How a Brand Becomes an Icon

In the post war era ad agencies saturated American life with graphic symbols aimed to bestow identity on everyday items such as soup, soda-pop, and cars. For the first time the public became entrenched in a kind of repetitive marketing psychological warfare. They were besieged by graphic design from magazines to packaged goods. Though these tactics succeeded in supplanting corporate iconography as staples in everyday life, brands wouldn’t achieve true icon status until Americans flipped the script.

Pop was a direct response to an overflowing advertising industry. It refracted brand marketing into a kind of epiphany. Because of these "icon's" pervasiveness in people’s lives they were significant. Though more importantly, it signaled a paradigm shift from the companies’ owning how they were perceived, to the people owning that perception. Warhol’s vision of the Campbell’s soup can undoubtedly transformed it into an everlasting icon. That vision was an articulation of the collective feeling Americans had toward Campbell’s and the role it played in their lives. As Marty Neumeier writes in The Brand Gap, “When enough individuals arrive at the same gut feeling, a company can be said to have a brand”. Though, given the right help from the people a brand can become an icon.

The best artists evoke what is already present in our collective consciousness. They have a way of materializing what was previously only in the air around us. Like Warhol, Spike Lee is a true master of this triumphal effect of pop art. It could be said that Lee’s 1986 breakthrough film She’s Gotta Have It, a comedic-drama that explores sexual and cultural stereotypes, sparked modern sneaker culture into existence. In addition to writing and directing the film Lee plays Mars Blackmon a stylized comic embodiment of Brooklyn hip. Mars’ fandom for Michael Jordan transcends his loyalism to the New York Knicks, an ode to Jordan’s status as an outsized icon. Though beyond this nod to Jordan himself, the statement is about the Air Jordan 1 sneakers that never leave Mars’ feet. In the same way that Warhol highlights the Campbell’s soup can’s pervasiveness in 1960s American life, Lee hones in on the fever pitch popularity of the Air Jordan 1 during the summer of 1985 (when the film was produced) through focus and repetition. Lee illustrates how these sneakers stand on their own (independent of Jordan) as an icon — transcending their athletic shoe functionality to become a fashion item, a status symbol, and a true sign of the time.