Try http://www.iknowall.com

While I think you are on the right track with inclusion of culture as a component for consideration… one of many possible ingredients, sometimes culture is more significant as an outcome of a product or brand.

Additionally, and I have only read a couple of the Christenson books, I think he is referring to products or a group of products wen he says brand. (not a definition I am on board with btw) He is a product strategist and to position him as a marketer seems a bit of a stretch.

One implication from your post (if I read things correctly) is that one could deploy several brand cycles within one product cycle, where aspects of brand context are tuned to cultural tides. That's interesting. However, I might not want to stake too much of a brand on shifting seas. Might be better to design a brand platform so customers can build out the brand themselves, in their own terms, rather than have corporate brand builders trying to read the tea leaves from the latest swirl.

Get real.

It's about humans.

Culture is a node in the human system. Functionality of tools is a node as well. Bigger nodes are found by contemplating the 99.9% of our history we spent in the wild (since hominan), rather than the .001% of modern culture. Bigger nodes are found within the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.

None of my marketing courses in school even mentioned the human brain or human evolution! How can I ignore 99% of my customer's development and expect *any* insights? For that matter, how can a social scientist expect sound results by ignoring the same?

Ultimately, any marketer who ignores any part of the system of humanity is missing out and selling short.

on the other hand: there is also s.th. extremely potent about being culturally ignorant – because at some point you have to be anyway (in order to create).

when grant heavily criticizes these marketing thinkers, as he is doing above, i should speculate that he is putting aside a lot of his sensitivity and empathy only in order to make his point. and only with the help of this ignorance he creates culture.

a big weakness of (marketing) theory is that it emphasises all the things that one can actually analyse and influence systematically.
the power of creation though lies in putting all analysis aside at some point and just saying: christensen, you have got no idea – or – this aeron chair will work in the market – or whatever…

your tools always cripple you – they can only take you so far – but at some point… you've got to jump

RE. Christensen. If one construes 'purpose' to connote 'function' then the approach woefully under specifies the relevant domain (as you should expect me to advocate). If, on encountering "purpose brand" one flashes to a phrase repeated endlessly in the Steve Martin movie, 'The Jerk', then we are perhaps closer to a popular culture rendition. But that, too, underspecifies matters. When I read Christensen, et al., my mind immediately generalized their concept of 'purpose' beyond pure utilitarian function to encompass symbolic (cultural) purposes as well.

Grant, oh weedmaster, am I missing your boat to think that a product must have a cultural purpose if it is to find or maintain a place within the cultural mileau? This cultural purpose may be construed a variety of ways. My take is that cultural purpose derives from evaluating a product's perceived attribute and performance characteristics (Kleine & Kleine 1991) through the lens of a particular set of identity schemas (e.g., Kernan & Sommers 1967; Kleine et al 1993). It seems that the fabled Chicago School of symbolic interactionism generally, and Lloyd Warner specifically, make a case for products to have cultural purpose.

Not to be too crabgrassy, but isn't there a difference between knowing a culture and knowing about culture? Some kid in junior high probably knows (even if he can't articulate) lots and lots about his local culture, his feelings about different parts of pop culture, etc. But he doesn't know anything about anthropology. So if a branding executive knows enough people who play golf and watch pro football games, wouldn't he be okay marketing golf clubs and developing ads to run during football games? In other words, native familiarity should be just as good as anthropological sophistication, if not better, at navigating the meaning structures relevant to a brand.

You could say that as our culture gets all fragmented and fluxy (new word?), a la plentitude and commotion, individual native experience becomes relevant to a smaller and smaller part of the world the brander must navigate. Then we all have to learn some anthropology because we all end up being non-native in the normal course of doing business (or living). Come to think of it, that probably IS what you say.

The only problem I have with all this is that I think the range of product markets where this kind of attention to cultural meanings matters "on the margin" is narrower than you do. Heck, I'm not sure that Steve Jobs really knows that much about the ins and outs of all the subcultures and meaning-maps of his millions of users. Maybe he just has really good aesthetic taste and knows how to edit software interfaces to make them user-friendly. Plus he's good at negotiating with psycho music executives.