Creating Iconic Brands

The website of the Zyman Institute of Brand Science at Emory University has an excerpt from How Brands Become Icons: The Principle of Cultural Branding, Harvard Business School Press (Sept. 2004)

In his research for the book, author Douglas Holt was unable to find a single example in which conventional consumer research contributed to the building of an iconic brand. Iconic brands are created by playing off cultural texts that other culture industries have already put into play.

Icon creation is about myth building - as only a few companies such as Budweiser, Nike and Harley Davidson have been able to create. Creating a mythic experience is not about consumer behavior "truths" or emotional hot buttons-the usual language of consumer research. It goes beyond documenting people's attitudes and emotions to acquire an embedded sense of what life really feels like if one were in their shoes. The kind of knowledge required to build an iconic brand is more like what an author requires to write a great novel or screenplay. Holt says that managers must get close to the nation-the social and cultural shifts and the desires and anxieties that result in order to give specific direction to their creative partners in order to build an iconic brand.