Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands

Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands

How do we explain the breakthrough market success of businesses like Nike, Starbucks, Ben & Jerry's, and Jack Daniel's? Conventional models of strategy and innovation simply don't work. The most influential ideas on innovation are shaped by the worldview of engineers and economists - build a better mousetrap and the world will take notice. Holt and Cameron challenge this conventional wisdom and take an entirely different approach: champion a better ideology and the world will take notice as well. Holt and Cameron build a powerful new theory of cultural innovation. Brands in mature categories get locked into a form of cultural mimicry, what the authors call a cultural orthodoxy. Historical changes in society create demand for new culture - ideological opportunities that upend this orthodoxy. Cultural innovations repurpose cultural content lurking in subcultures to respond to this emerging demand, leapfrogging entrenched incumbents.<br><br>Cultural Strategy guides managers and entrepreneurs on how to leverage ideological opportunities:<br><br>- How managers can use culture to out-innovate their competitors <br>- How entrepreneurs can identify new market opportunities that big companies miss <br>- How underfunded challengers can win against category Goliaths <br>- How technology businesses can avoid commoditization <br>- How social entrepreneurs can develop businesses that appeal to more than just fellow activists <br>- How subcultural brands can break out of the 'cultural chasm' to mass market success <br>- How global brands can pursue cross-cultural strategies to succeed in local markets <br>- How organizations can maximize their innovation capabilities by avoiding the brand bureaucracy trap<br><br>Written by leading authorities on branding in the world today, along with one of the advertising industry's leading visionaries, <em>Cultural Strategy</em> transforms what has always been treated as the "intuitive" side of market innovation into a systematic strategic discipline.<br>