Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

I’ve been sort of searching for what this blog is “about”, but lately I’ve started to realize which areas interest me the most and in which areas I feel I can contribute the most. I feel that a blog needs to be about something, not just random ramblings on any given subject. I’ve been searching my voice, but I think I’m moving in the right direction now.

As some of my readers (a total of three, no doubt) might know, I’m doing my master’s thesis in modern branding strategies. Of these, what speaks to me the most is Cultural Branding, which is championed by Douglas Holt. Cultural Branding is about creating iconic brands through myths that “solve” societal anxieties and speak to people’s most inner needs of belonging and self-identity. Cultural Branding is about managing brands as cultural objects that convey meaning in time. Brands are very much a part of our culture and vessels of our zeitgeist, very much like books and movies are. A coke bottle from the 1950s has a lot of cultural meaning attached to it, just like a VW Beetle from the 1960s, just to mention a few examples.

Cultural Branding calls for brand managers to become cultural anthropologists: looking for anxieties that stress people in their everyday lives and searching for tears in society that need repairing. To me, this means looking for the human elements that speak to people in new products, marketing campaigns and cultural phenomena. And this is what my blog is mostly going to be about. I’m trying to become more active in analyzing big cultural trends that surround us and advancement in new tech and social media, and look for that elusive “human factor” that makes or breaks the appeal.

I also fiddled with the layout a bit, which I freely admit sucked before. I’m still looking for that perfect banner image and making small corrections here and there. So it’s a work in progress…

BTW, I’m gutted that I forgot to include this link by ReadWriteWeb on hyperlocal information. It’s a good read, check it out.