Element Assessment Assignments-Format: Static Imagery

BRANDING

Branding in the Age of Social Media by Douglas Holt

FROM THE MARCH 2016 ISSUE

In the era of Facebook and YouTube, brand building has become a vexingchallenge. This is not how things were supposed to turn out. A decade agomost companies were heralding the arrival of a new golden age of branding. They hired creative agencies and armies of technologists to insert brands

throughout the digital universe. Viral, buzz, memes, stickiness, and form factor

became the lingua franca of branding. But despite all the hoopla, such efforts

have had very little payoff.

As a central feature of their digital strategy, companies made huge bets on what

is often called branded content. The thinking went like this: Social media would

allow your company to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships

directly with customers. If you told them great stories and connected with them

in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community of consumers.

Businesses have invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have

generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to

have made brands less significant. What has gone wrong?

To solve this puzzle, we need to remember that brands succeed when they break

through in culture. And branding is a set of techniques designed to generate

cultural relevance. Digital technologies have not only created potent new social

networks but also dramatically altered how culture works. Digital crowds now

serve as very effective and prolific innovators of culture—a phenomenon I call

crowdculture. Crowdculture changes the rules of branding—which techniques

work and which do not. If we understand crowdculture, then, we can figure out

why branded-content strategies have fallen flat—and what alternative branding

methods are empowered by social media.

Why Branded Content and Sponsorships Used to Work

While promoters insist that branded content is a hot new thing, it’s actually a

relic of the mass media age that has been repackaged as a digital concept. In the

early days of that era, companies borrowed approaches from popular

entertainment to make their brands famous, using short-form storytelling,

cinematic tricks, songs, and empathetic characters to win over audiences. Classic

ads like Alka-Seltzer’s “I Can’t Believe I Ate the Whole Thing,” Frito-Lay’s “Frito

Bandito,” and Farrah Fawcett “creaming” Joe Namath with Noxema all snuck into

popular culture by amusing audiences.

This early form of branded content worked well because the entertainment

media were oligopolies, so cultural competition was limited. In the United States,

three networks produced television programming for 30 weeks or so every year

and then went into reruns. Films were distributed only through local movie

theaters; similarly, magazine competition was restricted to what fit on the

shelves at drugstores. Consumer marketing companies could buy their way to

fame by paying to place their brands in this tightly controlled cultural arena.

Brands also infiltrated culture by sponsoring TV shows and events, attaching

themselves to successful content. Since fans had limited access to their favorite

entertainers, brands could act as intermediaries. For decades, we were

accustomed to fast food chains’ sponsoring new blockbuster films, luxury autos’

bringing us golf and tennis competitions, and youth brands’ underwriting bands

and festivals.

The rise of new technologies that allowed audiences to opt out of ads—from

cable networks to DVRs and then the internet—made it much harder for brands

to buy fame. Now they had to compete directly with real entertainment. So

Once audiences could opt out of ads, it became harder for brands to buy fame.

companies upped the ante. BMW pioneered the practice of creating short films

for the internet. Soon corporations were hiring top film directors (Michael Bay,

Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Wes Anderson, David Lynch) and pushing for ever-

more-spectacular special effects and production values.

These early (pre-social-media) digital efforts led companies to believe that if they

delivered Hollywood-level creative at internet speed, they could gather huge

engaged audiences around their brands. Thus was born the great push toward

branded content. But its champions weren’t counting on new competition. And

this time it came not from big media companies but from the crowd.

The Rise of Crowdculture

Historically, cultural innovation flowed from the margins of society—from fringe

groups, social movements, and artistic circles that challenged mainstream norms

and conventions. Companies and the mass media acted as intermediaries,

diffusing these new ideas into the mass market. But social media has changed

everything.

Social media binds together communities that once were geographically isolated,

greatly increasing the pace and intensity of collaboration. Now that these once-

remote communities are densely networked, their cultural influence has become

direct and substantial. These new crowdcultures come in two flavors:

subcultures, which incubate new ideologies and practices, and art worlds, which

break new ground in entertainment.

Amplied subcultures.

Today you’ll find a flourishing crowdculture around almost any topic: espresso,

the demise of the American Dream, Victorian novels, arts-and-crafts furniture,

libertarianism, new urbanism, 3-D printing, anime, bird-watching,

homeschooling, barbecue. Back in the day, these subculturalists had to gather

physically and had very limited ways to communicate collectively: magazines

and, later, primitive Usenet groups and meet-ups.

