Informing Brand Marketing Practice
Description
A second active line of brand management research concerns what I refer to as brand meaning management (now the title of an executive program I chair here at the Harvard Business School). This philosophy for brand management concerns itself with questions including: What are the meanings of the brand? Where have they been sourced? Who made them: marketers, consumers, cultures? How (and how well) have they been transferred? How well have they been managed? This anthropological perspective on branding not only raises sensitivity to meaning creation issues previously underappreciated, it brings into question fundamental marketing concepts of positioning, targeting, brand leverage, marketing skill development, and the marketing mix as well.
Evocative of many meaning management issues is current research related to the management of the person-brand, specifically as concerns the case of Martha Stewart . This research draws attention to issues that arise when meanings from one sphere (the personal) leak (intentionally and unintentionally) into another sphere (the professional, or brand). The transferability of meanings to other sources beyond the person-brand (i.e., content experts within the MSLO organization) are also considered in discussions of longevity and strength of the person-brand. The special case of balancing meanings across disparate and divergent consumers and channels, as is the case for Martha by Mail (which attracts an upscale demographic) versus Martha in K-Mart (which is more mainstream), is also raised by this case. Other cases that have been developed to explore brand meaning management issues include Harley-Davidson (two cases, on the role of Hollywood in meaning production, and the light hand of community management in the firm), Three Women (on the role of consumers as meaning makers), Cheerios (on architecture tools for capturing brand meanings), BMW (non-traditional meaning management tactics), Pokemon (the creation of fads and brands), Peapod (the management of meanings over time), and New Coke and XFL (as cases in point on the deleterious effects of ignoring core meaning management principles).
Research with Professors Mike Solomon and Basil Englis is also underway to develop a system for eliciting, structuring, and managing brand meanings over time.