How Brands Become Icons The Principles of Cultural Branding
Douglas Holt
Copyright 2004 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 05 04 5 4 3 2 1 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to
[email protected], or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Holt, Douglas B. How brands become icons: the principles of cultural branding / Douglas B. Holt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 9781422163320 1. Brand name products. 2. Business names. 3. Popular culture. I. Title. HD69.B7H647 2003 658.8′27—dc22 2004002697 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives Z39.48-1992.
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Table of Contents
Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Preface and Acknowledgments CHAPTER 1 - What Is an Iconic Brand? CHAPTER 2 - How Is Cultural Branding Different? CHAPTER 3 - Targeting Myth Markets CHAPTER 4 - Composing the Cultural Brief CHAPTER 5 - Leveraging Cultural and Political Authority CHAPTER 6 - Managing Brand Loyalty as a Social Network CHAPTER 7 - Coauthoring the Myth CHAPTER 8 - Advancing the Myth CHAPTER 9 - Branding as Cultural Activism APPENDIX - Methods Notes Selected Bibliography Index About the Author
Preface and Acknowledgments
I grew up in Rockford, Illinois, a small industrial city that boasted one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates in the late 1970s, right up there with Flint, Michigan. While Rockford always seemed to end up around 297 on lists of the top 300 livable cities, for teens who didn’t yet have to hustle up a job, the city could still be a good time. Like most guys I knew, I was a rock-and-roll kid. I bought albums, played air guitar, attended dozens of concerts, made my own cassettes, and took hundreds of concert photos. When famous Chicago radio deejay Steve Dahl blew up a dumpster full of disco records at Comiskey Park before a baseball game, I cheered. As a high-schooler, I loved many bands—at first Boston and Kiss, and then Styx, Aerosmith, and Ted Nugent. But my heart belonged to the hometown heroes—Rockford’s own Cheap Trick. My hero was Cheap Trick’s lead guitarist, Rick Nielsen. I even dressed like him for Halloween parties. Nielsen felled every stereotype in the rock handbook. At a time when rock guitarists had long hair, wore tight pants, showed chest hair, and played their guitars as if they were Freudian appendages, Nielsen dressed like a nerdy teenager. With his cardigan sweater, short hair, and baseball cap, he pranced around stage, kicking his legs in the air like a Las Vegas chorus girl, plying the crowd with strange, cartoonish expressions. Yet his guitar sound was even tougher and more inventive than those heavy metal heroes; he did them one better but without the testosterone. I thought this was very cool (but had no idea why). Cheap Trick made four amazing records (as every rock fan knows), and then someone pulled the plug. The band started pumping out album after album of trite, melodramatic songs. I stopped listening to them over twenty years ago, and I was not alone. But for me, as for millions of American teens, Cheap Trick mattered a lot for those precious few years of the late 1970s. Fast-forward twenty-five years. I’m seated in an o