Subculturize your brand - executive summary

We live in a branded world. A world of dreams and calculated perceptions. To some extent all of us are willing to accept the situation in order to escape into a world where our stressful and complex daily lives no longer exist. However during the years the impact of branding has created insightful and demanding consumers who are willing to explore the global supply of goods and services. Therefore marketing isn’t the same anymore. Optimal conditions to get in touch with consumers have vanished over time. Today it’s a whole new ballgame out there. A new situation where meaning and involvement must be added to the proposition, unless you are willing to give up market shares in fiercely competitive environments.

This thesis is about getting in touch with the subcultures surrounding your brand. By studying salient contributors to the field of branding and consumer theory, we have created a framework through which to carry out this initiative. Our principal idea of this thesis was the reflection of the majority of brands using the same tactics in their relentless struggle for differentiation. We acknowledge branding as a discipline and find it very useful but we believe that it is time to move up a level in order to outmatch the competition. A level that is only attainable by embracing a new logic to a company’s approach and involve the persons and subcultures surrounding the brand.

To create the necessary breadth of view and calibration of literary contributions, we started of a process in which branding literature was examined over time. We defined essential focus areas to live by in order to enable brands to establish a real relationship with subcultures. The result made it possible to define a critical essence, which we combined with our findings on critical areas like market conditions, media fragmentation and especially the nature of the consumer today. The illuminating conclusions were merged with mental models and calibrated with the model “Movement of Meaning” by McCracken. This approach made it possible for us to make the intangible effect of subcultures tangible.

A mental set of rules was discovered. The main findings where the ability of the Organization to think on ownership as both mental and physical, and the appearance of the four R’s and the T framework, which in short defines the rules of interaction.

We operationalized all our findings in the model “How to manage a brands relationship with its subcultures”, which was tested on professionals with first hand experience in the field of creating relationship with consumers. The learning process through the thesis makes it possible for us to rely on the model as a unique tool for mapping a company’s interaction with subcultures.