Social media has expanded and democratized these subcultures. With a few

clicks, you can jump into the center of any subculture, and participants’

intensive interactions move seamlessly among the web, physical spaces, and

traditional media. Together members are pushing forward new ideas, products,

practices, and aesthetics—bypassing mass-culture gatekeepers. With the rise of

crowdculture, cultural innovators and their early adopter markets have become

one and the same.

Turbocharged art worlds.

Producing innovative popular entertainment requires a distinctive mode of

organization—what sociologists call an art world. In art worlds, artists

(musicians, filmmakers, writers, designers, cartoonists, and so on) gather in

inspired collaborative competition: They work together, learn from one another,

play off ideas, and push one another. The collective efforts of participants in

these “scenes” often generate major creative breakthroughs. Before the rise of

social media, the mass-culture industries (film, television, print media, fashion)

thrived by pilfering and repurposing their innovations.

Crowdculture has turbocharged art worlds, vastly increasing the number of

participants and the speed and quality of their interactions. No longer do you

need to be part of a local scene; no longer do you need to work for a year to get

funding and distribution for your short film. Now millions of nimble cultural

entrepreneurs come together online to hone their craft, exchange ideas, fine-

tune their content, and compete to produce hits. The net effect is a new mode of

rapid cultural prototyping, in which you can get instant data on the market’s

reception of ideas, have them critiqued, and then rework them so that the most

resonant content quickly surfaces. In the process, new talent emerges and new

genres form. Squeezing into every nook and cranny of pop culture, the new

content is highly attuned to audiences and produced on the cheap. These art-

world crowdcultures are the main reason why branded content has failed.

Beyond Branded Content

While companies have put their faith in branded content for the past decade,

brute empirical evidence is now forcing them to reconsider. In YouTube or

Instagram rankings of channels by number of subscribers, corporate brands

barely appear. Only three have cracked the YouTube Top 500. Instead you’ll find

entertainers you’ve never heard of, appearing as if from nowhere.

YouTube’s greatest success by far is PewDiePie, a Swede who posts barely edited

films with snarky voice-over commentary on the video games he plays. By

January 2016 he had racked up nearly 11 billion views, and his YouTube channel

had more than 41 million subscribers.

How did this happen? The story begins with the youth subcultures that formed

around video games. When they landed on social media, they became a force.

The once-oddball video-gaming-as-entertainment subculture of South Korea

went global, producing a massive spectator sport, now known as E-Sports, with a

fan base approaching 100 million people. (Amazon recently bought the E-Sports

network Twitch for $970 million.)

In E-Sports, broadcasters provide play-by-play narration of video games.

PewDiePie and his comrades riffed on this commentary, turning it into a potty-

mouthed new form of sophomoric comedy. Other gamers who film themselves,

such as VanossGaming (YouTube rank #19, 15.6 million subscribers),

elrubiusOMG (#20, 15.6 million), CaptainSparklez (#60, 9 million), and Ali-A

(#94, 7.4 million), are also influential members of this tribe. The crowdculture

was initially organized by specialized media platforms that disseminated this

content and by insider fans who gathered around and critiqued it, hyping some

efforts and dissing others. PewDiePie became the star of this digital art world—

just as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Patti Smith had done in urban art worlds back in

the analog days. The main difference is that the power of crowdculture propelled

him to global fame and influence in record time.

Gaming comedy is just one of hundreds of new genres that crowdculture has

created. Those genres fill every imaginable entertainment gap in popular culture,

from girls’ fashion advice to gross-out indulgent foods to fanboy sports criticism.

Brands can’t compete, despite their investments. Compare PewDiePie, who

cranks out inexpensive videos in his house, to McDonald’s, one of the world’s

biggest spenders on social media. The McDonald’s channel (#9,414) has 204,000

YouTube subscribers. PewDiePie is 200 times as popular, for a minuscule fraction

of the cost.

Or consider Red Bull, the most lauded branded-content success story. It has

become a new-media hub producing extreme- and alternative-sports content.

While Red Bull spends much of its $2 billion annual marketing budget on

branded content, its YouTube channel (rank #184, 4.9 million subscribers) is

lapped by dozens of crowdculture start-ups with production budgets under

$100,000. Indeed, Dude Perfect (#81, 8 million subscribers), the brainchild of

five college jocks from Texas who make videos of trick shots and goofy

improvised athletic feats, does far better.

