Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands

This book is an eye opener on the true cultural effects of good marketing campaigns. The book effectively and engagingly touches on the most important topics and features of a true cultural strategy. I would recommend this book for anyone in the marketing field.

Wonderful book! Introductory information but great approach.

I was recommended Holt and Cameron by a client to ‘better help understand their business’. The book is an accessible easy read as business books go. Holt and Cameron propose that culture can be a key defining factor in business success:- An organisation culture can make it more resilient or innovative providing a clearly differentiated experience between a brand and its competitors in the eyes of consumers. Their concept of cultural orthodoxy is similar to the red ocean strategy, where companies in mature sectors tend to look alike.- By understanding consumers and the cultural context of the product or service, a market opportunity can be found. This is essentially what a good planner does in an advertising agency, but the Dougs look to bake this into the organisation rather than having it as a wrapper at the end of the product processAfter reading the book, I was not necessarily any wiser about my client was trying to say about their business; but that was more about them than my reading material. This story however emphasises an important point, what may be perceived as a cultural innovation internally in a company may not manifest itself as brand innovation or even a differentiated position.

Great perspective on how humans work in terms of self acceptance and positioning yourself in society, and then how companies have connected to this human dimension to become a preferred product to satisfy key mental and acceptance needs.

Excellent resource

Its a deep interesting and not and easy approach to brand development . The examples are excellent and clearly show good and bad marketing decisions and its explanations.

Great approach on how all companies and entrepreneurs should be thinking about marketing strategies. Great real world examples.

Cultural Strategy, by Douglas Cameron and Douglas Holt, was a simultaneously exciting and frustrating read for me. It is an important book in that it provides a specific model for integrating the power of culture into marketing strategy. It's a milestone that the authors go beyond the generic advice to simply "pay attention to culture" that most business books provide. The authors clearly have working experience in this area, and are able to provide compelling narratives to justify the application of their cultural strategy model.The weakness of this book, however, is a consequence of it being one of the first of its kind. The model of cultural strategy that it offers is better than what most marketers currently use, but it's much thinner than it could be.For one thing, the authors' model of culture is rather sparse, in comparison to what most cultural anthropologists might describe. Holt and Cameron content themselves with understanding culture as mere ideology - as ideas that are shared and motivate. Culture is much more than that. It's especially important for people in business to work with culture as something embodied. Culture isn't just the communication of ideas. Culture is in physical objects we possess, and the behavior we engage in with those objects. These aspects of cultural strategy are largely missing from Holt and Cameron's model. The authors briefly mention ritual here and there, but they never explain what they mean by it, much less how to use ritual in business. This oversight leads to a rather narrow scope of recommende application. Holt and Cameron focus mostly on advertising as a tool of cultural strategy, but advertising holds a rapidly diminishing portion of the marketer's toolbox.The book is thick with examples, perhaps a bit over thick, to compensate for the relatively sparse principles for cultural strategy that the authors provide. People who have read other work by Douglas Holt will recognize much that has been recycled for use here. The heavy reliance on examples gives the impression that cultural strategy mostly involves having a team of savvy and perceptive people who will notice cultural trends before the competition. Indeed, at the end of the book, the authors make an unfortunate descent into design thinking, suggesting that "cultural studios" can simply start off sloppy, and then go through iterative cycles of testing and refinement until they hit on a strategy that takes advantage of a cultural disruption.Some broader principles of culture could improve this fumbling approach, but Holt and Cameron are resistant to such principles, viewing them as tools that stiff "brand bureaucracies" use to defend their falwed ideologies. There's some truth to that, but a smarter strategy could involve using principles of culture to establish more sustainable, less ideosyncratic processes of anti-bureaucratic innovation.A final shortcoming of this book is that the authors don't seriously treat other methodologies that could be incorporated into a bigger, more effective system of cultural strategy in business. Holt and Cameron acknowledge only the most superficial versions of emotional mindshare strategy, for example, when there are in fact a growing number of research firms using extremely deep qualitative methodologies to illuminate complex and beautiful systems of emotional significance. When the authors of this book reduce such research to catchphrases, they accurately describe what corporate bureaucracies can do TO the results of such research, but the solution to this probem is to improve translation of research results into corporate action, not to abandon the research entirely.I've focused on the gaps and flaws in Cultural Strategy in this review, but encourage people working to develop culturally-informed methods in business to read this book nonetheless. It is to be expected that any book seeking to introduce concepts of culture into business will be partial and problematic at this point. The serious treatment of culture as a source for management and marketing has barely begun, and Holt and Cameron are to be applauded for this effort to provide the qualitative side of commerce more of the attention that it deserves.