressive typography, and â€Å"less-is-a-bore† philosophy. They were the lucky ones whose socio-economic privileges kept them out of the jungles of Vietnam. Hidden among the cloud of pot-smoke were the pioneers of the hard rock era. They were the bands that noticeably avoided the hugely popular outdoor music festivals like Monterey Pop and Woodstock. They included groups like The Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, and The Doors. These Rock and Roll outliers preferred harder drugs and harder living than the hippies (and often paid the price). They were present in a variety of musical styles including Country and the Blues. We look back on them today as being authentic â€Å"rock and roll†, not merely folk singers capitalizing of the popularity of the protest movement. By the mid-1970’s disillusionment with the continuing war, proliferation of harder drugs (heroin, cocaine), and realities of adult life effectively killed the hippy movement. The deterioration of the movement was keenly observed by Beatles guitarist George Harrison upon a visit to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in 1967, in which he â€Å"found no collective elevation of consciousness, just people immersed in ‘drugs’ the current fashion. † It would seem unlikely that an old-fashioned liquor preferred by Grandfathers and Senators would become the quintessential drink of hard rock. However, research from marketing professionals shows that the values people attribute to the Jack Daniels brand fall directly in line with hard rock values. â€Å"The words and phrases used to describe the brand included masculinity, quiet-confidence, knowing smile, pride, trust, and genuine. † People see Jack Daniel’s as the antidote to trendy drinks with clever names. Jack Daniel’s drinkers see themselves as the â€Å"the man among men. † The values of Jack Daniel’s are mainly derived from its iconic black label. This text–heavy label has remained largely unchanged since Jack Daniel designed it himself. The main type is bold and in all capitals. The name of the founder is featured prominently, along with â€Å"Tennessee† and â€Å"Whiskey. † Also featured prominently is the phrase â€Å"Old No. 7 Brand. † Only â€Å"Tennessee† is written in script giving it a unique hierarchy on the label (This emphasizes that Tennessee is the home of â€Å"sour mash† whiskey, as opposed to Kentucky’s â€Å"bourbon† whiskey). The type is framed by white ribbons, a style typical of Nineteenth-Century American signage. The secondary text includes â€Å"Sour Mash,† â€Å"Lem Motlow, Proprieter,† and â€Å"Lynchburg Tenn. U. S. A. † At the very bottom there reads â€Å"Est. amp; Reg. in 1866. † The label, never modernized, is a reminder that Jack Daniel’s is the oldest distillery in the United States and the world’s best selling whiskey. The high-contrast label is black and white, which appealed to the post-psychedelic artistic sensibilities of the hard rock era. These sensibilities include minimalism, dark themes, authenticity, mystery, masculinity, and timelessness. The art of the hard rock period reflects this; virtually every major heavy metal album features black prominently. The identical style of the label is appropriated in Pantera’s Official Live: 101 Proof, and in the best-selling Motley Crue biography The Dirt. The â€Å"Old No. 7† on the label has mysterious lore that fascinates musicians. No one knows its exact origin but it has become a symbol Jack and is used prominently in their marketing. Stories about â€Å"Old No. 7† abound: It may have been the seventh recipe of whiskey which was chosen; it may refer to Jack’s supposed girlfriends, it maybe his lucky number. As one television advertisement announces, â€Å"Only Jack knows the true story and he’s not talking. The use of mysterious symbolism like this can be seen throughout hard rock designs. Neither Jack Daniels nor Rock Music would be the same without the mystery their symbols create. The idea of a hard working, genuine, masculine male is promoted by the bottle’s portrait of Jack Daniel (left) and by his imagery in marketing campaigns. â€Å"The C ompany strengthens the association with its founder through various advertising and marketing materials. The result is that Jack Daniel the man and Jack Daniel’s the brand merge into one identity. Jack is the anti-hippy; the man who isn’t wayed by popular trends; the man who wouldn’t be caught dead basking in the sunny pastures of Bethel, New York. This man might very well resort to violence if things got ugly in his local bar. This mythos of Jack as a man is one undoubtedly admired by the hard rock community. The most significant attitude projected by Jack Daniel’s and embraced during the hard rock era is that of the irreverent sprit; the consummate individual. Hard rock musicians aren’t looking to be part of a collective; they want to pave their own path. They don’t want to join a church, march in a parade, or sit in a prayer circle. This desire to tread ones own path has proved to be global, just as heavy metal as a genre has been embraced around the world. According to its marketing firm, Jack Daniel’s has never gone out of its way to embrace any sort of music. â€Å"Its association with rock and roll excess is purely serendipitous. † That being said, the two are now inseparable Alright then, while I completely agree that timeless narratives like the one we saw above are essential for becoming a legendary brand, I also see the role of compelling brand experiences. It is through these types of experiences that customers advance your brand’s story. Many branding firms look at the intersection of story and customer experience in defining what is legendary. Take Zappos’s storyline for example. At the corporate level Zappos is â€Å"powered by service. †   Essentially, their epic and timeless story is that of a small dot. com company founded by a couple of college friends whose persistence and unorthodox â€Å"weird style† beat all the odds and parlayed a company to billion dollar revenues and a billion dollar buy out largely on the strength of their service. On the customer experience side, it is as simple as a recent tweet by Jon Ferrara, â€Å"My son wrote Zappos a letter amp; they sent him back a book on Company Culture personally signed by the entire management team†. Great customer experiences join with the overarching story line and the audience/consumer carries the