Coca-Cola offers another cautionary tale. In 2011 the company announced a new

marketing strategy—called Liquid & Linked—with great fanfare. Going all in, it

shifted its emphasis from “creative excellence” (the old mass-media approach) to

“content excellence” (branded content in social media). Coke’s Jonathan

Mildenhall claimed that Coke would continually produce “the world’s most

compelling content,” which would capture “a disproportionate share of popular

culture,” doubling sales by 2020.

The following year, Coca-Cola launched its first big bet, transforming the static

corporate website into a digital magazine, Coca-Cola Journey. It runs stories on

virtually every pop culture topic—from sports and food to sustainability and

travel. It’s the epitome of a branded-content strategy.

Journey has now been live for over three years, and it barely registers views. It

hasn’t cracked the top 10,000 sites in the United States or the top 20,000

worldwide. Likewise, the company’s YouTube channel (ranked #2,749) has only

676,000 subscribers.

It turns out that consumers have little interest in the content that brands churn

out. Very few people want it in their feed. Most view it as clutter—as brand spam.

When Facebook realized this, it began charging companies to get “sponsored”

content into the feeds of people who were supposed to be their fans.

The problem companies face is structural, not creative. Big companies organize

their marketing efforts as the antithesis of art worlds, in what I have termed

brand bureaucracies. They excel at coordinating and executing complex

marketing programs across multiple markets around the world. But this

organizational model leads to mediocrity when it comes to cultural innovation.

Brand Sponsors Are Disintermediated

Entertainment “properties”—performers, athletes, sports teams, films, television

programs, and video games—are also hugely popular on social media. Across all

the big platforms you’ll find the usual A-list of celebrities dominating. On

YouTube musicians Rihanna, One Direction, Katy Perry, Eminem, Justin Bieber,

and Taylor Swift have built massive audiences. On Twitter you’ll find a similar

cast of singers, along with media stars like Ellen DeGeneres, Jimmy Fallon,

On social media, what works for Shakira backres for Crest and Clorox.

Oprah, Bill Gates, and the pope. Fans gather around the tweets of sports stars

Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, Neymar, and Kaká, and teams such as FC

Barcelona and Real Madrid (which are far more popular than the two dominant

sports brands, Nike and Adidas). On Instagram you’ll find more of the same.

These celebrities are all garnering the superengaged community that pundits

have long promised social media would deliver. But it’s not available to

companies and their branded goods and services. In retrospect, that shouldn’t be

surprising: Interacting with a favored entertainer is different from interacting

with a brand of rental car or orange juice. What works for Shakira backfires for

Crest and Clorox. The idea that consumers could possibly want to talk about

Corona or Coors in the same way that they debate the talents of Ronaldo and

Messi is silly.

How One Brand Uses Celebrities to Break Through Under Armour’s recent campaign “I Will What I Want” shows how to combine celebrity sponsorships and cultural branding to create content with impact.

Under Armour originally became an iconic brand by swiping Nike’s cultural strategy—then doing it one better.

Nike’s approach, launched in the 1970s and perfected in the 1990s, was to tell stories of athletes who overcame societal barriers through sheer willpower. But a decade ago Nike abandoned its competitive-underdog ideology to go all in on branded content, using famous athletes to make entertaining sports lms. Under Armour stepped into the void, producing arresting new ads, such as “Protect This House,” that championed the same ideology and took off on social media.

Under Armour also followed Nike in dramatizing how übercompetitiveness, traditionally associated with masculinity, applied equally to women, broadcasting spots that showcased female athletes. The latest effort, “I Will What I Want,” pushed gender boundaries even further, challenging conventions in arenas where traditional ideals of femininity still reign.

Ballet star Misty Copeland—who grew up in poverty with a single parent—is an athletic, muscular dancer in a profession that celebrates waish, reed-thin women. Under Armour made a video about how she rose above adversity (the voice-over is from a rejection letter saying that her body was completely wrong for ballet), showing her dancing in a formtting sports bra and pants that reveal her curvier physique.

