Globalization, Culture, and Branding

How to Leverage Cultural Equity for Building Iconic Brands in the Era of Globalization

C. Torelli

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137331953
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Drawing from novel theoretical insights in social psychology, cultural psychology, and marketing, Globalization, Culture and Branding provides guidelines for imbuing brands with culturally symbolic meanings that can create deep psychological bonds with multi-cultural consumers.

Section 1

Understanding Brands and Their Cultural Meanings

Chapter 1

Brands and Models of Brand Equity

When I started writing this book in January of 2013, a Google search for the word brand yielded 2.91 billion (yes, with a b!) results. Although an exhaustive analysis of the content of these results was out of the scope of my inquiry, browsing through the results allows us to quickly identify key stakeholders concerning brands. A cursory glance shows page after page of links to brand consultants with recipes for helping companies create strong brands, as well as links to company websites promoting their own brands. The next category of links includes public news about brands, such as new product introductions, product recalls, and brand stories. Finally, blogs and forums also exist, in which consumers discuss issues related to the brands they use. These findings support the idea that brands matter to three different groups of stakeholders: companies, consumers, and society. Why are brands of interest for these different groups? Let us answer this question by focusing on the functions that brands perform for each group.

Functions That Brands Perform for Companies

David Aaker¹ starts his influential book Managing Brand Equity with a quote from Larry Light, a prominent advertising professional. When asked in 1991 to give his perspective on marketing three decades into the future, Light’s response was “The marketing battle will be a battle of brands, a competition for brand dominance. Businesses and investors will recognize brands as the company’s most valuable assets.” Two decades have passed, and Light’s prediction seems to be right on the money. Marketing practitioners and academics alike acknowledge that brands are possibly the most valuable asset a firm has. A company’s stock price goes up or down when new information points to the strength or weakness of the brands in its portfolio. In the quest for properly managing valuable brand assets, companies have fueled a flourishing industry of brand-management consultancy services. Companies’ focus on brand management is also apparent in the central role that brand-management courses play in MBA programs and the increasing presence of these courses in undergraduate business programs.

The International Accounting Standards Board² defines an asset as “a resource controlled by the enterprise as a result of past events and from which future economic benefits are expected to flow to the enterprise.” At its most basic level, a brand is a name often protected through a registered trademark that is used by sellers to distinguish their goods and services.³ Through the process of linking these names to distinctive elements (e.g., logos, slogans, symbols, and colors) and associations (e.g., quality characteristics and brand imagery), firms expect consumers to repeatedly buy their branded products and services. When firms succeed at this task, brands become assets capable of generating future economic benefit.⁴ Thus, the key function that brands perform for companies is to serve as identifications that can induce consumers to prefer the company’s products and services over those of competitors.

Functions That Brands Perform for Consumers

Imagine your last trip to a grocery store. If you are like me, this is one of the least exciting events during your week. However, this can be a somewhat painless experience when you focus on quickly grabbing from the shelves items that have been pre-identified on a grocery list. Importantly, you can only quickly match a product name on the list (e.g., toothpaste) with an actual product on the store’s shelves when you know exactly the brand of the product you are looking for (e.g., Colgate Total–Clean Mint toothpaste). This can be a simple process that we perform based on our habit to buy certain branded versions of products. Indeed, if you are like me, the most difficult part of the grocery trip can be buying fresh vegetables and fruits that lack brand names. However, even this is becoming an exception, as I can now buy the Rio Star grapefruit (registered trademark of TexaSweet Citrus Marketing, Inc.) that I like! Indeed, the international traveler probably remembers how intimidating it can be to grocery shop for the first time in a foreign environment that lacks familiar branded products. Which brand will I like? Which is the best quality? Will people around me disapprove if I buy one brand over another?

The above paragraph illustrates some of the key functions that brands perform for consumers. Brands help consumers to quickly identify a desirable version of a product. Brands can simplify purchasing decisions by saving time and effort that could be spent in searching for product alternatives. Brands also minimize the risk of making a bad decision, or one that will not fit one’s expectations for the product.⁵ In addition to these practical functions, brands can often say something about the user. For instance, buying a premium-priced brand of bottled water, such as Perrier, can remind you that you deserve the best, as well as tell others that you are the kind of person who values the status conveyed by premium-priced brands.⁶ In the same way, an American consumer who buys Coke might remind himself of the importance of his American identity, as well as tell others that he values buying American brands.⁷ I will elaborate later in this chapter on the signaling function of brands, but it should be apparent to the reader that using branded products to tell something about yourself can sometimes be more important than buying such products for their functional benefits.

Functions That Brands Perform for Society

“Seattle Woman Vows to Eat, Drink Only Starbucks Items for a Year” read the headline of an article that appeared on the ABC News portal on January 11, 2013.⁸ The article elaborates about how Beautiful Existence (that is the real name of the woman), a wife and mother from Seattle (same city where Starbucks is headquartered), decided that her New Year’s resolution as a “spoiled” American would be to test her determination in such a way. Although in a somewhat bizarre way, her attempt to eat and drink only Starbucks for a year makes a statement about the challenges that women can overcome in today’s America and spurs a conversation about the role of women in American culture. Weaving brand stories into collective discourse to substantiate beliefs and assumptions in a culture is a very common practice. Documentaries such as Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me or movies such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s are noteworthy examples of the way in which brands can be used to illustrate a cultural reality and hence provoke a collective conversation about the beliefs, ideals, and struggles of different g...