Building ‘Brandtopias’—How Top Brands Tap into Society

Questing ‘Tap-in’ strategies, I stumbled upon this article about brandtopias. Although it was published in 2002, I believe it has quite some relevance to my research. Currently, I am trying to define my research question. As my lector, Harry van Vliet, put it: “you’ve got slides two till eighty pretty much in your head, now where’s slide one?” Well, it all boils down to my working title: King client. I’ll be writing about it later. Here’s the article which I found on Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge.

“Customers value some of the most powerful brands in the world primarily for their “cultural value”: They provide imaginative resources that people use to build their identities” say Harvard Business School’s professor Douglas Holt.

These are what Holt terms identity brands—and their market power cannot be attributed to the usual suspects of success: superior business models or cutting edge technology.

Holt is interested in what makes identity brands resonate. In his research, he focuses on the best-performing identity brands—the top 5 percent that have been extraordinarily successful with customers over long periods of time.

What’s the secret of long-running megabrands such as Mountain Dew, Nike, and Budweiser? The magical sweet spot when a brand delivers imaginative stories that are perfectly attuned to society’s desires.

His new research, which he discussed with HBS faculty at a marketing seminar on May 8, is part of a forthcoming book that focuses on identity brands that deliver extraordinary customer value over time.

The most powerful brands are those that are able to transverse disruptive cultural shifts.
— Douglas Holt

“I’m interested in a question that I don’t think we ever really ask or address well, which is, ‘How does customer value work over time?’ How is cultural value created; how is it maintained; how is it destroyed?’”

With the strategic importance of brands climbing, understanding how certain brands achieve so much power in the marketplace is at the center of much discussion. The advice most often provided to managers is to weave the brand into the most potent popular culture trends. Recently, consultants and ad agencies began emphasizing the reverse: recommending that managers seek out the essential “DNA” of the brand. Many brands pursue these two models and do fine, says Holt.

Read the whole story.

IMAB sequence model version 0.1

I have developed a simple version 0.1 sequential model called IMAB; Identity – Mentality – Attitude – Behaviour. I use it to explain the sequences (steps) that lead to a certain behaviour. I believe it starts with giving meaning to oneself and the world; Identity. Identity is often described as ’sameness’. Being the same with the outside world (whatever it is: a person, an object, an experience) leads to a certain mentality (the core of my research). In my opinion, mentality can be described as habitual or characteristic mental attitude that determines how you will interpret and respond to situations. Thus mentality is about response to the situation one is in. In the core, mentality is about interpretation, based on the meanings you give to you in relation to the outside world. Perhaps re-reading ‘I’m okay, you’re okay’ may be of use. Mentality at its turn leads to a certain attitude: a mental, feeling or emotional position with/toward a fact or state. So attitude is the result of the former two sequences. It is a position taken that will lead to a certain behaviour. Behaviour is the the manner of conducting oneself and/or the response of an individual, group, or species to its environment. Thus behaviour is the acting of persons based on taken positions (or feelings or emotions). The IMAB model is no more than a visualization of this process.

Click the picture for a full size and readable jpg.