A Gisele Bündchen lm followed the same convention-breaking formula but mashed up incongruous crowdcultures to provoke a social media response. The former Victoria’s Secret star is usually portrayed within the glamorous world of runways and celebrity hobnobbing. Under Armour broke the frame by placing her in what was essentially an old Nike ad: a backstage video of Gisele in an intense kickboxing workout. The company announced the partnership ahead of lming. It immediately stirred up the crowdculture: Sports fans were cynical, Gisele fans were curious, fashionistas were puzzled, and feminists simply loved it. Under Armour’s agency scraped all this commentary from the web and projected quotes from the digital discussion on the walls behind her. The resulting video shows Gisele sweating and kicking the bag, ignoring the litany of digs surrounding her: “Is posing now a sport?” “She’s not even pretty.” “What’s her sport, smiling?” “Stick to modeling, sweetie.”

Under Armour succeeded because it innovated with ideology—using female celebrities to provocatively push against gender norms. The company aimed its communiqués directly at the crowdcultures that held those norms, which set off a restorm of debate.Social media allows fans to create rich communities around entertainers, who

interact directly with them in a barrage of tweets, pins, and posts. Sports teams

now hire social media ambassadors to reach out to fans in real time during

games, and once the game is over, the players send along insider photos and hold

locker-room chats. Beyond the major platforms, new media sites like Vevo,

SoundCloud, and Apple Music are spurring even more direct digital connections.

Of course, entertainers are still more than happy to take sponsors’ money, but

the cultural value that’s supposed to rub off on the brand is fading.

Cultural Branding

While the rise of crowdculture diminishes the impact of branded content and

sponsorships, it has greased the wheels for an alternative approach that I call

cultural branding. The dramatic breakthrough of the fast-casual Mexican food

chain Chipotle from 2011 to 2013 (before recent outbreaks of foodborne illness)

demonstrates the power of this approach.

Chipotle took advantage of an enormous cultural opportunity created when the

once-marginal movements that had challenged America’s dominant industrial

food culture became a force to be reckoned with on social media. The chain

jumped into the fray as a champion of this crowdculture’s ideology. By applying

cultural branding, Chipotle became one of America’s most compelling and

talked-about brands (though recent food-safety difficulties have dented its

image). Specifically, Chipotle succeeded by following these five principles:

1. Map the cultural orthodoxy.

In cultural branding, the brand promotes an innovative ideology that breaks with

category conventions. To do that, it first needs to identify which conventions to

leapfrog—what I call the cultural orthodoxy. America’s industrial food ideology

was invented in the early 20th century by food-marketing companies. Americans

had come to believe that, through dazzling scientific discoveries (margarine,

instant coffee, Tang) and standardized production processes, big companies,

overseen by the Food and Drug Administration, would ensure bountiful,

healthful, and tasty food. Those assumptions have undergirded the fast food

category since McDonald’s took off in the 1960s.

2. Locate the cultural opportunity.

As time passes, disruptions in society cause an orthodoxy to lose traction.

Consumers begin searching for alternatives, which opens up an opportunity for

innovative brands to push forward a new ideology in their categories.

How Cultural Branding Builds Icons Iconic brands are cultural innovators: They leapfrog the conventions of their categories to champion new ideologies that are meaningful to customers.

As a result, they enjoy intense customer loyalty and superior sales and prots, and garner loads of free media coverage. In business, few achievements are more prized than creating an iconic brand. Yet the two dominant branding models are not designed to do the job.

The rst model, mindshare branding, is one that companies have long relied on. It treats a brand as a set of psychological associations (benets, emotions, personality). The second model, purpose branding, has become popular in the past decade. In it, a brand espouses values or ideals its customers share. Over the past 15 years I’ve developed an alternative approach—cultural branding— to turn what was once serendipity into a rigorous discipline. Let me illustrate how it works, using the transformation of Jack Daniel’s from a near-bankrupt regional distiller to the maker of the leading premium American whiskey.

Whiskies compete to be perceived as upscale and masculine. In the 1950s the major brands sought to align themselves with the male ideal of the day: the sophisticated modern corporate executive. Jack Daniel’s, a small whiskey

targeted to upper-middle-class men, was being trounced by the national competitors. How could it break through?

Mindshare-branding experts would advise the company to convey, very consistently, the key brand associations: masculine, sophisticated, smooth- tasting, classic. But that was precisely what Jack Daniel’s was doing—its ads mimicked the national brands’, showing alpha executives drinking smooth whiskey. And they didn’t work. Purpose-branding experts would encourage the rm to champion its core values. With that approach, the focus wouldn’t be much different: Those values had to do with producing classic charcoal-ltered whiskey for a sophisticated drinker.

