Brand Mythology

Brand Mythology

Brand mythology is persuasion that skips the argument. Instead of a reason to buy, the audience is given a character to feel something about: no claim, no comparison, just a persona attached to the product until the two become the same thing. Pushed far enough it does not win a purchase so much as build a following that stops evaluating the product at all. The label is this vault's; the practice is usually dated to Theodore MacManus and his 1915 Cadillac advertisement.

What it is

MacManus wrote The Penalty of Leadership for Cadillac, published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1915. It never mentions a feature. It casts the brand as noble and misunderstood, and leaves the reader to supply the rest.

Leo Burnett built an agency around mascots doing the same emotional work, each one a character a customer could have a relationship with rather than a product they were evaluating. Tony the Tiger, the Marlboro Man and the Pillsbury Doughboy are Burnett agency creations. The Jolly Green Giant is often added to that list and should not be: the character dates from 1928, for the Minnesota Valley Canning Company, and was reworked by the Burnett agency later.

Tim Wu traces the endpoint of the logic to the modern product cult, naming Apple, Harley-Davidson and Hermes. There the brand is no longer informing a choice. It has replaced the choice.

In effect

The practical use of the idea is diagnostic. Ask what claim an advertisement is making that could in principle be checked. Where there is none, the persuasion is running on persona, and the appropriate response is to go and find the product information the advertisement declined to give you.

The economic consequence is the one worth understanding. Edward Chamberlin's account of monopolistic competition describes how differentiation lets a seller stop competing purely on merit, and brand mythology is the persuasion mechanism that produces the attachment the theory needs. The nearest academic treatment of brands functioning as myths is Douglas Holt's cultural branding work.

What it does not say

It does not rest on research. This is a descriptive account of an advertising style drawn from media history, not a single testable effect, and replication does not apply to it.

It does not belong to Wu. He describes the practice and this vault supplies the label. The soft-sell move is MacManus's.

It does not mean brand attachment is irrational in every case. The claim here is narrower: that the persuasion carries no checkable information, which is a fact about the advertisement rather than a verdict on the buyer.

Sources

  1. Wu, T. (2016). The Attention Merchants. Knopf. MacManus's Cadillac advertisement at pp. 58-59; Burnett's mascots at pp. 131-133; the product cult endpoint at pp. 78-79.
  2. MacManus, T. F. "The Penalty of Leadership." Cadillac, Saturday Evening Post, 1915.
  3. Burnett agency creations: Tony the Tiger (1952), the Marlboro Man (1954), the Pillsbury Doughboy (1965). The Jolly Green Giant dates from 1928 for the Minnesota Valley Canning Company and was reworked by the agency after 1935.
  4. Holt, D. B. (2004). How Brands Become Icons. The nearest academic treatment of brands as myths.
  5. Chamberlin, E. (1933). The Theory of Monopolistic Competition. The correct source for product differentiation.
  6. Chase, S., & Schlink, F. J. Your Money's Worth is listed among this concept's sources in this vault's hub with no page reference. Check the hub before citing it here.