Is John Wayne America’s Greatest Brand?

John Wayne is the top person listed on Brand Keys Most Patriotic Brands list. He may have a place well beyond that as the top “person” brand in recent American history. Brand Keys calls the results of its study the “top 20 most patriotic Americans”

Brand Key’s rules for picking people rules out current presidential candidates (and the current president), but it did throw a very wide net:

For the first time since Brand Keys Most Patriotic Brands survey was first conducted 10 years ago – in addition to asking consumers to evaluate the 248 brands – Brand Keys asked respondents to name “anyone – alive or dead – who they felt best personified the value of ