How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding

CHAPTER 4

Composing the Cultural Brief

TO BECOME AN ICON, a brand must not only target the most advantageous contradiction in society, but also perform the right myth, and in the right manner. In mind-share and emotional branding, storytelling is left to creatives as an executional issue. In viral branding, influential customers are charged with telling the brand’s stories. In cultural branding, the story itself must be the center of strategy, because the quality of the myth, not some set of abstractions, drives the brand’s identity value. For the brand strategy to influence market results, it must direct what kind of story the brand will tell and how that brand tells it.

Conventionally, the positioning statement is the heart of the brand strategy. ...