教老品牌新技巧复古品牌和品牌价值的复苏外文翻译.docx

1、教老品牌新技巧复古品牌和品牌价值的复苏外文翻译标题：Teaching Old Brands New Tricks: Retro Branding and the Revival of Brand Meaning 原文：Retro brands are relaunched historical brands with updated features. The authors conduct a netnographic analysis of two prominent retro brands, the Volkswagen New Beetle and Star Wars: Episod

2、e IThe Phantom Menace,that reveals the importance of Allegory (brand story). Aura (brand essence), Arcadia (idealized community), and Antinomy (brand paradox). Retro brand meanings are predicated on a Utopian communal element and an enlivening paradoxical essence. Retro brand management involves an

3、uneasy, cocreative, and occasionally clamorous alliance between producers and consumers.America has no now. Our culture is composed of sequels, reruns, remakes, revivals, reissues, re-releases, recreations, re-enactments, adaptations, anniversaries, memorabilia, oldies radio, and nostalgia record co

4、llections.George Carlin, Brain Droppings, 1998Brand extension, the use of an existing brand name to introduce a new product or service (Keller 1993,1998), is an important marketing tactic that has attracted considerable academic interest (e.g., Desai andKeller 2(X)2; John, Loken, and Joiner 1998). H

5、owever,another form of brand extension strategy is gaining prominence and requires urgent research attention. Many long abandoned brands have recently been revived and successfully relaunched (Franklin 2002; Mitchell 1999; Wansink 1997), so much so that marketers appear in the midst of a retro revol

6、ution in which revivals of old brands and their Images are a powerful management option (Brown 2001).The rise of retro brands places marketing in an interesting conceptual quandary. On the one hand, marketers are continually reminded of the need for product differentiation, that todays marketing env

7、ironment demands strong brand identities and decries imitation (Aaker 1996). On the other hand, contemporary markets are suffused with updated imitations, such as retro brands, many of which are proving enormously popular (Franklin 2(X)2; Naughton and Vlasic1998; Wansink 1997).Brand Revival and Retr

8、omarketingThere is considerable overlap among nostalgia, brand heritage, and brand revival. Revived or retro goods and services (we use retro synonymously with revived brands) trade on consumers nostalgic leanings. Familiar slogans and packages, for example, invoke brand heritage and evoke consumers

9、 memories of better days, both personal and communal. The success of the Museum Store, Past Times, Restoration Hardware, and similar retailers of exact reproductions and the continuing popularity of heritage-based campaigns for brands such as Budweiser, John Hancock, and Ivory indicate that demand e

10、xists for allegedly authentic reproductions of past brands. The problem with exact reproductions, however, is that they do not meet todays exacting performance standards. Retro products, by contrast, combine old-fashioned forms with cutting-edge functions and thereby harmonize the past with the pres

11、ent (Brown 1999, 2001). In this regard, consider the Chrysler PT Cruiser, which amalgamates the shape of a 1940s sedan with the latest automotive technology to produce a futuristic car with anachronistic styling. Another striking example is Nikes Michael Jordan XI Retro Sneakers. These shoes may loo

12、k like a monument to 1950s hoop dreams, yet their cushioned soles, aerated uppers, and recommended retail prices are state of the marketing art. Dennys retro diner is an homage to eateries of the 1950s, but its registers are computerized, the kitchen equipment is cutting edge, smoking is prohibited

13、in the dining area, and vegetarian dishes are available for those unwilling to revert to carnivorous habits of yore. We define retro branding, therefore, as the revival or relaunch of a product or service brand from a prior historical period, which is usually but not always updated to contemporary s

14、tandards of performance, functioning, or taste. Retro brands are distinguishable from nostalgic brands by the element of updating. They are brand new, old-fashioned offerings.FindingsThe New BeetleThe original Volkswagen Beetle was the stuff of motor-enthusiast legend. Created by the pioneering auto

15、motive designer Ferdinand Porsche, with a past grounded in the common classes of Third Reich Germany, the car proved wildly popular across postwar Europe and North America. The Volkswagen Beetle was globally cherished for its durability, economy, user-friendliness, and idiosyncratic design.At the ti

16、me, it was considered an exemplary vehicle of the people. Everyone from commune-bound hippies and middle-class couples with children to eccentric multimillionaires drove Beetles. The Beetle even begot a series of live-action Disney movies starring the Love Bug as Herbie, the sentient vehicle with a

