Cultural Strategy

• Major contribution to thinking on strategy and innovation from a brand perspective
• Shows how societal changes produce opportunities for entrepreneurs and managers; how to identify these; and how to exploit them
• Explores how many successful firms ally products with cultural innovations to use these opportunities to build brands
• Provides a five step strategy framework and seven cultural methods with application to consumer technologies, social enterprise, and business start-ups
• Draws on case studies of firms such as Nike, Marlboro, Starbucks, Jack Daniels, vitaminwater, and Ben & Jerry's, all of whom employed a cultural innovation approach
• Explains the inbuilt barriers to innovation that hinder many large organizations, and puts forward a solution to overcoming these barriers
• Questions many 'sciency' marketing approaches
• Follows on from Holt's hugely successful How Brands Become Icons
• Holt and Cameron draw upon their consulting work with New York advertising agencies

Readership: Managers, entrepreneurs, and MBA and management students looking to understand cultural innovation and how to build new businesses and brands that reflect and respond to cultural shifts

Douglas Holt, Founding Partner of The Cultural Strategy Group, New York, and Douglas Cameron, Founding Partner of Amalgamated Advertising Agency, New York

Douglas Holt is the founding partner of The Cultural Strategy Group, a consulting firm that specializes in helping managers, entrepreneurs, and activists develop cultural strategies. He was previously a professor at the Harvard Business School and Oxford University's Said Business School. A leading expert on branding and innovation, he pioneered cultural branding in his best-selling book How Brands Become Icons. Holt has developed cultural strategies for a wide range of brands including Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Ben & Jerry's, Sprite, Jack Daniel's, MINI, MasterCard, Fat Tire beer, Qdoba, Georgia Coffee, Planet Green, and Mike's Hard Lemonade, along with a number of not-for-profit organizations. He has lectured on these ideas at management seminars and talks worldwide, including the World Economic Forum.

Douglas Cameron is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Amalgamated, an influential non-traditional advertising agency known for developing provocative cultural content across multiple media platforms. He began his career at Cliff Freeman & Partners, the most lauded creative shop of its time. He entered the world of marketing inadvertently: travelling the world as a bagpiper, he was invited by David Ogilvy to perform at his French castle. Ogilvy insisted he take up advertising. He worked with Holt extensively developing cultural strategies at Cliff Freeman and Amalgamated, which led to his role as co-author of Cultural Strategy. He graduated from Dartmouth College, where he received the English department¹s top graduating honour.

"...May well be one of the most important books on advertising and branding in the past ten years." - Richard Huntington, Adliterate.com

1: Rethinking Blue Oceans
Part I: Cultural Innovation Theory
2: Nike: Reinventing the American Dream
3: Jack Daniel's: Mythologizing the Company to Revive Frontier Masculinity
4: Ben & Jerry's: Provoking Ideological Flashpoints to Launch a Sustainable Business Myth
5: Starbucks: Trickling Down New Cultural Capital Codes
6: Patagonia: How Social Enterprises Cross the Cultural Chasm
7: Vitaminwater: Creating a "Better Mousetrap" with Myth
8: Marlboro: The Power of Cultural Codes
9: Cultural Innovation Theory
Part II: Applying the Cultural Strategy Model
10: Clearblue Pregnancy Tests: Branding a New Technology
11: Fat Tire Beer: Crossing the Cultural Chasm
12: Fuse Music Television: Challenging Incumbents with Cultural Jujitsu
13: Freelancers Union: Branding a Social Innovation
Part III: Organizing for Cultural Innovation
14: The Brand Bureaucracy and the Rise of Sciency Marketing
15: The Cultural Studio Forms Underground: Levi's 501s in Europe
16: The Cultural Studio Forms Above Ground: ESPN