Douglas B Holt

Brands are potent and efficient vehicles to diffuse and reproduce ideologies. This article revisits over a decade of research on Jack Daniel’s as an iconic brand, and provides a behind the scenes look at the process of researching cultural brands. It describes whiskey as a marketplace icon that reflects particular cultural ideologies, and updates t...

Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) vaccination rates remain well below herd immunity in regions of many countries despite huge international resources devoted to both financing and access. We draw upon service marketing theory, organisational sociology, development anthropology and cultural consumer research to conduct an ethnographic study o...

My concern is that sustainable economy movement strategy is not working. Over the past four years, the United States has experienced the most acute economic crisis since the Depression. The majority of Americans are very disenchanted with our economic system and are questioning deeply ingrained assumptions. It is hard to imagine a better opportunit...

Twenty years of major policy and activist interventions that seek to promote sustainable consumption have been guided by what I term the ethical values paradigm, despite that this paradigm has significant conceptual flaws and has not produced impressive results. This article critiques the ethical values paradigm and proposes an alternative by adapt...

How does status consumption operate among the middle classes in less industrialized countries (LICs)-those classes that have the spending power to participate effectively in consumer culture? Globalization research suggests that Bourdieu's status consumption model, based upon Western research, does not provide an adequate explanation. And what we c...

We conduct an ethnographic case study of poor migrant women living in a Turkish squatter to explore how consumer acculturation operates in this important context. Poor migrants have no choice but to engage Turkish consumer culture because it is hegemonic and it conflicts ideologically with their village culture, and they do so with few resources. O...

Branding is often viewed as a form of ideological influence, but how brands impact ideology has not been carefully specified. I use a genealogical study of the emergence of Jack Daniel's whiskey as an iconic brand to specify the ideological role played by such brands in relation to other producers of ideological change, particularly the other cultu...

A number of influential gender theorists contend that men suffer from a pandemic crisis of masculinity in their work and family roles that they seek to assuage through the compensatory consumption of phallic symbols. We critique this conventional view through a cultural analysis of the consumption practices of a group of men who fit the stuck-in-th...

It's time to rethink global branding. More than two decades ago, Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt argued that corporations should grow by selling standardized products all over the world. But consumers in most countries had trouble relating to generic products, so executives instead strove for global scale on backstage activities s...

We develop a model describing how certain American men, those men who have been described as emasculated by recent socioeconomic changes, construct themselves as masculine through their everyday consumption. We find that American mass culture idealizes the man-of-action hero - an idealized model of manhood that resolves the inherent weaknesses in t...

Roundtable on Approaches to the Analysis of Advertisements Robin M. Akert, Andy Berndt, Paul Kurnit, Robert Goldman, Doug Holt, Craig Markus, William O'Barr, Lisa Peñaloza, Tom Reichert, Faith Davis Ruffins WMO: This roundtable will be conducted in two parts. During the first part, the scholars will meet to discuss interpretive strategies in teachi...

Pocos responsables de márketing saben cómo convertir sus marcas en iconos ya que los iconos se construyen de acuerdo con principios totalmente diferentes a los del márketing tradicional

Some brands become icons. Think of Nike, Apple, Harley-Davidson: They're the brands every marketer regards with awe. But they are not built according to the principles of conventional marketing, says Harvard Business School marketing professor Douglas Holt. Iconic brands beat the competition not just by delivering innovative benefits, services, or...

Steven Jackson is Senior Vice President, Worldwide Account Director of DDB Chicago. This interview traces the evolution of the Budweiser and Bud Light advertising, two of the most successful American advertising campaigns in recent decades, and both of which rely heavily on ideals of masculinity to brand their beers. Rather than an analytical/criti...

Branding has become one of the most important aspects of business strategy. Yet it is also one of the most misunderstood. Branding is sometimes considered to be merely an advertising function. And many managers and business writers hold the view that branding is about the management of product image, a supplementary task that can be isolated from t...

The compensatory consumption thesis states that men who experience anxieties in living up to American ideals of manhood in their everyday lives as workers and husbands use consumption as a means to escape these pressures. Masculine consumption, in this view, is a form of rebellion against society's expectations. This thesis of compensatory rebellio...

Brands are today under attack by an emerging countercultural movement. This study builds a dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding that explains the rise of this movement and its potential effects. Results of an interpretive study challenge existing theories of consumer resistance. To develop an alternative model, I first trace the rise...

This study examines one of the most debated questions in the sociology of culture: Does Pierre Bourdieu's theory relating levels of cultural capital to consumption patterns apply to the contemporary United States? First, I summarize the innovative characteristics of Bourdieu's theory in relation to the Warnerian tradition of social class research....

This essay critically examines the North American sociological literature that has developed in response to Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction, his tour-de-force study of consumer taste and social reproduction. I argue that theoretical and empirical challenges often misread Bourdieu, recasting the theory as a variant of Lloyd Warner's social class theor...

In the sociology of consumption, a core research issue is the symbolic expression, reproduction, and potential transformation of social collectivities through consumption. The two theoretical perspectives that have long dominated both consumer research and sociological investigations of this class of research questions—what I term personality/value...

This article examines what people do when they consume. In recent interpretive consumer research, three research streams have emerged, each portraying how people consume through a distinctive metaphor: consuming as experience, consuming as integration, and consuming as classification. The research reported here - a two-year observational case study...

Efforts by the Ethiopian coffee sector to trademark Ethiopia's most valuable coffee brands have come to a screeching halt, courtesy of The Starbucks Corporation. The coffee sector is pursuing trademarks in all major international markets on Sidamo , Yirgecheffe , and Harrar so that they can then apply sound marketing techniques to increase the comm...

Cuando una marca se comercializa en todo el mundo, este mero hecho le otorga un aura de excelencia y una serie de obligaciones. Para maximizar el valor del alcance global, las empresas tienen que gestionar ambas. -- Símbolos de la cultura global -- Dimensiones de las marcas globales -- Segmentos de los consumidores globales -- Nuevas oportunidades,...