That demand, in turn, gives rise to what I call “myth markets.” It’s in these markets, not in product markets, that brands compete to become icons.
The contradictions between ideology and individual experience produce intense desires and anxieties, fueling the demand for myths. A national ideology may, for example, promote the ideal of a family with two parents, even though many citizens contend with broken homes. But, inevitably, many people live at a considerable remove from that vision. An ideology, by its nature, presents challenging moral imperatives it lays out the vision to which a community aspires. As Apple’s customers typed away on their keyboards in the late 1990s, they communed with the company’s myth of rebellious, creative, libertarian values at work in a new economy.Īs these examples suggest, iconic brands embody not just any myth but myths that attempt to resolve acute tensions people feel between their own lives and society’s prevailing ideology. Anthropologists call this “ritual action.” When Nike’s core customers laced up their Air Jordans in the early 1990s, they tapped into Nike’s myth of individual achievement through perseverance. So they buy the product to consume the myth and to forge a relationship with the author: the brand.
When a brand creates a myth, most often through advertisements, consumers come to perceive the myth as embodied in the product. People feel compelled to make these icons part of their lives because, through them, they’re able to experience powerful myths continually.
We find icons among the most successful politicians-think of Ronald Reagan-artists and entertainers like Marilyn Monroe, activists like Martin Luther King, and other celebrity figures, such as Princess Di. They are powerful because they deliver myths to us in a tangible form, thereby making them more accessible. They provide ideals to live by, and they work to resolve life’s most vexing questions. Simple stories with compelling characters and resonant plots, myths help us make sense of the world. As we’ll see, even a seemingly unremarkable product like Mountain Dew-water, sugar, green dye, and carbonation-can take on iconic power and keep it. The underlying principles I discovered were consistent across these brands. I’ve researched many of the most successful American iconic brands of the past four decades to discover how they were created and how they have been sustained. Myth making isn’t the sort of skill a marketer acquires in the course of hawking cornflakes. Their impressive market power is based on a kind of customer value we don’t think about very often: Icons are valued because, through them, people get to experience powerful myths. And it’s the only form of competition that yields icons. Here, the name of the game is symbolism: The strategic focus is on what the brand stands for, not how the brand performs. It’s a form of competition that is particularly fierce in what marketers refer to as “lifestyle” categories, such as food, clothing, alcohol, and automobiles. In essence, they compete for culture share. Rather, they succeed because they forge a deep connection with the culture. These brands win competitive battles not because they deliver distinctive benefits, trustworthy service, or innovative technologies (though they may provide all of these).
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Few marketers, however, have any notion of how to turn their brands into icons, and that’s because icons are built according to principles entirely different from those of conventional marketing. Revered by their core customers, they have the power to maintain a firm hold in the marketplace for many years. Think of Nike, Harley-Davidson, Apple, Absolut, Volkswagen-they’re the brands every marketer regards with awe.
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