The triumphal march of the automobile and its connection with American culture have often been acknowledged in scholarship. By contrast, the culture-specific, value-oriented advertising strategies of the most important US carmaker General Motors (GM) in its home market have received less attention, especially in American Studies. This study focuses on the connection between GM products and America and the fundamental values represented by politics, business, and society. The author examine...

A legend in the car industry reveals the philosophy that's starting to turn General Motors around.In 2001, General Motors hired Bob Lutz out of retirement with a mandate to save the company by making great cars again. He launched a war against penny pinching, office politics, turf wars, and risk avoidance. After declaring bankruptcy during the recession of 2008, GM is back on track thanks to its embrace of Lutz's philosophy.When Lutz got into the auto busin...

**From the author of the award-winning The Master Switch, who coined the term "net neutrality”—a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time."Dazzling." —Financial Times**Ours is often called an information economy, but at a moment when access to information is virtually unlimited, our attention has become the ultimate commodity. In nearly every moment of our waking liv...

Coca-Cola. Harley-Davidson. Nike. Budweiser. Valued by customers more for what they symbolize than for what they do, products like these are more than brands--they are cultural icons. How do managers create brands that resonate so powerfully with consumers? Based on extensive historical analyses of some of America's most successful iconic brands, including ESPN, Mountain Dew, Volkswagen, Budweiser, and Harley-Davidson, this book presents the first systematic model to explain how brands bec...

A job seeking strategy guide revealing "the extraordinary ways a liberal arts education broadens the career opportunities of new graduates" ( The Hill ).For more than a decade, the national spotlight has focused on science and engineering as the only reliable choice for finding a successful post-grad career. Our destinies have been reduced to a caricature: learn to write computer code or end up behind a counter, pouring co...

Trenchantly on point and bursting with insight, anthropologist Grant McCracken shows American corporations how keeping a finger on the pulse of contemporary cultural trends can change their business practices for the better -- and ahead of the curve.Levi-Strauss, the jeans and apparel maker, missed out on the hip-hop trend. They didn't realize that those kids in baggy jeans represented a whole new -- and lucrative -- market opportunity, one they could have seen com...

One of the country's leading activist curators explores how corporations and governments have used art and culture to mystify and manipulate us.The production of culture was once the domain of artists, but beginning in the early 1900s, the emerging fields of public relations, advertising and marketing transformed the way the powerful communicate with the rest of us. A century later, the tools are more sophisticated than ever, the onslaught more relentless.In Culture as ...

Brands are dead. Advertising no longer works. Consumers are in control. Or so we're told. In Buying In, Rob Walker argues that this accepted wisdom misses a much more important cultural shift, including a practice he calls murketing, in which people create brands of their own and participate, in unprecedented ways, in marketing campaigns for their favorites. Yes, rather than becoming immune to them, we are rapidly embracing brands. Profiling Timberland, American Apparel, P...

"For all the right reasons." "Cars that can." "What to Drive." "The perfect Car for an Imperfect World." Only one of these slogans would be chosen by Subaru of America to sell its cars in the recession year of 1991.As six advertising agencies scrambled for the account and the winner tried to churn out the Big Idea that would install Subaru in the collective national unconscious, Randall Rothenberg was there, observing every nuance of the chaos, comedy, creativity, and egotism that ...

A radical new book about the Participation Age, for everyone who: has a job, owns a company, or manages people.IMAGINE a company of any size:With no titles, no departments, no corporate ladder, no office hours, unlimited vacation time, and profit sharing for everyone.That invites the whole person to work, not just the part tied to the machine.Where leaders hire people they will never have to manage, in fact where there are no employees or managers ...

Contrived. Disingenuous. Phony. Inauthentic. Do your customers use any of these words to describe what you sell-or how you sell it? If so, welcome to the club. Inundated by fakes and sophisticated counterfeits, people increasingly see the world in terms of real or fake. They would rather buy something real from someone genuine rather than something fake from some phony. When deciding to buy, consumers judge an offering's (and a company's) authenticity as much as-if not more than-price, qua...