THE MEANING OF BRANDS ACROSS CULTURES

Brands, products, and services are complex systems of meaning. Different issues about different meanings that are given to these facets pervade a variety of cultural dimensions at the same time. In this section we'll combine a variety of dimensions that, in their very unique combination, become an archetype .

Marketing is frequently defined as structured knowledge that we apply to bring goods or services from the producer to the user . Brands are thereby the bridges that link products with users. Products are not the same as brands, although sometimes users may experience them as such. Brands are also simply names ; they form a language.

Brands are obviously very closely related to values. Values represented in brands are not "added" but integrated, since all values are differences that rarely add up. Hence all values are dilemmas. Good branding resolves dilemmas by offering consumer solutions.

The smart use of brands seems to have been very lucrative for companies in the last few years . If we observe teenagers' buying patterns, then it is easy to see that the brand is frequently more important than the objective characteristics it represents. Subjective perception is therefore worth quite a lot of money. Interestingly most basic research shows that immigrants and their children buy branded clothing even more frequently than locals. Some research concludes that they are attracted to branded clothing in order to build a bridge between the traditional culture of their parents and the culture in which they must live. Nevertheless, what attracts people to a brand?

There are a many ways to position a brand. Censydiam, a leading market research agency, shows one of the better analyses on their website. Every year they publish their longitudinal study of the positioning of car marques. They use a 2 x 2 matrix, where one axis shows the degree to which emotions are expressed , and the other the degree of social integration (see Figure 5.1). It is splendid to see how the producers of these brands confirm their cultural preference.

Figure 5.1: Perceptual mapping of car marques

The majority of the French and Italian brands are represented on the expressive side. On the emotionally more neutral side are British, Swedish, and Japanese cars , with Opel and Ford. It won't astonish anybody that on the side of social differentiation Alfa Romeo, BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes, and Audi occupy the field, whereas on the social integration side Fiat, Suzuki, Nissan, and Daewoo dominate the game. But most interesting is that the international top sellers - Peugeot, Volkswagen, Renault, and Toyota - are all near the cross point of the two axes. Is that because an average or compromising score is rewarding ? Is it because they occupy a large playing field of which this score only reflects the average? Or is there something more at play here, something that a 2 x 2 a matrix cannot express well?