Description
My research draws upon social and cultural theories to address three important topics in marketing: branding strategy, organizing to deliver creative content, and cultural consumer behavior:
1)Branding Strategy: How are iconic brands built?
I have conducted extensive cultural analyses (what I call brand genealogies) on iconic brands--brands such as Nike and Budweiser and Marlboro that have been supercharged with identity value. I develop a new branding model--what I call cultural branding--which specifies how these iconic brands work. This model is developed in a forthcoming book: How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).
2)Organizing Creative Content: What are the organizational prerequisites for successful brand advertising?
With co-author Douglas Cameron, I analyzed ten of the most effective consumer branding campaigns of the last decade from an organizational perspective. We traced the organizational histories of these campaigns from both client and ad agency perspectives. With these cases we have built a new organizational model for the management of creative content, which is quite different than the conventional models for managing advertising found in texts and business practice today. This study will also be published in a forthcoming book.
3)Cultural Consumer Research: How do key social categories (class, gender, ethnicity, nation) impact branding and consumption?
My academic research draws upon social and cultural theories to examine how the most important social categories impact consumption, and also how these categories are leveraged by firms in their branding activities. My research approach here is cultural: I want to understand how people understand and use these categories to construct their identities in everyday life. And, rather than treat these categories as generic concepts, I seek to specify how they operate in a particular time and place. For instance, I have studied how social class and masculinity get expressed in contemporary American consumption. And I have studied how the ways in which American brands express race and massculinity has shifted during the last forty years in the USA.