Ultimate Liberal Bias

[Love, Peace & Iconic Brands - 1 2 3 4 5]

Now consider a multiethnic context. In big and diverse markets, hotbeds of cultural and economic creation – culture continents like India, Brasil, United States, Ethiopia, South Africa, or Indonesia, where many brands are born with a few escaping into iconic maturity – there seems to be a bit of a built-in bias. Something yours truly awkwardly calls the Ultimate Liberal Bias (to only make sense this side of the Atlantic). In considering the Coke example to understand what it is, consider also what is missed when this – a whole layer of additional brand support structure built over time – is not there for national identities built on cooperation and tolerance, when the together-we-are-one identity is solely in the hands of political managers.

Bottom line considerations, return margins and sales increases, this is what is at the core of the presumed bias. Even though brands can do very well by carving out all sorts of niche markets and identities, a big, national market will have a certain space and stomach for those who want to build brand myths that cast the widest identity net possible. And those who – consciously or not, “organically” or “artifically” – take on cultural tensions in that given market and stay culturally relevant might end up propping up the very identity of that same national market space.

In other words, they might actually become an inseparable part of a national identity. It is not something any product can do; stars do have to align. It goes without saying that skill and capacity have to be there all along. No longterm brand – your average airline, pressure cooker, or the iconic Coke, Lucky Strike, or Mac – can be built on fluff alone. Whatever myth is offered to channel a contradiction between the preached ideal and reigning reality, sooner or later some substance has to be there to back it up. Those few suited for iconic heights can stay relevant with times and in time become something much bigger, something widely regarded as the most compelling symbol of a set of ideas or values that a society deems important. If you are in sales, this is a very good thing.

There are many ways to look at cultural branding, but the assumed tendency to include and work towards the highest common denominator seems to be used widely. One wouldn’t think this is for sentimental reasons or teenage knee-jerk cosmopolitanism. If wide spread use as a telling indicator is any good, then the prevalence of the Kumbaya attitude should mean that cold metrics of sales justify it. It should be no coincidence that the Olympics as an undertaking sits so well with the images of global citizenship embraced by big global brands.