Instead, the rm (tacitly) pursued a cultural-branding approach. Because masculine ideals are shaped by society, they change over time. The Cold War had dramatically affected Americans’ perceptions of masculinity. In the face of a nuclear threat, the corporate executive seemed too sedentary. Instead, the public was drawn to what had only recently been viewed as an anachronism: the gunslinging rugged individualist of the Old West, who, in the American mythos, had helped forge the country’s success. The enormous popularity of Western lms was one indication of this shift. This massive cultural opportunity, which Marlboro and Levi’s leveraged as well, is obvious when analyzed through a cultural-branding framework—but invisible without one.

The Jack Daniel’s distillery was in a rural region of Tennessee that the postwar mass media portrayed as an impoverished land of hillbillies. Yet in the American imagination, the area was also one of the last authentic pockets of the frontier, where Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone had gotten their start. So when American men yearned to revive the ideology of the frontier, the whiskey offered great potential as a symbol. This theme was rst hit upon by men’s magazines (Fortune, True), which published stories romanticizing the distillery as a place run by frontiersmen, little changed since the 19th century. The company’s print-ad campaign simply emulated those stories, adding some folksy copy.

Jack Daniel’s quickly became the aspirational whiskey among urban upper- middle-class men; the branding converted its once-stigmatized location into a place where men were really men. Conventional models would never build a

strategy centered on such a downscale version of masculinity. But in cultural branding, inverting marginal ideologies is one of the tricks of the trade.

For industrial food, the tipping point came in 2001, when Eric Schlosser’s book

Fast Food Nation powerfully challenged it. This was followed in 2004 by Morgan

Spurlock’s film Super Size Me and in 2006 by Michael Pollan’s influential book

The Omnivore’s Dilemma. These critiques dramatically affected the upper middle

class, quickly spreading concerns about industrial food and providing huge

momentum to Whole Foods Market, Trader Joe’s, and a host of other upmarket

food purveyors. The same transformation is unfolding in other countries

dominated by industrial food ideology. For instance, in the United Kingdom the

celebrity chefs Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have played a

similar role.

Before social media, the influence of these works would have remained locked

within this small fraction of society. Instead, crowdcultures grabbed the critiques

and blew them up, pushing industrial food anxiety into the mainstream. News

about every major problem linked to industrial food production—processed

foods loaded with sugar, carcinogenic preservatives, rBGH in milk, bisphenol A

leaching from plastics, GMOs, and so on—began to circulate at internet speed.

Videos of the meatlike substance “pink slime” went viral. Parents worried

endlessly about what they were feeding their kids. Crowdculture converted an

elite concern into a national social trauma that galvanized a broad public

challenge.

3. Target the crowdculture.

Challengers to the industrial food ideology had lurked at the margins for more

than 40 years but had been easily pushed aside as crazy Luddites. Small

subcultures had evolved around organic farming and pastured livestock, eking

out a living at the fringes of the market in community-supported agriculture and

farmers’ markets. But as social media took off, an influential and diverse cluster

of overlapping subcultures pushed hard for food innovations. They included

advocates of evolutionary nutrition and paleo diets, sustainable ranchers, a new

generation of environmental activists, urban gardeners, and farm-to-table

restaurants. In short order, a massive cultural movement had organized around

the revival of preindustrial foods. Chipotle succeeded because it jumped into this

crowdculture and took on its cause.

4. Diffuse the new ideology.

Chipotle promoted preindustrial food ideology with two films. In 2011 the

company launched Back to the Start, an animated film with simple wooden

figures. In it, an old-fashioned farm is transformed into a parody of a hyper-

rationalized industrial farm: The pigs are stuffed together inside a concrete barn,

then enter an assembly line where they are injected with chemicals that fatten

them into blimps, and then are pressed into cubes and deposited in a fleet of

semis. The farmer is haunted by this transformation and decides to convert his

farm back to its original pastoral version.

Crowdculture converted an elite concern into a national social trauma.

