Successful cultural icons like The Grateful Dead and contemporary brands such as Starbucks, Whole Foods Market and Stonyfield Farm exemplify the cultural connection between the brand and the consumer world. Today's cultural brands have learned they are not merely selling products, they are creating lifestyle worlds around their products and brands. As marketers, the more you know about the world in which your product plays, the more successful your brand will be.

Marketers can utilize distinct components of a cultural brand to create an emotional appeal with consumers. These five steps – creating brand experience, building community, selling to cultural occasions, learning the language and creating the culture of the product - work in tandem to build a cultural brand. Compared to a cultural brand, a plain old “run-of-the-mill brand” may be very strong on community building or may be a product of exceptional quality but it may lose out on the other essential components. While one cultural brand element may entice a consumer to enter a brand world it is typically true that all five components of a cultural brand play a role in making that consumer want to return.

Beyond establishing these five elements, the real key in building a cultural brand is in identifying and truly understanding that consumers are constantly changing. They're changing the way they live, where and how they shop and what they buy. Knowing this, we have to understand that with this change consumers are resonating to products and brands that reflect the values they hold and the values they are developing. Therefore, a cultural brand encompasses and represents these changing values; it represents this changing experience people are longing for and participating in; and it represents the community that's a part of this shifting culture.