George rossolatos seminar on branding, brand equity, brand semiotic models and research methods part 3

George Rossolatos MSc, MBA, PhD
//disruptiVesemiOtics// email: georgerossolatos123@gmail.com
http://uni-kassel.academia.edu/georgerossolatos
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Emerging perspectives in branding research
 The traditional approach to marketing planning has been criticized for its
undue focus on cultural variables.
 Increasing emphasis on the impact of culture in shaping bottom-up the very
manner the notion of brand has been defined, the stakeholders who impact
on its performance and the components that should be managed in a brand
planning process have resulted in a proliferation of perspectives on branding
 Community branding approach (Fournier, Muniz & O’Guinn)
 Cultural branding approach (Belk, Arnould, Thompson, Schroeder, Holt)
 Postmodern branding (Brown, Firat, Venkatesh, Holbrook, Hirschmann)

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Community branding
 Challenges the transactional perspective to brand management.
 A brand community is a social entity where consumers interact socially with a brand as the
pivotal point of their interaction.
 Brand communities take place in internet-based settings, in geographically bound clubs, and at
so-called brandfests (social gatherings arranged by the marketer).
Heding et al.
 The brand community perspective that emerged in the late 1990s views
 the consumer as a cultural player in a social context
 the consumption experience as the source of important personal social experiences.
 Communities of consumers are autonomous agents capable of collectively rejecting marketing
actions.
 This shift in negotiation power influences the creation of brand meaning and brand equity as the
negotiation of brand meaning primarily takes place on consumers’ terms.
Jeep Community

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Ethnographic research into brand communities
 Ethnographic research, also known as observational research or participant
observation is characterized by researcher ‘immersion’ in a cultural community
 Migrated to consumer research from cultural anthropology and sociology
(ethnomethodology/symbolic interactionism)
 Understanding people in the ethnographic research tradition means understanding
them in their own socio-cultural milieu and from the perspective of the participants.
 Common data types are interviews (more or less structured), depth interviews,
videography, netnography.
 Qualitative data may be triangulated with quantitative measures.
 Ethnography allows for creative interpretations and thick descriptions (Geertz).
Ethnographic and stories-based analysis of
brand communities
 Muniz and O’Guinn (2001) highlighted the importance of storytelling among
consumers in establishing shared meanings in brand communities.
 It is the tropes that simultaneously unite and differentiate interpretive communities.
 As Ritson and Elliott (1999) found in their study of how advertising discourse
circulates in ordinary parlance, metaphor is a key tropic manner of creatively
transferring commercial meanings from text to life and brands.
 What distinguishes interpretive communities are the particular ways that consumers
use figurative language.
 Knowledgeable application of the various branches of literary criticism is key to
unpacking the cultural meanings and interpretive strategies that constitute brand-
related social configurations.

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brand communities
• An interpretive community is a cultural formation with a shared social and historical
context that delimits the potential of marketing communications (Kates)
 Members of various audiences have significant connections to their social locations or
positions and use broadly similar repertoires of interpretive strategies, resulting in
similar interpretations of marketing communications
 Membership of an interpretive community is characterized by structured polysemy
that allows for a limited range of readings relevant to the cultural identifications
and social positionings of consumers (Hirschman, 1998; Ritson and Elliott, 1999)
 Common themes permeating community-oriented branding research (Kates)
 Brands help negotiate a sense of social affiliation
 Brand meaning that is relatively oppositional to others emerges in brand-related
interpretive communities.
 Identity is negotiated and constructed in brand subcultures and communities.
brand communities
 Brands have a ‘linking value’ that connects consumers to each other through a set of
common meanings or activities.
 For example, fashion discourses about brands allow consumers to create a style that
is acceptable to self-relevant social cliques or help them fit in socially (Kates)
 In Fournier’s (1998) study of consumer–brand relationships, women
construct different types of gender identities (caring matriarch, working single
mother and young female university student) through consumer narratives,
attesting to the structuring effects of gender on brand meaning.
 The analysis of the interpretive strategies (that in turn, comprise an
interpretive community) during an ethnographic study requires identifying,
exploring, tracking and unpacking the different cultural meanings inscribed
on brands and products that unite a given interpretive community (kates)

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The SAAB brand community (Muniz &
O’Guinn)
The cultural branding perspective
 The ‘cultural branding’ approach (Holt) draws on sociological/anthropological
perspectives such as Bourdieu’s cultural sociology and McCracken’s
anthropology of consumption
 both consumers and producers are seen as mediators of cultural
production
 Brands are considered to be important parts of and contributors to
mainstream culture.
 The perspective assumes as its point of departure ‘counter-brand’
movements and ways of opposing dominant brand discourse by brand
hijackers (Kozinets).
 It explores genealogically ways whereby marketers can use cultural forces to
build strong brands (or what Holt calls brand icons) and how brands
contribute to culture.