The second film, The Scarecrow, parodied an industrial food company that

branded its products using natural farm imagery. The company is actually a

factory in which animals are injected with drugs and treated inhumanely. It

cranks out premade meals stamped “100% beef-ish” that kids, oblivious to the

real process, eagerly gobble up. A scarecrow who works at the factory is

depressed by what he witnesses until he gets an idea. He picks a bunch of

produce from his garden, takes it to the city, and opens up a little taqueria—a

facsimile of a Chipotle.

The films were launched with tiny media buys and then seeded out on social

media platforms. Both were extremely influential, were watched by tens of

millions, generated huge media hits, and helped drive impressive sales and profit

gains. Each won the Grand Prix at the Cannes advertising festival.

Chipotle’s films are wrongly understood simply as great examples of branded

content. They worked because they went beyond mere entertainment. The films

were artful, but so are many thousands of films that don’t cut through. Their

stories weren’t particularly original; they had been repeated over and over with

creative vigor for the previous decade or so. But they exploded on social media

because they were myths that passionately captured the ideology of the

burgeoning preindustrial food crowdculture. Chipotle painted an inspired vision

of America returning to bucolic agricultural and food production traditions and

reversing many problems in the dominant food system.

The bête noire of the preindustrial food movement is fast food, so the idea that a

major fast food company would promote that story was particularly potent with

the crowd. Chipotle was taking on pink slime! Moreover, boutique locavore food

was expensive, but at Chipotle people could now assuage their worries with a $7

burrito. Because they tapped into anxieties percolating in the crowdculture,

Chipotle’s films never had to compete as great entertainment.

5. Innovate continually, using cultural ashpoints.

A brand can sustain its cultural relevance by playing off particularly intriguing or

contentious issues that dominate the media discourse related to an ideology.

That’s what Ben & Jerry’s did so well in championing its sustainable business

philosophy. The company used new-product introductions to playfully spar with

the Reagan administration on timely issues such as nuclear weapons, the

destruction of the rain forests, and the war on drugs.

To thrive, Chipotle must continue to lead on flashpoint issues with products and

communiqués. The company has been less successful in this respect: It followed

up with a Hulu series that had little social media impact because it simply

mimicked the prior films rather than staking out new flashpoints. Then Chipotle

moved on to a new issue, championing food without GMOs. Aside from the fact

that this claim challenged its credibility (after all, Chipotle still sold meat fed by

GMO grain and soft drinks made with GMO sweeteners), GMO was a relatively

weak flashpoint, a contentious issue only among the most activist consumers

and already touted by many hundreds of products. These efforts failed to rally

the crowdculture. A number of other flashpoints, such as sugary drinks and

industrial vegetable oils, generate far more controversy and have yet to be

tackled by a major food business.

Of course, leading with ideology in the mass market can be a double-edged

sword. The brand has to walk the walk or it will be called out. Chipotle is a large

and growing business with many industrial-scale processes, not a small farm-to-

table taqueria. Delivering perishable fresh food, which the company is

committed to as a preindustrial food champion, is a huge operational challenge.

Chipotle’s reputation has taken a painful hit with highly publicized outbreaks of

E. coli and norovirus contamination. Chipotle won’t win back consumer trust

through ads or public relations efforts. Rather, the company has to convince the

crowdculture that it’s doubling down on its commitment to get preindustrial

food right, and then the crowd will advocate for its brand once again.

Competing for Crowdcultures

To brand effectively with social media, companies should target crowdcultures.

Today, in pursuit of relevance, most brands chase after trends. But this is a

commodity approach to branding: Hundreds of companies are doing exactly the

same thing with the same generic list of trends. It’s no wonder consumers don’t

pay attention. By targeting novel ideologies flowing out of crowdcultures, brands

can assert a point of view that stands out in the overstuffed media environment.

Take the personal care category. Three brands—Dove, Axe, and Old Spice—have

generated tremendous consumer interest and identification in a historically low-

involvement category, one you would never expect to get attention on social

media. They succeeded by championing distinctive gender ideologies around

which crowdcultures had formed.

Axe mines the lad crowd. In the 1990s feminist critiques of patriarchal culture

were promulgated by academics in American universities. These attacks

whipped up a conservative backlash mocking “politically correct” gender

politics. It held that men were under siege and needed to rekindle their

traditional masculinity. In the UK and then the United States, this rebellion gave

rise to a tongue-in-cheek form of sexism called “lad culture.” New magazines like

Maxim, FHM, and Loaded harked back to the Playboy era, featuring lewd stories

with soft-porn photos. This ideology struck a chord with many young men. By

the early 2000s lad culture was migrating onto the web as a vital crowdculture.

