Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

Helsingin Sanomat, the leading Finnish daily newspaper just recently had a voting for the ideal postcard for Helsinki. The results were published today (or very recently, anyway).

This came out on top with a rather hefty percentage of the total votes (33.8%):

Now, I’m not going to argue taste and say that the one I voted for was any better. But it’s pretty safe to say that the winner is and was the safe choice. The vanilla of postcards.

I guess most people like bland, they don’t like the ordinary challenged in any way. The other postcards did not look like postcards, so they didn’t get the votes. But where they lacked in postcard-likeness, they made up for in originality. And in my opinion, they told a better story about Helsinki than the winner. Then again, a cynic might say that the blandness is spot on in its truthfulness. Maybe the majority of the people really are just that, bland?

I ran into Mikko in a bar here in Helsinki. We got into talking about the usual stuff: marketing, Finland, entrepreneurship etc. He then asked me about my thesis and its theories and why I use big American brands mostly as my examples. He said that American brands (or rather, American consumer tastes) might not translate or might be a hard “sell” for Finnish businesses.

It’s a fair point. The only small brand I’ve featured in this blog was Gym Jones and the only Finnish brand has been Nokia. But the thing is, I don’t think Finland has that many brands that could qualify as iconic brands, at least in the sense of portraying an identity myth. One reason is the size of our market and our relatively late industrialization, but another reason is that we’ve been notoriously lagging in the grand art of marketing. The only brands I could think of when chatting with Mikko were Marimekko, Iittala and maybe Ivana Helsinki, and with each of them I have a hard time conceptualizing an identity myth that could be clearly identifiable. Marimekko probably comes closest with its timeless and unwavering design (as Mikko said), but as said, that in itself doesn’t make for an identity myth yet.

An iconic brand?

However, when I got home I remembered a great example of cultural branding in Finland that my friend Viola had in her master’s thesis. It’s the case of Karjala (Karelia), a Finnish beer brand. As this (Finnish) Wikipedia page shows, Karjala’s sales were modest in the 1960s until the Soviet ambassador Andrei Kovaljov stated that its nationalistic imagery and name were insulting to the USSR. This created a nationalistic movement that boosted the beer’s sales immensely. Karjala got swooped up into the national dialogue and became a key and credible prop in culture, although not by its own doing (which might often be even for the better). People even had a saying in those days: “Let’s bring Karelia back, even though it’s one bottle at a time!”

Fast forward to 1994 and the beer brand decided to start sponsoring the Finnish national hockey team, and when the team won the hockey gold medal a year later the brand saw significant increases in its sales. Karjala had dipped into its heritage of nationalistic pride and gotten lucky, yet again, with circumstances that were out of its control. One could argue that any beer brand could have done the same, but I feel that the key issue here was Karjala’s nationalistic heritage, that had lived on since the 1960′s onwards. Another brand might’ve seen a small increase in sales, but Karjala saw massive gains thanks to their place in Finnish culture. It goes without saying though, that Karjala should look to reinvent its myth, I doubt that the nationalistic angle from the 90s is still resonant with culture, but that’s a whole other issue.

Karjala continues to leverage its place in Finnish culture

I also somewhat disagreed with Mikko that American culture and European culture (and Finnish culture for that matter) are so different that you can’t necessarily take from American cases examples and try to apply them here. It’s true that nearly all of Douglas Holt’s work is based in America, and I’m sure that it gives the theories a distinctive flair. But popular culture has been converging for a long time now, and the Internet has only accelerated this trend. We same a lot of the same memes, anecdotes and stories with our American counterparts. And as Joseph Campbell has shown with his work, idenitity myth as are universally identifiable. I’m sure Finland has its own versions to, for example, the American “man of action” myth, one example that immediately springs to mind is Koskela, the mythic character from Väinö Linna’s books.

From the article (in Finnish, sorry):

Yläsen mielestä Yhdysvallat varsinkin sellaisena, miksi Hollywood sen klassisella kaudella kuvasi, oli Suomen kaltainen, herroja kunnioittamaton raivaajakansa, joka oli oppinut tulemaan toimeen omin avuin.

“Sä et tyrkytä apua, koska kaikilla on samat edellytykset, kaikki pärjäävät itse.”

So it seems that Finnish and American culture might have more in common than previously thought.

It’s also very important to note that in many ways America could be seen as a testing ground for branding, because their consumer culture is so much more saturated in terms of choice and amount of advertising compared to us. I’d also argue that this leads to a higher “consumer literacy level”, as I had argued in my thesis. So in effect, America consumer culture is paving the way for European brands.

I’ve been thinking about the perfect metaphor how brands should currently be seen, and I think the Hollywood actor metaphor is the best I can come up with.

It has to do with typecasting. Certain actors get certain roles over and over again, which has its advantages and disadvantages. When Sylvester Stallone was doing action movies with over the top macho performances, he could price himself very highly because such movies (or rather, such role models) were in high demand, but as the cultural demand for tough male role models dried off in the 1990s’, he had a hard time reinventing himself. Only recently has he been able to make his return as the macho male, only because our culture has shifted in such a way that conservative values and the “man of action” (as Douglas Holt calls it) is in high demand again.

