Instead, the firm( tacitly) pursued a cultural-branding approach. Because masculine ideals are shaped by society, they change over time. The Cold War had dramatically affected Americans’ perceptions of masculinity. In the face of a nuclear threat, the corporate executive seemed too sedentary. Instead, the public was drawn to what had only recently been viewed as an anachronism: the gunslinging rugged individualist of the Old West, who, in the American mythos, had helped forge the country’ s success. The enormous popularity of Western films was one indication of this shift. This massive cultural opportunity, which Marlboro and Levi’ s leveraged as well, is obvious when analyzed through a cultural-branding framework— but invisible without one.
The Jack Daniel’ s distillery was in a rural region of Tennessee that the postwar mass media portrayed as an impoverished land of hillbillies. Yet in the American imagination, the area was also one of the last authentic pockets of the frontier, where Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone had gotten their start. So when American men yearned to revive the ideology of the frontier, the whiskey offered great potential as a symbol. This theme was first hit upon by men’ s magazines( Fortune, True), which published stories romanticizing the distillery as a place run by frontiersmen, little changed since the 19th century. The company’ s print-ad campaign simply emulated those stories, adding some folksy copy.
Jack Daniel’ s quickly became the aspirational whiskey among urban uppermiddle-class men; the branding converted its once-stigmatized location into a place where men were really men. Conventional models would never build a strategy
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