Cultural Strategy

Market innovation has long been dominated by the worldview of engineers and economists: build a better mousetrap and the world will take notice. But there's another important way to build new businesses: with innovative ideologies rather than innovative mousetraps. Consider Coca-Cola, Nike, Jack Daniel's, Marlboro, Starbucks, Corona, Oprah, The Body Shop: all built with innovative ideologies. Further many &quote;better mousetraps&quote; are much more compelling to consumerswhen bundled with innovative ideologies; consider BMW, Apple, and Whole Foods. Cultural Strategy provides a step-by-step guide for managers and entrepreneurs to build businesses in this simple but effective way. Holt and Cameron analyse a series of classic cases that relied on these bold, innovative strategies: Nike, Marlboro, Starbucks, Jack Daniels, vitaminwater, and Ben & Jerry's. They then demonstrate how the theory works as an actionable strategy model, drawing upon their consulting work. They show how cultural strategy takes start-up brands into themass market (Fat Tire beer), overcomes &quote;better mousetraps&quote; wars in a technology driven category (ClearBlue pregnancy test), effectively challenges a seemingly insurmountable incumbent (FUSE music channel vs MTV), and develops a social innovation (The Freelancers Union). Holt and Cameron also describe the best organizational model for pursuing this approach, which they term &quote;the cultural studio&quote;. The book demonstrates that the top consumer marketing companies are consistently poor at this type of innovation because they rely on an antithetic organization structure, what the authors term &quote;the brand bureaucracy&quote;. To succeed at cultural innovation requires not only a very different approach to strategy, but a new way of organizing as well.