Element Assessment #2 – Format: Dynamic (Video) Imagery
marybewy
HBR-BrandingintheAgeofSocialMedia-WithComments.pdf
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.
Amplied 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 backres 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 waish, 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 formtting 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 prots, 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 (benets, 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
This article is about BRANDING
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31 COMMENTS
Niki Qwee 15 days ago
Thanks for this useful post! Social media Inuencers, when used correctly, are arguably one of
the world’s most powerful forms of digital marketing at present and thus worth it. Inuencers
typically specialize in their own niche to capture a targeted audience. I use ingramer.com and
bigbangram.com/hashtag-generator for me account on IG and also I use livelikes.com( this
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program get likes, followers, views, reposts and commentson the most prominent social
media - Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, VK, and Youtube). You might want to check out, I can
say that this will surely help you either.
Monica Wilson 9 months ago
Thanks for sharing this post. I think so now a days social media is one of the biggest and
greatest places to promote your business and get brand recognition. You can build the brand
on social media and earn the trust of people. It is very necessary for every brand to have
unique personality from other brands. You can also try some tools like Growr (
https://socialgrowr.com/ ) to get followers for your Instagram account.
Linda Vecvagare 10 months ago
Thanks for the interesting article! I think this comes together with what such media scholars as
Axel Bruns and Henry Jenkins have described as Generation C and participatory culture. What
we have to deal with nowadays is digital natives and exceptionally tech-savvy population and
traditional online marketing methods just don't work on them. Generation C trust each other
and look to one another for recommendations. This means that making a lasting impression
and ensuring the awless customer experience is the most crucial thing for brands (you can
read more about it here: http://cli.re/generation-c-marketing-tips). I totally agree that now it's
more about the experience and community that brands can offer than plain branding itself.
And the best way to do it is by analyzing your customers and their behavior and interactions
with your content. This is also why I use different analytic tools like Google Analytics and
www.capsulink.com on daily basis. This way I make sure I can optimize the content I create
and provide meaningful experience to the audience.
Sonya Baldwin a year ago
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This is a great article with good info! A lot of success of your project also depends on how well
you trust your branding company. Here are some ways to avoid project failure written by Nice
Branding - https://nice-branding.com/trust-branding-company-hired/
William Leeman a year ago
Very well written article, right on point, personally I love how the industries its created are
evolving. I just broke into social media management etc myself I love the research and
constant learning and adapting. I love creating gorilla tactics yes I meant to spell it that way lol
to give my clients as much reach and lead conversion as possible.
Emma Braun 2 years ago
This is a literally amazing article about how social media can be utilized as branding. I guess
social media itself is a playground to make-up your brand and have a word of mouth of your
product. 90% of the marketers of this era cannot neglect social media as a core factor for their
brand. Recently I found another article which is highly interconnected with this piece of
writing. Here are 5 advantages of social media for marketing and branding you never know! :
http://www.craftedium.com/blog/top-5-advantages-social-media-for-marketing
Ganesha Lufthansa 2 years ago
I nd this article very helpful and interesting. When it comes into branding, this website surely
is very helpful. There's also a website that gives insights about branding:
http://www.dreambox.id/blog/ which is very helpful and understandable, too.
Lorena Carpio 2 years ago
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I nd pretty important for our business and brands to have a unique personality to be
identiable from other brands. Equally important, we have to take care of its image on the
internet. That is why a few months ago I started working with the Dalai Group team. I was soon
made aware of how meaningful it is to be present on social networks and generate
engagement with our consumers. With the social media strategy Dalai Group built for my
brand, my business saw a 15% growth rate in social media trafc this month. Users took part in
conversations about our brand and new visitors came to our website to request products. This
is where you can nd them http://dalaigroup.com/services/social-media-marketing/ they are
really good at consulting and SEO strategies.
Marlee Ellison 2 years ago
An excellent read. Cultural shifts in the digital age have posed a mountain of problems for
brands, and it seems that a lot of them have never truly recovered. People don't trust branded
content anymore – it's trying to sell you something, not help you. It's just not objective.
Another great way to work with social media (instead of against it) is to incorporate user-
generated content into marketing strategies. People trust photos and videos taken by other
ordinary people. And when brands use this content, their engagement soars.
Fortunately, high-tech platforms like Scop.io help brands take advantage of the social media
explosion. You can now license photos and videos from Twitter and Instagram with the click of
a button. It works far better than stock photos or branded content!
