The Rise and Fall of an Iconic Brand: Alfa Romeo

Brand literature has in the last decade introduced religious-like concepts such as icons and cults among others (Muniz and Schau, 2005) in order to depict how a small set of brands is able to produce extreme attachment and love amongst consumers. A brand becomes an icon (Holt, 2006) when it delivers innovative cultural expressions through offering a compelling myth, a story that can help a large group of people - often a nation - resolve tensions in their lives. A brand becomes a cult (Belk and Tumbat, 2005) when it enjoys exclusive devotion from a small group – a community - of consumers who form personal or virtual cult-like followings. Notwithstanding the introduction of these two concepts, the conceptual difference between them is still unclear (Thompson, Rindfleisch and Arsel, 2006) as are the possible transitions between these two states in the life of a brand. In this research, we revisit these two concepts - iconic brands and cult brands - to specify their similarities and differences. Then, we focus on the specific case of brands that are national icons and run the risk of losing their iconicity (Torelli and Cheng, 2015). The aim of our research is to contribute to knowledge on iconic brands, cult brands and brand iconicity by following the ‘career’ of an iconic brand: from creation to the period of iconization to episodes of loss and regain of iconicity. To this end, we investigate the case of the Italian brand Alfa Romeo created in 1910, which was taken over by the Italian Fiat Group in 1986. Alfa Romeo is deemed iconic for Italians