Exploring professional human brand identity through cultural and social capital: a typology of film director identities

ABSTRACT

Our research focuses on film director human brands. It addresses the issue of human brand identity construction through the social valuation of identity attributes linked to cultural capital. Based on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural and social capital, we examine the identity attributes on which human brand identities are built through the acquisition of legitimacy. We conduct a qualitative study combining three context levels of analysis (external, internal and individual). Our results reveal the existence of four human brand identity types (i.e. chameleon conformist, niche archetypecast, mass archetypecast, cultural influencer), thus enriching and extending previous research. Each identity type is characterised by a set of culturally valued identity attributes, associated with legitimacies – specific, bourgeois, popular and institutional – bestowed by human brand constituencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional human brand identity
• cultural and social capital
• legitimacy
• identity attributes
• cultural relevance
• auteurism
• film directors

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the editorial team for their very helpful comments and insightful suggestions all along the reviewing process. They also thank the two non-expert coders for their involvement and the time they devoted to the study. They are grateful to the respondents (film directors, producers, critics, filmgoers) for sharing their experience and expertise with them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Bourdieu (1983) defines specific legitimacy in the context of poetry, where the only legitimate benefit is recognition by one’s peers. In the context of an artistic industry, specific legitimacy can come from other professional constituencies inside the field of practice.

2. Within the same category, strong differences in terms of productivity were quickly noticed. Therefore, it was essential that our sample also comprised such differences in productivity. Among the Western film directors, John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Burt Kennedy and Andrew V. McLaglen featured among the most productive, while Fred Zinnemann and Otto Preminger featured among the least productive.

3. In our vertical analyses, we examined each respondent’s train of thought in his/her construction of a film director categorisation (from the 60 director names given). We looked for the identity attributes characterising director types according to each respondent. In our horizontal analysis, we looked for recurring themes common to all interviews. Furthermore, the content analysis used long verbatims (whole sentences) rather than short ones, to better understand the phenomenon at hand (e.g. Parmentier & Fischer, 2015).

4. The five cycles and the socioeconomic trends can be summarised as follows:

Cycle 1: the foundations of the genre and the pre-classical era (1903–1928), with silent Western films, and the introduction of revolutionary new technologies that led to the success of the American film industry;

Cycle 2: the classical era (1929–1949), with the Great Depression, the emergence of classical codes of Western film-making, the introduction of sound and colour technology, cinemascope, natural settings;

Cycle 3: the revisionist era (1950–1962), with social and moral concerns (McCarthyism, feminism, racism) and the first pro-Indian films, then the beginning of the Vietnam War;

Cycle 4: the twilight era of super-heroes and anti-heroes (1963–1979), in a Vietnam War context with anti-war movements, and the emergence of the European influence (American auteur movement) and ‘Spaghetti’ Westerns;

Cycle 5: the end of the Western genre, with only occasional Western films (1980–2017), following the financial disaster of Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino) in 1980 and with the return to studio control.

5. The respondent refers to the film industry in Europe.

6. ‘Makers’ are non-creative but highly competent film directors.

7. These directors may have been initially involved in the setting and construction of these norms.

8. http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/feature-articles/sam-newfield/

9. After Birth of a Nation (1915), David W. Griffith also directed some Westerns (e.g. The Massacre (1912), and The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1913)). But he did not professionally survive the social and technological developments of the 1920s.

10. Westerns of the genre’s classical era celebrated the conquest of the West and its associated values (e.g. bravery, moral integrity, etc).

11. The term ‘Indian film’ was commonly used when these types of films were made, that is Western films featuring native American characters. We use this term in reference to those films.

12. Westerns of the genre’s revisionist era introduced social and moral concerns of their time (e.g. feminism, McCarthyism from 1951 to 1954, a pro-Indian angle, etc).

13. In sum, cultural relevant expertise goes along with non-auteur, non-eclectic film director characteristics and high specific legitimacy to define the chameleon conformist identity type. Cultural irrelevant creativity concurs with non-eclectic auteur film attributes and high bourgeois legitimacy to characterise the niche archetypecast, while the mass archetypecast ranks also high on genre eclecticism, specific and bourgeois legitimacy. The cultural influencer type distinguishes himself from the mass archetypecast by also having a high institutional legitimacy, that is being ‘consecrated’.

14. This controversial human brand, placed by our study in the ‘mass archetypecast’ category, is highly creative, eclectic and attracts large audiences with films such as Pulp Fiction, (1994), Kill Bill (2003, 2004), Django Unchained (2012), and The Hateful Eight (2015). In his movies, Quentin Tarantino enjoys paying tribute to great film directors he admires, but he also possesses cultural influencer skills, having won multiple academy awards and being considered by many young directors as an iconic director who influences others.

15. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/peter-biskind-michael-ciminos-twisted-910101.

16. With the European auteur movement (which arose in the mid-1960s in France), film directors were no longer perceived as technicians but as artists, and more importantly as the main artistic contributors to any film. The auteur movement established the director as the ‘parent’ of the film, and argued that film and film director formed an organic whole, and directors should be given complete artistic freedom.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Camille Pluntz

Camille Pluntz is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at ISG International Business School. Her research focuses on strategic marketing with human branding, brand extension strategies and brand legitimacy. She has presented papers at the annual international conferences held by the Association for Consumer Research and the Association Française du Marketing.

Bernard Pras

Bernard Pras is a Professor of Marketing at the Université Paris Dauphine (PSL University) and ESSEC Business School. A former President and founder of the AFM (Association Française du Marketing), he has published numerous articles on consumer behaviour, marketing strategy and international business that have appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Southern Economic Journal, Recherche et Applications en Marketing, Revue Française de Gestion, Journal of Marketing Management, European Journal of Marketing, and the Journal of Product & Brand Management.