conversation forward to build lore and legend. Developing a good brand mythology comes down to purpose—the purpose for your business. If your product or business is a me-too, or exists simply to make money, not to change the world, you will struggle to tell a compelling brand story. On the other hand, if your purpose is to change the world, or change your customers lives in a meaningful way, you probably have the beginnings of a great brand story. So what exactly does distinguish the great brands from the rest of the pack? , is it their work force, the exemplerary customer service delivered by its employees or does it come down to having a charismatic leadership? Well, Scott Bedbury, the man who gave the world â€Å"Just Do it† and â€Å"Frapuccino† shares an 8 point program to turn anything from sneakers to coffee to you – into a Great Brand A great brand is hard to find. I walked through a hardware store last night and I came across 50 brands I didnt know existed, says Scott Bedbury. They may be great products, but theyre not great brands. Bedbury should know hes already working on his second great brand. As senior vice president of marketing at Starbucks Coffee Co. , Bedbury, 39, is responsible for growing the $700 million Seattle-based company into a global brand. Since Bedbury joined Starbucks in 1995, the company has been on a branding blitz: beginning a relationship with United Airlines to serve Starbucks on all United flights; joining with Redhook Ale Brewery Inc. o introduce Double Black Stout, a malt beer flavored with coffee; venturing with Pepsi-Cola Co. to market Starbuckss Frappuccino drink in supermarkets; joining with Dreyers Grand Ice Cream to introduce six flavors of Starbucks Ice Cream; opening its first retail stores in Tokyo and Singapore, with 10 more to follow in each market; expanding the Starbucks stores to 1,100 outlets with 22,000 employees; and serving coffee to 4 million people each week. Building the Starbucks brand, however, is deja vu for Bedbury: his first great brand was Nike Inc. When he joined the Beaverton, Oregon-based footwear and apparel company in 1987, Nike was a $750 million business; when he left seven years later, Nike was a $4 billion business. In between Bedbury directed Nikes worldwide advertising efforts and broke the Just Do It branding campaign. I can honestly say that Nike left its imprint on me in ways I never thought possible, Bedbury says, largely because of the strength of the Nike culture. Whether the product is sneakers, coffee or a brand called â€Å"You† building a great brand depends on knowing the right principles. 1. A great brand is in it for the long haul. For decades we had great brands based on solid value propositions theyd established their worth in the consumers mind. Then in the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of companies sold out their brands. They stopped building them and started harvesting them. They focused on short-term economic returns, dressed up the bottom line, and diminished their investment in longer-term brand-building programs. As a result, there were a lot of products with very little differentiation. All the consumers saw was who had the lowest price which is not a profitable place for any brand to be. Then came Marlboro Friday and the Marlboro Man fell off his horse. Today brands are back stronger than ever. In an age of accelerating product proliferation, enormous customer choice, and growing clutter and clamor in the marketplace, a great brand is a necessity, not a luxury. If you take a long-term approach, a great brand can travel worldwide, transcend cultural barriers, speak to multiple consumer segments simultaneously, create economies of scale, and let you operate at the higher end of the positioning spectrum where you can earn solid margins over the long term. . A great brand can be anything. Some categories may lend themselves to branding better than others, but anything is brandable. Nike, for example, is leveraging the deep emotional connection that people have with sports and fitness. With Starbucks, we see how coffee has woven itself into the fabric of peoples lives, and thats our opportunity for emotional leverage. Almost any product offers an opportunity to create a frame of mind thats unique. Almost any product can transcend the boundaries of its narrow category. Intel is a case study in branding. I doubt that most people who own a computer know what Intel processors do, how they work, or why they are superior to their competition in any substantive way. All they know is that they want to own a computer with Intel inside. As a result, Andy Grove and his team sit today with a great product and a powerful brand. 3. A great brand knows itself. Anyone who wants to build a great brand first has to understand who they are. You dont do this by getting a bunch of executive schmucks in a room so they can reach some consensus on what they think the brand means. Because hatever they come up with is probably going to be inconsistent with the way most consumers perceive the brand. The real starting point is to go out to consumers and find out what they like or dislike about the brand and what they associate as the very core of the brand concept. Now thats a fairly conventional formula and it does have a risk: if you follow that approach all the way, youll end up with a narrowly focused b rand. To keep a brand alive over the long haul, to keep it vital, youve got to do something new, something unexpected. It has to be related to the brands core position. But every once in a while you have to strike out in a new direction, surprise the consumer, add a new dimension to the brand, and reenergize it. Of course, the other side of the coin is true as well: a great brand that knows itself also uses that knowledge to decide what not to do. At Starbucks, for instance, we were approached by a very large company that wanted to partner with us to create a coffee liquor. Im sure Starbucks could go in and wreak havoc in that category. But we didnt feel it was right for the brand now. We didnt do a lot of research. We just reached inside and asked ourselves, Does this feel right? It didnt. It wasnt true to who we are right now. 4. A great brand invents or reinvents an entire category. The common ground that you find among brands like Disney, Apple, Nike, and Starbucks is that these companies made it an explicit goal