Do you want your website to deliver you a super-engaged community that will then buy and use and return to buy and use more of whatever product or service you are selling? Yeah, me, too. Alas, however, before you can enjoy the benefits of such a relationship, you must invest some of all your resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people in online cultural branding to create and sustain that relationship.
Cultural branding did not just spring up last week, month, or even year. One of the early writers about it is Douglas Holt, who wrote How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. Holt, a former Harvard Business School professor who wisely gave up academia for lucre, founded the Cultural Strategy Group. http://culturalbranding.org. His friends at HBS apparently still love him, however, because they published his work another time as a Big Idea section titled Branding in the Age of Social Media. https://hbr.org/2016/03/branding-in-the-age-of-social-media.
Cultural branding requires you to innovatively leapfrog the conventions of your workspace and champion ideologies that are meaningful to your largest sphere of prospective customers. This requires a shift from mindshare branding, through purpose branding, and to cultural branding.
If you’ve ever marketed anything in the past, then you familiar with mindshare branding, whether you call it that or not. Mindshare branding uses psychological associations to convince prospects whatever you are selling will enhance their benefits, emotions, and personality. Purpose branding, mindsharing in the present third millennia, actively espouses the values or ideals prospective customers share.
Cultural branding requires less obvious selling and more subtle, but also more active, support of a targeted pre-existing cultural segment of society’s values and ideals using a strategic combination of traditional media platforms and current social media tools. The targeted subsegment is one that is working on leapfrogging the larger society’s orthodoxy, which creates a cultural opportunity that a marketer can then champion purposefully, truthfully, effectively, and efficiently. Cultural branding requires actually figuring out what culture you want to serve and then actually joining and serving that culture.
Finding, joining, and serving a culture takes # steps:
- Mapping the cultural orthodoxy
- Locating the cultural opportunity
- Targeting the crowdculture
- Diffusing the new ideology
- Innovating continually, using cultural flashpoints.
In his HBR article, Holt explained each of these five steps and describes how Chipotle scored 80% over the test of time:
- Chipotle leapfrogged the cultural orthodoxy that “BigFood’s” commercially processed and refined foods were good for us,;
- located the cultural opportunity being pushed by Whole Foodies, Trader Joe’s fanatics, Jamie Oliver home-cuisinartists, and others that they wanted healthier food such as organics, non-organic, but unprocessed, and farm-to-table fruits and vegetables;
- Researched, recognized, and joined the grassroots subculture (crowdculture) advocating these ideas;
- Diffused the subcultures idea in an entertaining, educational, and enthusing way using some short, animated movies tied in to a good social media presence and traditional media platforms; but
- Chipotle spun out in the end, however, when it didn’t continue along the culturebranding path by picking inconsequential issues to support, picking consequential issues such as non-GMO foods, but failing to walk that walk, and then suffering through its E.coli problems.
Holt’s article mentions other brands that have exploited subcultural shifts, such as:
- Axe (men’s grooming products exploiting the “lad” fad)
- Dove (led the body-positive crowd with a campaign for “real beauty”)
- Old Spice (used Isaiah Mustafa to let women believe they could improve their men with Old Spice deodorants and colognes).
So, apparently, Holt’s recognized and pointed out for us cultural branding. The question remains, how do we in small business, who cannot afford much in the way of professionally produced videos run first on traditional media and then seeded over social media, use cultural branding most effectively and efficiently to run, grow, and sell our businesses better?
Come back next time and we will discuss more about that.
[reminder]How does your website compare and contrast with the websites of the companies mentioned in Holt’s article discussed in this post? Look and see and then come back read the next post in this series.[/reminder]