Culture-Based Products: Integrating Cultural and Commercial Strategies

Today it is customary to speak of the collaborative potential of culture and business to achieve benefits in one’s cultural and professional lives. Making sense of the involvement of culture in firms, however, requires a better understanding of the link between cultural practices and projects and the development of business models. This paper focuses on companies that place culture at the core of their respective production practices and business models, with particular reference to those offering culture-based products. For these kinds of products, the creation, preservation, enhancement and transmission of a specific culture all play vital roles in embedding particular aesthetic and symbolic content in their unique consumption experiences. In order to explore the integration of cultural and commercial strategies that culture-based products seem to drive, we propose an early study through the investigation of a set of brands competing in the same field.