Some actors are able to avoid typecasting and can credibly play a multitude of characters. Philip Seymour Hoffman is one, but even he had to struggle after he made it big in Happiness and Magnolia, he was close to being typecast as a sort of interesting loser. His character was modified for Magnolia so it was more in line with his character in Happiness. Your previous movies determine what kind of roles are offered in the future (and what people expect from you), and I guess you’re as interesting as your latest film.

Brands are similar to actors in this sense. Microsoft is hopelessly typecast. So is Apple, although right now they are benefiting from this massively. But what most people (especially Apple fanatics) don’t seem to realize that their myth (synonym for typecast) may change in relevance, as well as where this kind of myth has demand.

Grant McCracken has written about the parallels of branding and Hollywood, or rather how branding should conducted, in his blog extensively. This post particularly hit the nail in the head in arguing that companies should approach marketing opportunities with the same agility as movie studios: create hot teams around emerging cultural topics, and deliver a product.

I’m now playing around with the idea as to how brand managers should see their jobs as “agents” for their brands. Is it better to resist your brand be typecast by branching out to different roles (in emotional branding this would be called “adding layers to the brand’s extended identity) or rather embrace it and just find the right roles for your brand’s myth? Is the best possible brand a Daniel Day Lewis or a Tom Cruise (pre going insane)? Should an agent be representing many brands and how the brands’ relationships should mesh?

It’s a work in progress.

click to download PDF

I uploaded my Master’s Thesis, called A CONCEPT ANALYSIS ON MODERN BRANDING – Defining Key Concepts in Mind-Share, Emotional, Viral, and Cultural Branding, to my server. It’s 124 pages all in all, and it received the grade 80/100 from the Helsinki School of Economics’ marketing department (read: a good grade).

Why should you read the thesis? Well…

• if you think brand managers can totally control their brands, then you need to read this thesis
• if you think consumers are in total control of brands, then you need to read this thesis
• if you want to know what should you take into account when your brand matures and why, then you need to read this thesis
• if you want to understand why advertising constantly keeps losing its power and what you can do about it, then you need to read this thesis
• if you want to know why people driven brands seem to succeed where as more resource-rich and bigger brands are faltering, then you need to read this thesis
• if you’re want to know why forgetting about making money for a while might be the best business decision you’ll ever make, then you need to read this thesis
• if you want to know what Viral Branding REALLY means, and what it means for your business, then you need to read this thesis
• and above all, if you think that a “brand” is just “value added to a product”, then you DEFINITELY need to read this thesis

And as a teaser, here is the main finding of my thesis, communicated as shortly as I possibly can in visual format:

Enjoy, and please give feedback and challenge my ideas, if you dare!

Well, are you?

Steve Jobs clearly is worthy of Apple. When he comes on stage at any of Apple’s major conferences and does that little dance of his, within minutes he has the brand fanatics eating out of his hand. He could (and often will) take the brand into many different directions, because of his credibility as the brand’s number 1 spokesman. Steve Jobs can present many changes to the brand and be sure that people will at least listen to what he has to say. Other brands aren’t so lucky.

The guys at Flickr, apparently, are not worthy of their brand. They decided to add video features to the famous photo sharing site, and the heavy users and the fanatics didn’t like it and are up in arms about it. I’m a bit torn on the development myself. I understand the rationale behind both the company and the people opposing the move, but that’s not what this post is about.

When people are really fanatical about a brand, they will seek to take ownership of it. They see themselves as the only “worthy” chroniclers of the brand and its meaning. That’s why it’s sometimes so hard for prominent and popular brands to be managed: the insiders and fanatics are resistant to change (as people usually are by nature), and in this new and connected consumer economy the fanatics can group up and voice their opinions given their lack of geographic restraints. This is why it’s so important to have your brand’s management “on brand” (I hate that expression but can’t think of a better one): to avoid the brand’s control slipping away from the brand’s management.

Changes to the brand are inevitable. The consumers’ acceptance of these changes, however, is not. Some people even feel that in this new economy brand managers can’t control their brands at all anymore and they should just embrace this and let the consumers sit in the brand’s driver’s seat. Echoing this notion, in the book “Authenticity” it was argued that the more consumer-driven a brand feels, the more authentic it is perceived to be. So simply handing the keys to the brand to the customers looks like a tempting idea, but I still think it’s not the best way to approach the problem.

A company controlling its brands’ destinies is still possible, but the rules for brand management have changed, and brand managers have much less room to maneuver now. Brand managers have to convey a profound understanding as to what the brand is about (more than its mission statement and brand guidelines etc.) and show a charismatic voice and a vision that people will at least be willing to hear out. Otherwise the consumers will assume control of the brand entirely and steer the brand towards a more rigid and eventually doomed path.

Because we all know how committees work as decision makers.