17、heart of gold.Tony argues from the perspective of a moderate rationalist laying out a logical argument to ease the tensions between two warring factions. Discounting the intrinsic value of the past, he insists that the old brand must be adjusted for a new time, place, and set of target consumers. Ak

18、in to Orrin, he shifts the argument about brand essence to superficial design elements and advertising-laden symbolic associations. The result, for Tony, is an up-to-date vehicle that still shares the enchanting personality of the old Beetle brand. Enchantment indeed is the operative word, as many S

19、tar Wars fans testify.Star WarsThe original 1977 Star Wars movie attempted to disorient its consumers temporally by offering a faraway future world of spacecraft and intelligent robots subsumed within a fairy tale set in the distant past. Star Wars: Episode IThe Phantom Menace attempted to top this

20、temporal dislocation. Setting the fourth movie three episodes before the first was a stroke of marketing genius that created the neologism prequel. This prequel demonstrates retro branding in the realm of connected products and services that characterize todays entertainment economy (Wolf 1999). As

21、a retro brand.The Phantom Menace stamps an established brand name. Star Wars, on a new movie that couples cutting-edge special effects with a cast of contemporary actors. As with the new Beetle, it imaginatively melds a familiar brand name with an all-new, up-to-date product. Bills diatribe offers o

22、pposing poles of the profane market and the sacred myth (see Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry 1989). Zacks posting is resentful of the myth and moneymaking power manifested in George Lucas as a person. Both message posters demonstrate that though the brand is clearly recognized as a commercial creation,

23、 it is also a deeply meaningful part of some consumers livesit is enthusiastically represented as a powerful metaphor for living and even for religion. These comments suggest not only that commerce and the sacred are cultural opposites but also that their intermixing in brands such as Star Wars has

24、considerable cultural power (see also Kozinets 2001, pp. 76-78). In support of these findings having wider marketing relevance, Pefialoza (2(X)0, p. 105) finds similar tensions between commerce and soul among ranchers of the American West and concludes that the West is a site for the production of p

25、rofound cultural meanings. Bills and Zacks postings express these important tensions in terms of a brand and the different responses to them. They respond to the brand paradox behind Star Warss combination of creed and commerce,piety and profanity, mana and money.DiscussionImplications for Brand Mea

26、ning ManagementMarketing scholars from Alderson (1957) to Zaltman (1997) have recognized the importance of the experiential nature of the brand, but perhaps not since the heyday of motivation research (e.g., Dichter 1960) has there been such a resurgence of interest in brand phenomenology. The most

27、succinct if overstated justification for this interest is the contention that some conceptualize a product as no more than an artifact around which customers have experiences (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2000, p. 83). From the pioneering work of Levy (1999) and Hirschman and Holbrook (1982) through the c

28、urrent wave of postpositivist inquiry (e.g. Brown 1995; Fournier 1998; Fournier and Mick 1999; Holt 2002; Kozinets 2001; Penaloza 2000; Sherry 1998; Thompson 1997), the tendency to regard brands as symbolic creations has led to the conclusion that the management of meaning must underlie marketing st

29、rategy. That marketers are quintessentially meaning managers, shaping the experience of consumers, is intuitively plausible. That meaning management involves attending to the creative activity of consumers, or that consumers might justly be regarded as the cocreators of brand essence, is equally pla

30、usible, if less fully appreciated.Antinomy, the final element of our 4As abbreviation, is perhaps most important of all, for brand paradox brings the cultural complexity necessary to animate each of the other dimensions. The brand is both alive and not alive, a thing and a personality, a subject and

31、 an object: This is the paradoxical kernel of brand meaning. The story is both truth and fiction, composed of clever persuasions and facts, devised by distant copywriters and real users. This is the central conundrum of brand story and consumer-marketer codependence. The idealized community is both

32、a real community and a pseudo community, moral and amoral, in thrall to a commercial creation and a rebellious uprising, dependent and independent, a gathering of both angry activists and covetous consumers. For a retro brand, the tension between past and presentand even, as in our two examples, the

33、 futurealso vivifies brand meanings. Retro products seem custom-made to address a core paradox at the heart of brand management. Retro combines the benefits of uniqueness, newness, and exclusivity (with its hints of higher functionality, class, styling, and premium prices) with oldness, familiarity, recognition, t