The document analyzes the complexities of human brands, particularly through the lens of David Bowie, exploring the dualities of celebrity and iconicity. It discusses how Bowie navigated public perception, managing his identity as both a celebrity and a cultural icon over time. Key findings highlight the evolving associations between his public persona and private self, as well as the impact of cultural and market dynamics on his branding strategies.

1. Toni Eagar
Australian National University
Email: Toni.Eagar@anu.edu.au
Becoming Iconic:
Resolving Contradictions in
Human Brand Celebrity and
Iconicity
Andrew Lindridge
The Open University
Email: A.M.Lindridge@open.ac.uk

2. From Nelson Mandela to
Ronald Reagan, from Steve
Jobs to Sam Walton, from
Oprah Winfrey to Martha
Stewart, from Michael
Jordan to Muhammad Ali,
from Andy Warhol to Bruce
Springsteen, from John
Wayne to Woody Allen,
cultural icons dominate our
world.
(Holt, 2004, p.1)
“Fame can take interesting
men and thrust mediocrity
upon them.”
“I always had a repulsive
need to be something more
than human.”
David Bowie
2

3. Quote highlights two important assumptions:
1. Human brands are often associated with famous
celebrities
(Muñiz, Norris, and Fine, 2013; Parmentier, 2010; 2011;
Schroeder, 2005).
Human brands represent the “well-known persona[s] who [are] the
subject of marketing communications” (Thomson, 2006, p.104)
Studies include:
a. Celebrities (Parmentier 2010, 2011)
b. CEOs (Seo, Chae, & Lee, 2012)
c. Job seekers (Close, Moulard, & Monroe, 2011)
d. Artists (Muñiz et al., 2014; Schroeder, 2005)
3

4. Quote highlights two important assumptions:
2. Within celebrity studies the human brand is
considered both:
a. the mediocre (artificial and synthetic celebrity)
(Boorstin, 1964; Debord, 2002),
b. the icon (more than human, embodying a
“compelling symbol of a set of ideas or values that
a society deems important”)
(Holt, 2004, p.1).
4

5. The Conundrum
So is a human brand mediocre
or culturally important or both?
This leaves the human brand in a
quandary over their signification
and their role in macro societal
structures.
5

6. Research Question
• How are the contradictions between
celebrity and iconicity resolved in creating
and managing a human brand?
– We address this question by analyzing David
Bowie who, we argue, achieved celebrity and
iconicity simultaneously.
6

7. Celebrity and Iconicity
When a human becomes a celebrity:
– when media interest in their activities transfers from the reporting
of their public-self to investigating their private-self
(Rojek, 2001)
– lacks legitimate achievement
and authenticity
(Boorstin, 1964; Debord, 2002)
– fame precedes their
achievements
(Turner, 2004)
7

8. Celebrity and Iconicity
Icons embody:
– crucial cultural functions
– perform cultural identity myths
– allow imagination
– and repair a damaged cultural
fabric
• In essence, the icon is a
legitimate cultural symbol of
personal achievement and
societal values
(Holt, 2004)
8

9. Celebrity and Iconicity
Whether a person is considered a
celebrity or an icon is often based:
• On representations of the
public and private self
• Attributions of greatness
across time,
• The malleability of the
celebrity’s cultural meaning
and value to manage shifting
cultural concerns
(Brown, McDonagh and Schultz, 2013).
9

10. Structuration Theory and Human Brands
• Agents exist and interact within
a structure and draw upon rules
and resources
• Agents’ behaviours are
constantly recreated and
adapted through differing time
periods
• Agents’ power to recreate
differing meanings over time
depends on the ownership of
material and organisational
capabilities
– Giddens (1984)
10
http://groundcherry.wordpress.com/2012/11/04/structuration/

11. David Bowie’s Multiple-Human Brands
11
Performed
Sub-Brand
Parent Brand
“Human”
Brand Creator
David Jones
David Bowie
Ziggy Stardust Major Tom
Aladdin Sane
Halloween
Jack
The Thin White
Duke
John Merrick
(The Elephant
Man)
Tao Jones
David Bowie

