How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding

I had to buy this for a graduate level class. Very interesting... love all the product marketing background in the book.

While a bit US-centric and could be edited down, the ideas are very compelling and well illustrated with examples so that anyone can understand

This is a serious book for marketers who want to understand the intersection of culture and branding. Brands that become icons speak into a cultural conversation in a relevant way and take on meaning beyond their categories. This book shows how brands like Mountain Dew, Corona, and Coke did it. A very readable and insightful book.Carol Phillips[...]

I love this book already. I have not completed it yet, but the author's findings is far different from normal marketing strategies.

The book I received was in great condition. As a used book, I expected some wear and tear, but no, it was perfect.

I bought it because brands needs to understand the culture to fit in and become icons. This book explains that.

If you are looking for a marketing book to read and (or) have a limited understanding of the importance of marketing, How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding by Dr. D.B. Holt is a fantastic read. Holt uses his enormous marketing knowledge that he accumulated from his research at some of the most prestigious colleges in the world. Holt attend Stanford, University of Chicago and received his doctorate from Northwestern. He has also taught at schools such as Penn State, Harvard and currently Oxford University. Reading a book written by a man with extensive academic and research experience is incomparable.Holt is a highly educated and experienced scholar that has the incredible ability to write in the way that an individual with no marketing background or advanced schooling would understand. His book is an easy read that does not use academic language that the reader would not understand. Any content specific verbiage that used is thoroughly defined and explained. Personally, having a mechanical engineering background, I have a broad understanding of many marketing concepts, but nothing too specific. I found myself able to follow and understand the information being presented to me as the reader. Holt went into detail about topics that I learned about in my freshman level marketing course in which I was familiar with. He then took some of these basic level topics to the next level. Holt utilizes specific examples to explain various marketing topics. His ability to connect these examples to the information he is explaining to the reader is exceptional. In each chapter of How Brands Become Icons, a marking topic is presented and is supported and explained with subtopics. Holt breaks down each one of these topics and relates his findings and research directly back to an iconic company that is relevant to these topics. He uses companies such as Coke, Volkswagen, Snapple, Anheuser-Bush, Harley-Davidson and Corona. Before going into detail about which marketing topic he will be conveying through each example, Holt gives the reader a “short genealogy” of the selected company for that chapter. This is very important for the reader because the reader might not have heard of the company being discussed or have a warped perception of the company. It also gives him the opportunity to set the stage and time frame of the company’s history he will be referring to. His detail to providing a company’s background demonstrates his dedication to providing the reader important background information. Following the genealogy, Holt then explains the different marketing techniques used by a specific company. For example, when explaining the topic of how identify brands compete in a myth market, he thought that Mountain Dew would be a good example to use. Mountain Dew became an identity brand through their marketing toward the Hillbilly and Redneck communities and were trying to create a myth about their brand. Mountain Dew is one of the most popular soft drinks in the world and the reader would be able to connect to the brand through personal experience or through Holt’s detailed explanation. Visual graphics are also very helpful throughout the book. Holt uses different graphics to give the reader the ability to connect different ideas through a picture or graph rather than reading an explanation. This is a good change of pace in the book because some of the topics can get very dry and this is a tactic to keep the reader engaged. For example, when Holt explains brand loyalty he puts a flow chart with brand in the center. Around the brand shows what followers, feeders and the populist world gives to the brand and what the brand reciprocates back. Holt also has a “key words” section at the end of a chapter or the end of a subsection so that the reader can find a definition of a word that they might not be familiar with. This is also helpful when a word is used extensively throughout a section. He ensures that the reader will have a clear understanding of the meaning both in and out of context. One aspect of the visuals that Holt could have changed is adding color in the graphs. This would allow the reader to better understand the information presented. There are two reasons why I chose Holt’s book to read. First, I wanted to read a marketing book written by a professional with a significant knowledge in marketing and who conducted many years of research. Holt checks these boxes. The second reason why I chose to read this book is my limited marketing knowledge. My academic background is in engineering and construction. However, I have high aspirations to start my own construction company with my brother in the future. Many entrepreneurs with technical skills, including myself, will forget the importance of marketing themselves and their brand in order to expand and become successful. Even though this book was mostly about the biggest brands in the world, the companies discussed had to start small and work their way up to becoming successful, well-known brands. Learning from the successes and failures of famous companies allows me to gain a deeper understanding of what it takes to create and market a very successful business. Overall, I would give this book a 4.5/5 star raking. The only thing that I would want to see was more interviews with people who were running these successful brands. Holt focused on the companies from a third person view and had no real insider information. However, I was able to learn new information and generate a different understanding regarding the work that goes into marketing a successful and iconic brand. Holt’s book expanded on my limited background knowledge of marketing and inspired me to continue learning in order to develop a new appreciation and understanding of marketing techniques.

