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Executive Summary
This article uses the American Girl brand to provide a more complete understanding of sociocultural branding. Much recent research by academics and practitioners has been directed toward brands with legendary, iconic, or cult status with the objective of understanding the intense emotional bonds that exist between these brands and consumers. This research, along with prior work on brands’ symbolic nature and their role as relationship partners, represents a significant shift in the way marketers think about brands and brand management. However, a full understanding of powerful and emotionally resonant brands has been elusive. One reason for this is that sociocultural branding knowledge has accumulated in a piecemeal way. Another reason is that powerful brands are extraordinarily complex and multifaceted, but in general they have been studied from a single perspective in a single setting. On the basis of a qualitative exploration of the American Girl brand that is both deep and broad, the authors posit that an emotionally powerful brand is best understood as the product of a complex system whose component parts are in continuous interplay and together constitute a whole greater than their sum. Studying American Girl from the perspectives of various stakeholder groups in many of the venues in which the brand is manifest, the authors attempt to close the sociocultural branding research loop and identify implications for brand management.

Biography
Nina Diamond is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at DePaul University. Her interests are in branding, consumer culture, and new product development. Her work has appeared in several books and journals and has been presented at several academic conferences. As a partner in the B/R/S Group, a market research and consulting firm, she has worked with firms including Microsoft, eBay (PayPal), the California Milk Processor Board, Clorox, and Mars Inc. on marketing strategy, new product, and marketing communication projects. Earlier in her career, Dr. Diamond served as a brand manager, group brand manager, vice president of marketing, and general manager at Pillsbury, Dow Chemical (DowBrands), and Whirlpool. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the City University of New York, Adelphi University, and New York University’s Stern School of Business.

John F. Sherry Jr. joined the Notre Dame Marketing faculty in 2005 as the Herrick Professor of Marketing and Chairman of the Department. For the two previous decades, he was a member of the Marketing Department at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Sherry is an anthropologist who studies the sociocultural and symbolic dimensions of consumption and the cultural ecology of marketing. He is a fellow of the American Anthropological Association as well as the Society for Applied Anthropology and is past president of the Association for Consumer Research. Sherry’s work appears in numerous journals, book chapters, professional manuals, and proceedings. He has edited Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior: An Anthropological Sourcebook and Servicescapes: The Concept of Place in Contemporary Markets; he is coeditor of Advances in Consumer Research (Vol. 19), Time, Space and the Market: Retroscapes Rising, and Consumer Culture Theory.

Albert M. Muñiz Jr. is Associate Professor of Marketing in the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at DePaul University. His research interests are in the sociological aspects of consumer behavior and branding, including consumer generated content and value creation in consumption communities. He has researched extensively in the area of consumer brand communities for more than a decade, and his work has been published in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Interactive Marketing, and Journal of Strategic Marketing. Professor Muñiz received his BS, MS and PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. Before coming to DePaul, Professor Muñiz taught at the University of California at Berkeley.

Mary Ann McGrath is Professor of Marketing in the School of Business at Loyola University Chicago. A former mathematics teacher and marketing consultant, she joined Loyola’s School of Business in 1986. Her area of academic research is consumer behavior, specifically related to her research on retailing and gift exchanges. She received her bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Loyola University Chicago, and she received both her PhD and her MBA in Marketing from Northwestern University.

Robert V. Kozinets is Associate Professor of Marketing at York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto. He has extensive consulting and speaking experience with corporations around the world, including American Express, Nissan, Campbell’s Soup, Merck, and eBay. His areas of research expertise include online communities, brands and brand management, new product development, entertainment marketing, and subcultures. He has written and published more than 50 articles and chapters, including contributions to Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Research. Consumer Tribes, his coedited volume (with Bernard Cova and Avi Shankar), was published by Elsevier in 2007. Sage Publications will publish his book on netnography, the method of online anthropology, in 2009.

Stefania Borghini is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Università Bocconi, Milan. Her research interests are related to children’s marketing, brand consumption, place attachment, and organizational buying behavior. In her studies, she adopts a consumer culture perspective and privileges ethnographic methods. She has published her works in books and academic journals, such as Journal of Business Research and Industrial Marketing Management.

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