12. Method
1. Grounding
– Identify data sources used to develop concepts
• Multiple data sources tracking Bowie’s career from 1972-2013
– Social media, media, music industry, Bowie generated
– Total documents = 562
– Just started conducting in-depth interviews with Bowie fans (N=4)
– looking for more volunteers to interview. more
about that later.
• Materials were read, notes made, and re-read to identify nuances
and metaphors
• Systematic coding according to emergent themes e.g. “Ziggy”,
“Paranoia” or “career decline”
12

13. 13

14. Findings
Stage 1: Forming Associations within a
Time Period
Stage 2: Fixing associations in a Time
Period
Stage 3: Shifting associations across
Time Periods
14

15. Stage 1: Forming Associations within a Time Period
Bowie’s appearance as Ziggy Stardust on BBC’s Top of the
Pops on 22nd January 1972
– a time characterized by Britain’s continued economic decline,
industrial strife and an impending feeling of apocalyptic doom
(Lynskey, 2013)
15
– Ziggy’s allure lay in “a new sexually ambiguous image for
those youngsters willing and brave enough to challenge
the notoriously pedestrian stereotypes conventionally
available to working-class men and women”.
– For Bowie, the sexually ambiguous associations of his
performance persona, translated into public interest in his
private self.
– David’s present image is to come on like a swishy
Queen, a gorgeously effeminate boy. He’s as camp
as a row of tents, with his limp hand and trolling
vocabulary. ‘I’m gay,’ he says, ‘and always have
been, even when I was David Jones.’ But there’s a
sly jollity about how he says it, a secret smile at the
corners of his mouth.
(Watts, 1972)

16. Stage 1: Forming Associations within a Time Period
Bowie Sexual
ambiguity Celebrity
Audience and media look to Bowie’s private self (marriage, sex-life,
child, statements of homosexuality) to interpret the sexual
ambiguity of his performance persona
16

17. Stage 1: Forming Associations within a Time Period
Ziggy Building
Blocks Iconicity
Cultural symbols:
• Corruptive power celebrity
• Pessimism for the future
• Libertinism in the present
17
Mythic imagery:
• God-like figure
• Comes to Earth
• Dies

18. BoyGeorge, the British singer, writing in 1995 (pp. 35-36) captured how Ziggywas
sacralized through dress and appearance and the communitas of being a Ziggyclone:
When Ziggy Stardust…came to Lewisham in 1973 I rushed to buy a ticket. …I tried to give
myself a Ziggy stardust haircut. It was a disaster….I spent the whole day hanging around
Lewisham, watching the crowd well up. Hundreds of Ziggy … clones. Bowie was like an
alien. It was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen.
18

19. Stage 2: Fixing associations in a Time Period
19
Bowie’s fixed associations:
• The perpetuation of the belief
that Bowie is Ziggy
• Bowie’s human attributes

20. Stage 2: Fixing associations in a Time Period
20
The perpetuation of the belief that Bowie is
Ziggy:
• Perpetuated by Bowie:
― ‘"Call me Ziggy! Call me Ziggy Stardust!" are
Bowie's last words.’ (Edwards, 1972)
• Perpetuated by the media:
― “…a high priest of pop” “a self-constructed
freak” who “claims he enjoys the pleasure of
other men” and “…who spends two hours
before his show caressing his body with paint”
• Bowie announces in 1973 that Ziggy is dead and
will not perform again.

21. Stage 2: Fixing associations in a Time Period
21
Bowie’s human characteristics: Age
• As he and his audience age ability to experiment
musically is considered undignified:
Oi, Bowie! No! That was one's first reaction
to the rumour sweeping the Hanover Grand
on Monday that David Bowie would follow his
show with a drum & bass set. Though he
conducted some brave experiments with the
genre on his current album, Earthling, there
was something undignified about the idea of
him trying to recreate adrenalised beats in
front of a bemused crowd of people his own
age.
(Sullivan, 1997)

22. Stage 2: Fixing associations in a Time Period
22
Bowie’s human characteristics: Age
• Bowie had the agency to deny the market their desired
performances, as he did with killing Ziggy in 1973, this denial
no longer signified 'cutting edge and subversive musician' to
the media and his audience. Instead it suggested market
irrelevance and pretentiousness.