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The cultural branding perspective (Holt)
 The brand is a storyteller, endowed with cultural meaning and an
important factor in the intricate web of cultural meanings used in the
collective identity projects of consumers.
 Brand value is created through playing an active role in mainstream
culture.
 The brand is subjected to social and cultural changes and thereby
influenced by changes completely outside the brand manager’s control.
 A brand gains competitive power by providing the consumer with the
appropriate web of associations and the most powerful myths of its time.
(Holt/McCracken)
 Pivotal in the theory of cultural consumption is the notion of culture and
consumption operating as a system.
• Products do not only have a utilitarian character, they also convey
cultural meaning.
 Meaning is transferred from the culturally constituted world to consumer
goods; in turn, through the consumption of consumer goods cultural
meanings are integrated into consumers’ lives.
 This conceptualization of the transfer of cultural meaning draws minimally on
semiotics.

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(Holt/McCracken)
 Pivotal in the theory of cultural consumption is the notion of culture and
consumption operating as a system.
• Products do not only have a utilitarian character, they also convey
cultural meaning.
 Meaning is transferred from the culturally constituted world to consumer
goods; in turn, through the consumption of consumer goods cultural
meanings are integrated into consumers’ lives.
 This conceptualization of the transfer of cultural meaning draws minimally on
semiotics.
The cultural branding perspective (Holt)
 Consumption objects are seen as cultural artefacts carrying meaning from the culturally
constituted world to consumers.
 Brands are regarded as cultural resources just like movies, social movements, books,
magazines, etc.
 Brand icons perform more representative and powerful myths to mainstream culture than
identity brands.

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4 basic components of iconic brand communications
 1. Iconic brands are capable of relieving cultural oppositions, of enacting
powerful myths that accommodate these tensions (Holt)
 Brands compete in myth markets
 2. Iconic brands create original expressive cultures just like artists. In terms of
aesthetics, they lead the way, do not just follow trends.
 3. Iconic brands develop an authentic voice. A brand must be perceived as a
credible representative of a subcultural movement, a folk culture or a social
movement which is where new non-commercial culture is being created.
 4. Iconic brands display a deep understanding of the point of view they
represent.
Comparison between the mindshare and the cultural
branding models
Holt

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Brand truth as conventionalization of cultural
mediators’ stories (Holt)
 A brand emerges as various ‘authors’ tell stories that involve the brand.
 Four primary types of authors are involved:
 Companies
 The culture industries
 Intermediaries (such as critics and retail salespeople)
 Customers
 Brand stories have plots and characters and they rely heavily on metaphor to
communicate and to spur imagination.
 AS THESE STORIES COLLIDE IN SOCIAL LIFE, CONVENTIONS
EVENTUALLY FORM
 Marketers often like to think of brands as a psychological phenomenon which
stems from the perceptions of individual consumers. But what makes a brand
powerful is the collective nature of these perceptions.
 The stories have become conventional and so are continually reinforced because
they are treated as truths in everyday interactions.
Constructing brand culture through multiple
stakeholders’ narratives (Holt)
Brand Culture
Shared,Stories,
images &
associations
The Firm
Popular
Culture
Influencers Customers
Brand
Stories
Brand
Stories
Brand
Stories
Brand
Stories

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Cultural branding research methods
 The cultural approach displays a variety of methods and data ‘borrowed’ from
different interpretive research traditions (Heding et al.)
 A common interpretive approach is to incorporate the macro-cultural POV into
brand specific texts and consumer narratives.
 In order to document a brand’s cultural and political authority a brand manager should
look back in time to comprehend what historical activities constrain or enhance the
future myth-making ability of the brand (brand genealogy)
 Textual semiotic methods for analyzing and interpreting ads, packages, brand-related
consumer stories involve questions about
 What does brand A mean to consumer segment X in social context F?
 How are distinctive cultural discourses interwoven in consumer accounts of
experiencing brand H?
 Brands as inter-textual formations
 Ethnographic studies
 Phenomenological interviews
 Long interviews aimed at understanding uniquely lived aspects of consumption
experiences (cf. McCracken’s The long interview)
Post-modern branding: Decentralization of
brand meaning
 In ‘postmodernity’ the conditions of fragmentation, decentering, and ambiguity have
problematized the interpretation of brands and marketing promotions for both consumers and
marketers.
 Consumers construct different meanings from brands’ intended positioning, depending on
personal background and contexts of consumption.
 Meanings are not simply imposed by the textual aspects of advertising, direct mail or
other brand stimuli
 rather, meanings emerge between the texts of marketing communications and the bodies of
cultural knowledge shared by consumers (Eco, Scott), co-creating the brand as a complex bundle
of personal and sociocultural meanings.
 Over-restrictive conceptualization of textuality

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Postmodern branding
Firat & Venkatesh

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