Axe (sold as Lynx in the UK and Ireland) had been marketed in Europe and Latin

America since the 1980s but had become a dated, also-ran brand. That is, until

the company jumped onto the lad bandwagon with “The Axe Effect,” a campaign

that pushed to bombastic extremes politically incorrect sexual fantasies. It

spread like wildfire on the internet and instantly established Axe as the over-the-

top cheerleader for the lad crowd.

Dove leads the body-positive crowd. Axe’s aggressive stand set up a perfect

opportunity for another brand to champion the feminist side of this “gender

war.” Dove was a mundane, old-fashioned brand in a category in which

marketing usually rode the coattails of the beauty trends set by fashion houses

and media. By the 2000s the ideal of the woman’s body had been pushed to

By targeting novel ideologies from crowdcultures, brands can stand out.

ridiculous extremes. Feminist critiques of the use of starved size 0 models began

to circulate in traditional and social media. Instead of presenting an aspiration,

beauty marketing had become inaccessible and alienating to many women.

Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” tapped into this emerging crowdculture by

celebrating real women’s physiques in all their normal diversity—old, young,

curvy, skinny, short, tall, wrinkled, smooth. Women all over the world pitched in

to produce, circulate, and cheer for images of bodies that didn’t conform to the

beauty myth. Throughout the past decade, Dove has continued to target cultural

flashpoints—such as the use of heavily Photoshopped images in fashion

magazines—to keep the brand at the center of this gender discourse.

Old Spice taps the hipster crowd. The ideological battle between the laddish view

and body-positive feminism left untouched one other cultural opportunity in the

personal care market. In the 2000s, a new “hipster” ideology arose in urban

subcultures to define sophistication among young cosmopolitan adults. They

embraced the historical bohemian ideal with gusto but also with self-referential

irony. Ironic white-trash wardrobes (foam trucker hats, ugly Salvation Army

sweaters) and facial hair (waxed handlebar mustaches, bushy beards) became

pervasive. Brooklyn was chock-full of lumberjacks. Amplified by crowdculture,

this sensibility rapidly spread across the country.

Old Spice branding piggybacked on hipster sophistication with a parody of Axe

and masculine clichés. The campaign featured a chiseled, bare-chested former

football player, Isaiah Mustafa, as a huckster for Old Spice—“the man your man

could smell like.” The films hit the hipster bull’s-eye, serving up an extremely

“hot” guy whose shtick is to make fun of the conventions of male attractiveness.

You too can be hot if you offer your woman amazing adventures, diamonds and

gold, and studly body poses, all with aggressive spraying of Old Spice.

These three brands broke through in social media because they used cultural

branding—a strategy that works differently from the conventional branded-

content model. Each engaged a cultural discourse about gender and sexuality in

wide circulation in social media—a crowdculture—which espoused a distinctive

ideology. Each acted as a proselytizer, promoting this ideology to a mass

audience. Such opportunities come into view only if we use the prism of cultural

branding—doing research to identify ideologies that are relevant to the category

and gaining traction in crowdcultures. Companies that rely on traditional

segmentation models and trend reports will always have trouble identifying

those opportunities.

A decade in, companies are still struggling to come up with a branding model

that works in the chaotic world of social media. The big platforms—the

Facebooks and YouTubes and Instagrams—seem to call the shots, while the vast

majority of brands are cultural mutes, despite investing billions. Companies need

to shift their focus away from the platforms themselves and toward the real locus

of digital power—crowdcultures. They are creating more opportunities than ever

for brands. Old Spice succeeded not with a Facebook strategy but with a strategy

that leveraged the ironic hipster aesthetic. Chipotle succeeded not with a

YouTube strategy but with products and communications that spoke to the

preindustrial food movement. Companies can once again win the battle for

cultural relevance with cultural branding, which will allow them to tap into the

power of the crowd.

A version of this article appeared in the March 2016 issue (pp.40–48, 50) of Harvard Business Review.

Douglas Holt is the founder and president of the Cultural Strategy Group and was formerly a professor at Harvard Business School and the University of Oxford. He is the author of How Brands

Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).

Related Topics: SOCIAL PLATFORMS

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