23. Stage 2: Fixing associations in a Time Period
23
Bowie’s human characteristics: Sexuality
• We are confused:
“the biggest mistake I ever made…[as] I was always a
closet heterosexual" (cf. Gilmore, 2012)
• The audience and the media perpetuate Bowie’s image
of sexual ambiguity, in line with Ziggy, rather than
updating their image of Bowie

24. Stage 3: Shifting associations across time periods
Bowie’s resources to shift associations through
time:
– Different musical genres
• Glam rock  Captured UK market (Ziggy - sexuality)
• Soul music  Captured US market (Halloween Jack - White man
doing Black music)
• Challenged by the market:
– US media particularly questioned Bowie’s authenticity:
There is an honesty about David these days even though it really can’t be
described as refreshing. It is as carefully acted out as anything he’s ever
done, and as such, the face of David Bowie presented to me that week was
who David Bowie decided to be, February 1976. He’s clever, totally aware of
his persona, and there’s a very determined gleam in his eyes these days.
(Robinson, 1976)
– New commercial materials, business practices and
technologies
• Music videos
• Bowie Bonds
• Interactive website
• Electronic downloads
24

25. Stage 3: Shifting Associations across Time Periods
Ziggy’s transitioning associations through time:
• Product of different market agents as a counter-cultural narrative:
– Audience - nostalgia
– Media – consistent association of Bowie with Ziggy
“That fucker Ziggy wouldn’t leave me alone for
years, that was when it all started to sour”
– Record companies – Ziggy re-issues, lost material
– Fashion
– Bowie re-engages with Ziggy as a tool to advance his human brand:
Yeah, I'm not only doing it, I'm doing it on three platforms. I'm working with
people on a film version and I'm working with people on a theater version
that's completely different and I'll synthesize the two into a huge version of
Internet hypertext - where we will find out about Ziggy's mum and things like
that. I want this kind of parallel world with Ziggy on the Internet that stays
there as archive forever - like a living organism. But the theater version and
the film versions will be completely and utterly different from each other. The
stage show will be about the interior values of Ziggy and his contemporaries.
It won't have terribly many characters in it. The film would be the audiences'
perception of who or what Ziggy was. It will be a bigger, grander, more blah,
blah. But the three taken together is, I suppose, lazy post-modernism where
the same story is told in different ways. (Phoenix, 1999)
25

26. Stage 3: Shifting Associations across Time Periods
Ziggy’s 1972 break-through television appearance on
TOTP’s, uploaded by ‘midevilfreako’ in 2007 is credited
with over 9.8 million viewings:
Who'd have thought David Bowie putting his arm around Mick
would still be talked about today in connection to gay liberation?
This man is a social pioneer and a living legend.
Abi Watson (2014)
26

27. Summary of Findings
Stage 1
Associations
form
 Interest in the
private self
 Building
blocks of iconicity
Stage 2
Associations are
fixed in time
 Celebrity
Stage 3
Associations shift
across time
 Iconicity
27
Human brand
icon
Celebrity and
Icon converge
 Material and
organizational
capabilities

28. Summary of Findings: Trajectories
Stage 1
Associations
form
 Interest in the
private self
 Building
blocks of iconicity
Stage 2
Associations are
fixed in time
 Celebrity
Stage 3
Associations shift
across time
 Iconicity
28
Human brand
icon
Celebrity and
Icon converge
 Material and
organizational
capabilities
Bowie
Ziggy

29. Discussion: Human Brand Icons
David Bowie adopts and adapts
the material and organizational
capabilities of:
• changing commercial materials
• business practices
• new technologies
• performance personas
29
Consequence of the agentic actions of human brands
to reconcile their public / private selves in forming,
fixing and shifting associations within a dynamic
system

30. The end and a request for help
30
• We are seeking Bowie fans to interview in person, by skype or telephone.
• Contact either Andrew or I
•Toni.eagar@anu.edu.au
•andrew.lindridge@open.ac.uk
• or there is an information sheet on the registration desk.
• or come and talk to me.
• or use this QR code
• or click here
https://anu.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_2rf4WcY8BukDbDL