to be the protagonists for each of their entire categories. Disney is the protagonist for fun family entertainment and family values. Not Touchstone Pictures, but Disney. Apple wasnt just a protagonist for the computer revolution. Apple was a protagonist for the individual: anyone could be more productive, informed, and contemporary. From my experience at Nike, I can tell you that CEO Phil Knight is the consummate protagonist for sports and the athlete. Thats why Nike transcends simply building shoes or making apparel. As the protagonist for sports, Nike has an informed opinion on where sports is going, how athletes think, how we think about athletes, and how we each think about ourselves as we aim for a new personal best. At Starbucks, our greatest opportunity is to become the protagonist for all that is good about coffee. Go to Ethiopia and youll immediately understand that weve got a category that is 900 years old. But here in the United States, were sitting on a category thats been devoid of any real innovation for five decades. A great brand raises the bar it adds a greater sense of purpose to the experience, whether its the challenge to do your best in sports and fitness or the affirmation that the cup of coffee youre drinking really matters. 5. A great brand taps into emotions. Its everyones goal to have their product be best-in-class. But product innovation has become the ante you put up just to play the game: its table stakes. The common ground among companies that have built great brands is not just performance. They recognize that consumers live in an emotional world. Emotions drive most, if not all, of our decisions. Not many people sit around and discuss the benefits of encapsulated gas in the mid-sole of a basketball shoe or the advantages of the dynamic-fit system. They will talk about Michael Jordans winning shot against Utah the other night and theyll experience the dreams and the aspirations and the awe that go with that last-second, game-winning shot. A brand reaches out with that kind of powerful connecting experience. Its an emotional connection point that transcends the product. And transcending the product is the brand. 6. A great brand is a story thats never completely told. A brand is a metaphorical story thats evolving all the time. This connects with something very deep a fundamental human appreciation of mythology. People have always needed to make sense of things at a higher level. We all want to think that were a piece of something bigger than ourselves. Companies that manifest that sensibility in their employees and consumers invoke something very powerful. Look at Hewlett-Packard and the HP Way. Thats a form of company mythology. It gives employees a way to understand that theyre part of a larger mission. Every employee who comes to HP feels that he or she is part of something thats alive. Its a company with a rich history, a dynamic present, and a bright future. Levis has a story that goes all the way back to the Gold Rush. They have photos of miners wearing their dungarees. And every time you notice the rivets on a pair of their jeans, at some level it reminds you of the Levis story and the rich history of the product and the company. Ralph Lauren is trying to create history. His products all create a frame of mind and a persona. You go into his stores and there are props and stage settings a saddle and rope. Hes not selling saddles. Hes using the saddle to tell a story. Stories create connections for people. Stories create the emotional context people need to locate themselves in a larger experience. 7. A great brand has design consistency. Look at what some of the fashion brands have built Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, for example. They have a consistent look and feel and a high level of design integrity. And its not only what they do in the design arena; its what they dont do. They refuse to follow any fashion trend that doesnt fit their vision. And theyre able to pull it off from one season to the next. Thats just as true for strong brands like Levis or Gap or Disney. Most of these companies have a very focused internal design process. In the case of Nike, between its ad agency Wieden amp; Kennedy and Nike Design shop, probably 98% of every creative thing that could possibly be done is handled internally, from hang tags to packaging to annual reports. Today Nike has about 350 designers working for it more than any company in the country to make sure it keeps close watch over the visual expression of the brand. Theyre what I like to call impassioned environmentalists with their brands. They dont let very many people touch them in the way of design or positioning or communication verbal or non-verbal. Its all done internally. 8. A great brand is relevant. A lot of brands are trying to position themselves as cool. More often than not, brands that try to be cool fail. Theyre trying to find a way to throw off the right cues they know the current vernacular, they know the current music. But very quickly they find themselves in trouble. Its dangerous if your only goal is to be cool. Theres not enough there to sustain a brand. The larger idea is for a brand to be relevant. It meets what people want, it performs the way people want it to. In the last couple of decades theres been a lot of hype about brands. A lot of propositions and promises were made and broken about how brands were positioned, how they performed, what the companys real values were. Consumers are looking for something that has lasting value. Theres a quest for quality, not quantity. - - - - - Conclusion Customer’s value products for as much as what they symbolize as for what they do. For brands like Coke, Budweiser, Nike, and Jack Daniels, customers value the brands stoties largely for their identity value. Acting as vessels of self-expression, the brands are imbued with stories that consumers find valuable in constructing their identities. Consumers flock to brands that embody the ideals they admire, brands that help them express who they want to be. The most successful of these brands become iconic brands. Biblography http://www. fastcompany. com/29056/what-great-brands-do http://brandstory. typepad. com/writer/2006/12/brands_as_mytho. html http://ebookbrowse. com/how-brands-become-icons-pdf-d385989335 http://www. wpp. com/wpp/marketing/reportsstudies/whatmakesaniconicbrand. htm