Nelson Traver 2 years ago
Thanks a lot Douglas for the post on branding.Thank you for posting the wonderful post, i have
gone through this article and i have learned so much from this. I would like to add another
perspective as detailed "Branding and Advertising includes concepts of product branding,
consumer behavior, marketing communication, and public relations. Branding is the process of
creating a distinct image of a product or range of products in the customer's mind. This image
communicates the promise of value the customer will receive from the product or products.
Branding should remain consistent across all channels of customer communications." in
http://www.smstudy.com/. U could also go thorough this site and gather some information
about the marketing research :http://www.smstudy.com/Article/
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SERENA GONSALVES 2 years ago
I love articles that make me think and motivates me to look at things differently! It was a very
insightful and well written article!
Cheers
Serena
Ranjeet Menon 2 years ago
This is an extremely insightful article and a must read for everyone connected to the internet. I
have rst hand experience of the power of crowd culture. I am sure the world must have heard
about Indian movies and Bollywood. Every Indian state has it's own movie industry. I come
from the state of Kerala and what is unique about what we call as Mollywood is that no matter
whose movies get released, it can be of a super star or a rst timer, if the movie neither has a
good story line nor is a good entertainer, word spreads so fast that the fate of the movie sinks
in 2-3 days.
When the author of the article talks about crowd culture, he is talking about the people on the
ground who understands the realities and who truly understands what can be changed and
what it takes to bring about those changes. The time when people used to lap up all the
advertisements in print and visual media has changed rapidly in the last few years. The two
words that have become extremely signicant in the digital media world are user engagement
and user retention. To promote a brand through social media, companies need a dual strategy
of continuously engaging with people on one side and also ensuring that there are positive
outcomes and value add for both the parties.
A friend who works in the digital marketing had told me about a couple of the clients she is
working for, one trying to push latest clothing trends for women through the digital media into
a city that is immersed in traditional values and the boss of a beauty salon startup who is
expecting 3 times revenue for what he is investing every month for branding his products in the
digital space. The rst question I asked her was, what are the marketing strategies of these
companies on the ground? Indian market is a very unique and sensitive place where branding
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strategies can vary considerably from one state to another. To get people to talk about their
products on social media, they still need to have the basic marketing strategy in the print and
visual media in place rst and it is this dual strategy that would work for them. This would hold
true specically for any company that is trying to create market disruption through it's
products. The success of every business model depends eventually on it's strategies for
reaching out to people and engaging with them.
SOFIE Sandell 2 years ago
When I train and speak about social media I always say it's hard to do it well if you don't know
who you are and what you stand for. If your brand isn't sure about that their communication
will become wishy-washy.
11 difcult & time-consuming ways to boost your social media strategy
http://www.soesandell.com/11-difcult-time-consuming-ways-to-boost-your-social-media-
strategy
I’m tired of posts that share ‘X easy ways to boost your social media strategy’. Being great at
communication is never easy. Sorry, but it isn’t, never ever. It takes effort, engagement and a
big dose of endurance to be great at any kind of communication.
I’ve listed some of the headlines that most annoy me below. I found them by randomly
searching on Google for ‘easy ways’ to boost your social media strategy.
‘7 Easy Ways To Boost Social Engagement Today’
‘5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Social Media Marketing’
‘8 Guaranteed Ways to Increase Social Media Reach’
‘11 Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Social Media Results’
The formula: no effort = great results. This is very rarely true in any context.
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I teach large organisations how to manage their social media strategy. Not a single person has
ever said it’s easy, quick or simple to manage their strategy. Nope, not a single one and I’ve
met hundreds of social media managers.
Rajnil Mallik 2 years ago
Interesting article, but there might be a few simplications. Fundamentally, not everyone on
social media is the same – there are niches along every conceivable dimension and successful
campaigns need to customize heavily. For example, some dimensions may include brand
positioning (Prada v. Zappos), by platform (Facebook v. LinkedIn), and by target segment
(Millennials v. Pre-Teens).
The title “Branding in the Age of Social Media” implies a need to center all branding practices
on social media. Multiple channels (the TV, radio, newspaper, subway ads, etc.) have always
co-existed, and the real winners incorporate holistic, omni-channel strategies rather than
solely focusing on Social Media as a separate toy.
The true power of social media is that it allows for a) customization (based on user
preferences) b) enrichment (videos and live interaction as opposed to billboards) and c) fast
failing (and faster recovery)
Brand marketers must continue to focus on dening the brand messaging and customer
promise. Social Media should only be but one of many means for spreading the messaging.