I'm no business-head. I find modern consumerism more disturbing than exciting. But I read this book as part of a study on public relations and I must say Holt's passion for the subject is contagious.First of all, his writing style is superb. He alternates nicely between anecdotes, charts and philosophy, allowing all sorts of minds to grasp just what he's saying. His ideas were bold and insightful, and he helped me to understand what a craft marketing really is.I sometimes felt his connections were just that - his connections - but a lot of his ideas rang true, and for the most part his evidence was well, evident.What I found most impressive was his aknowledgement of all the sexism in marketing. Perhaps it's a bit of sexism on my part, but I hadn't expected a man to pick up on all the overt and covert misogyny inherent in the advertising world. Holt not only saw it, he understood how it connected with the greater social and political environment surrounding it.How Brands Become Icons should be required reading for every high school student in the country. And that's the first time I've said that. Holt's grasp of the subject goes beyond branding, into the heart of American culture, into the minds of the American people. This is not just a how-to book. It's an important book of why.

The underlying blue ocean approach is heart-warming. The historical and cultural approaches are eye-opening.

superb text

This is a very worthwhile book, and it would take a book-length response to fully do it justice. Douglas B. Holt contributes a lot of good observations and insights on the specificity of iconic brands. However, he also makes several dubitable points, with which most marketing experts would disagree.The weakest point of this otherwise excellent book is when Holt tries to suggest that his "cultural branding model" is somehow in opposition with 1. the "mind-share branding model", 2. the "emotional branding model" and 3. the "viral branding model (sic)". He is compelling when he suggests that iconic brands are different from other brands and should be treated differently, but they require ADDITIONAL considerations, that are not in any way in conflict with the other three that remain necessary for any strong brand.To briefly address each: Holt wants to impugn the mind-share model of branding, to which today's marketing community almost unanimously subscribes, yet presents no convincing evidence as to why it should be questioned. If anything, the latest neuroscience shows that the mind-share model's weak point is that traditional marketing tools have focused too exclusively on CONSCIOUS mind-share, when in fact UNCONSCIOUS mind-share is as or even more important, as confirmed by leading research firm Thinkscan's findings on the Mere Exposure Effect, and Dr. Robert Heath's research on Low Attention Processing, among others.When Ipsos, Millward Brown and other leading research firms insist on the importance of brands' mind-share - (conscious) Awareness, perceived Popularity, and people's Familiarity with what the brand is all about, they are absolutely correct. Most people like what they think is Popular, and most people don't like what they don't know. Like it or not, we are part of a Herd.And can anyone suggest seriously for even a moment that iconic brands do not use, and even depend on, emotional branding practices? Coca-Cola, Apple, Harley Davidson, Mountain Dew, Volkswagen, Budweiser - are at their best (often literally) dripping with emotion. As leading neuroscientists such as Dr. Antonio Damasio have shown, emotion is absolutely necessary for motivation, even when evaluating supposedly rational functional attributes and benefits.Finally, most marketers would consider it bizarre to talk about a "viral branding model". Viral communication can be an extremely effective strategy or tactic (see for example Dove's groundbreaking Evolution campaign), but it is not a "branding model".Despite these reservations, Holt's overarching point is a vital one, the importance of which is usually under-estimated : that iconic brands are NOT exactly like other brands, and should not be treated as such by marketers.Iconic brands are iconic because of their unique relationship with semiotically-rich "populist worlds" that they are able to tap, unlike other run-of-the-mill brands, and the way that they articulate and mythically resolve tensions among different social milieus, and within society at large.His point is made convincingly through the presentation of a series of case studies of iconic brands (which he calls "genealogies"), some more convincing (his discussion of Harley Davidson), some less (his analysis of Corona). But what is clear in any case is that iconic brands "perform as activists, leading culture".Consumers do not only accept the role of iconic brands in pointing out new directions for society, they expect it. Nike, Apple, Coca-Cola are deeply embedded in our cultural unconscious, and thus possess the license to make statements about culture or about sub-cultures that other brands simply do not have.Apple's famous "1984" ad is an example, as is Coca-Cola's "I'd like to teach the world to sing", that blazed the trail of Emergent social codes. Iconic brands should always be one step ahead, and this is why they cannot be evaluated on the same basis as ordinary brands: the criteria to be a successful leader are different from the criteria to be a successful follower. As Holt asserts, "Managers of iconic brands like ESPN, Nike and Patagonia never aim their strategies at (mainstream customers). Rather, they work to create the most desirable myth for their nucleus of followers and insiders".There is nothing more sad than iconic brands that through poor marketing practices fail to leverage or even undermine their own iconic status (Levi's is the saddest example I can think of).Overall Holt's book is a very welcome addition to the marketing discussion.

I do not like this particular read, it is very one-sided and boring...I didn't know branding was such a useless topic

didnt make any sense !