Speaker 1: Last time we talked about viral branding and how attaching a brand to influential people can brute force its communication with a large number of customers. And as we all know, managers who use viral model love any kind of communication, as long as it's retold over and over. But today's branding strategy, the cultural model, is the one that invests the most on the type of communication that's meaningful for people and their cultural stance. So far we've learned that brands not only use the functionality of their products to capture the audience, but also other types of benefits like emotional bonds, social influence and so on. But why does anything other than functionality work for branding? The answer lies in our social expression. There are some products that we not only choose for their use, but also for the identity value that's attached to them, because they make it easier for us to tell others who we are. But the identity value of brands has multiple levels, and as it goes higher, it forms deeper emotional connections with the customers, something we mentioned in our video on emotional branding. There are some brands that make people feel creative, smart or young when using their products. And that's one level of constructing our identities using brands. But what rates higher in the ladder of identity value are brands that put an identity myth at the core of their brand, something that holds the desire of resolving a cultural contradiction in heart. How do they plan to tackle these cultural contradictions? One word, stories. Brand storytelling is a powerful tool known to everyone in the realm of business. There are brand stories that entertain us while teaching us about the benefits of the product. And there are also other stories that affect how people think about themselves in the world. Those are the ones that can resolve a cultural contradiction and usually stick more in our memories. What about brand equity? With cultural branding, in contrast to other models, the brand's value resides in the specifics of the brand's cultural expression, the particular cultural contents of the brand's myth, and the particular expression of these contents in the communication. So over time, as the brand performs its myth, the audience eventually perceives that the myth resides in the brand's markers, what we know as brand identity. Therefore, the brand becomes a cultural symbol, a material embodiment of the identity myth, something that gifts the brand the cultural halo effect, which is the positive impact of high levels of identity value on conventional brand metrics, such as perceived quality and association with key category benefits. And this is probably how most of iconic brands are made, a modern secular example of the rituals that anthropologists have documented in every human society. But rather than religious myth, in modern societies, the most influential myth address people's identities. This was the last of the four branding strategies that are in practice by brand managers in almost every market. Feel free to explore each of them on a deeper level and gain the insights you need to make the right choice for the future of your own brand.