Gwen Gayhart 2 years ago
The author's point, however, wasn't really about which platforms are or should be used
for branding. Rather, he reected on (and recommended a strategy for) branding in
general. Despite the fact that other, more traditional distribution mediums continue to
exist, his point was that the dawn of the hyper-connected, super-active social media
era has prompted a shift in the origins of what drives cultural innovation, thereby also
prompting a need for brands to consider "amplied subcultures" in their branding
strategies, no matter the medium. If a brand can't "get relevant," its brand strategy is
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doomed to fail, and if brands want to get relevant, they need to look up from their
metrics spreadsheets and engage with their kids (or young people, in general), who are
naturally-primed to be sensitive to what's culturally-relevant.
Jaime Porta Martin 2 years ago
I think the point of this article is that you have to focus on an ideology instead of a
trend. People are looking for brands that support their way of being. Meanwhile,
brands have to nd the main ideology that supports the biggest share of its targeted
customers (Axe with the lad culture; Dove with the real body, etc.).
Once the ideology is found, the brand has to nd the marketing strategy to release it. It
doesn't matter if it is on social media or in the newspaper, what really matters is that
people nd the support they search.
ERIK Sturesson 2 years ago
Really good article. I loved it when I read the article in the newspaper-subscription. Thank you
for keeping us, the readers, up to date!
Best wishes
Erik Sturesson
CEO, Student Node
Cirqus 6 2 years ago
Good article. I think there are a few simple yet brutally frank truths that need to embraced.
Fact is, branded content works. The problem for most large agencies however is that the
crowd-culture is more creative, produces better content faster, taps into a global subcultural
zeitgeist much better (because it is a part of that zeitgeist) and is completely unfettered by the
norms and practices of traditional advertising. The volatile cauldron of social dynamics has
often been the catalyst for the creation of pop culture phenomena. This cauldron however is
fueled by the heat of true, raw, authentic human emotion in reaction to prevalent or even
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eeting social situations. With the democratization of creativity and connectivity enabled by
social media, the creative output caused by these responses to social situations is more
authentic and therefore, results in more immediate and natural resonance. The cauldron has
the added benet of being akin to a pot of hot porridge or grits (trust me, I'm going somewhere
with this). As it bubbles, tiny volcano like structures emerge and tiny 'pops' of hot
porridge/grits emerge. In the cauldron of globally connected hyper creativity, these pops are
akin to the super successful creative executions we see (because the number of super
successful creative is a small fraction of the total creative output generated). Large brands
however, aren't designed to produce massive creative output in order to nd a few successful
hits; in fact they're designed to achieve the exact opposite - make creative hits as efciently
and quickly and cost effectively as possible. In such a pressure cooker environment, the
pressure cooker can rarely produce the kind of taste that the cauldron can because the
method of cooking is different. Brands need to, in the old parlance of the street, get over
themselves. Take percentages of their massive budgets to support those who do create great
content. If bloggers blog for the love of it yet inuence the opinions of millions of people
worldwide, reach out to bloggers and nd simple ways to collaborate. What's painfully obvious
now is that much of the in house creative from large brands and large agencies simply cannot
compete any more with a globally connected structure of creatives. The open market has co-
opted the conversation and brands need to nd a way to maintain relevance in that
conversation lest consumers more rapidly embrace what's now a nascent but growing
phenomenon; creating for themselves, the products and services they desire, bypassing those
created for them.
Nathanael Este-Klein 3 years ago
Interesting read, even if the article is some kind of native advertising. But a professional
sharing his convictions is obviously only self-promoting himself, and shouldn’t he be allowed
to do so?
In my humble opinion, the question you raise is simply: has a cultural approach for branding
and communication became more relevant at the digital age that it used to be in the past?
I believe that yes, even if I am not convinced by your examples nor by the methodology of
"cultural branding" (let’s be careful, trademark infringement here) Mostly because, like others
readers, it seemed all warmed over to me.
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- "Branding is a set of techniques designed to generate cultural relevance". Totally agree, but
this has been discussed since the early age of marketing with academic works and highlighted
with buzzwordy concepts from agencies as "cultural traction" (WPP, 2010) or "cultural muscle"
(JWT, 2014)
- "Map the cultural orthodoxy and locate the cultural opportunity"? Sounds very familiar to
disruption (TBWA, 1996) with just a « cultural » twist.
- "Target the crowdculture and diffuse the new ideology"? This isn’t different from what
advocates Ogilvy for (at least) 10 years: a brand should have a point of view, OK, we got that.
I found the concept of crowd-culture interesting though, and I agree on many points about
subculture’s inuence and how they can now be amplied with digital tools. How a subculture
can became mainstream at the digital age is indeed a very interesting question. Exploring the
brands that has tapped into subcultures to build their legitimacy - like let's say Supreme -
would have been much more relevant than taking the examples of the last Lion's winners and
turning them into "cultural case studies"
Also, even a failed attempt of taking the concept of "culture" and using it as a real
methodological tool, not just a gimmick, would have been really honorable. But in order to do
that, it would have needed a clear denition, and maybe we would still be debating about that
instead. Merriam-Webster crowned “culture” the 2014 Word of the Year but my feeling is that
we still don’t know what does it really means, neither for us or for brands.
Barbara Kruger made a great work titled « When I heard the word culture, I take out my
checkbook". Maybe I will take out my wallet and buy your book after all, out of curiosity.
PS: English is not my native language, sorry if you felt it.
Kevin York 3 years ago
Iz A is on the right path. To take it a step further, I'd say HBR should really have this piece
labeled as sponsored content. An entire article promoting "cultural branding" from the guy
whose agency ofcially trademarked the term? Plus he promotes the Jack Daniel's example as
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a success without disclosing that Jack Daniel's is a client. Real lack of transparency there. Lost
some respect for HBR with this one.
In terms of the subject matter, this post isn't saying anything new. Branded content isn't
broken, it's not going anywhere. All good pieces of content combine audience, context and
brand. It's just that some brands aren't good at it, while others are. The same argument
could've been made 20 years ago with other mediums.
Richard Hren 3 years ago
Perhaps companies will go back to basics, simply making great products.
tim Piper 3 years ago
Branded content succeeds when the work is great and culturally relevant. PR and social media
are good distribution tools, with traditional TV and paid YouTube views coming a distant
second. The problem is (always has been, always will be) the quality of the creative product.
Academics and marketers keep refusing to accept this because it means that success is out of
their immediate control. While the debates continue, the same creative-driven companies
keep delivering for intelligent brands no matter what the climate. Ted Manger is correct and I
speak from experience having written Dove's rst viral "Evolution" and co-created the Chipotle
series, which had an 800% return on investment with enormous earned social media & PR btw
(and drew attention to multiple issues, which the short form animations couldn't due to
length.) That said, enjoyed the article and found it mostly valid.
Iz A 3 years ago
You keep reminding the reader "...what I call...." And "....what I call...." And "...what I call..."
We get it. You coin phrases and terms no one cares about. Marketing, like music or humour,
cannot be taught.
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Marc Dhalluin 3 years ago
This is a terric post, thank you. I think you frame and package the holy grail of competitive
marketing - gaining acute insight into an appropriate audience, amplifying that insight in a
relevant way, and then distributing it correctly. And the insight, to be 'culturally' effective, has
to, absolutely has to be considered 'higher purpose' insight. It encompasses the 'why' we do
things, as opposed to 'what' we do. Web has made it easy for everyone to be present, and
therefore mediocrity has ourished.
Gaurav Bhandari 3 years ago
A very insightful article. However, I wonder if the brands identify the sub-culture and plan or if
the sub-culture is identied post the success of a campaign? My experience says that there are
too many sub-cultures going around (as specied in the article as well). While planning a
campaign, you try and touch as many relevant aspects as possible and then zero down on the
one which is most effective!
ted manger 3 years ago
With all due respect, this is the quintessential example of over complicating the obvious --
something marketers and academics excel at.
Having worked for years in marketing I can bet that the very reason that your success stories,
Chipotle, RedBull, UnderArmor etc. succeeded is because they ignored articles like this one.
Do you really thing they sat down to "map the cultural opportunity"? I don't. I think they did
what they thought was cool instead of consulting some kind of marketing playbook --even one
as well thought out as this. If you have to read how to do it, you don't know how.
Ted Manger
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Emily Sandoval 2 years ago
Exactly. The problem for most brands is that they are too scared to take a risk on
promoting what is culturally relevant (aka cool and new) -- right as it's beginning and
before any other brands participate. Dove - they pioneered that "body positive"
movement (from a brand perspective). And now look at all of the brands that are now
following suit.
Neha Bindal 3 years ago
Case studies about these popular brands clearly demonstrates that marketing and branding
activities work when they are linked with some way of life. One size doesn't t all, we can have
the perfect blend of marketing mix but if it lacks a hook i.e. some unique association or
belongingness then it cant work out.
Soriya Pen 3 years ago
Great read!!
edith duarte 3 years ago
Enjoyed this reading. Great insight. Practical. Shared on my network.
Jonathan Feliciano 3 years ago
Amazing Article! A lot of great insight.
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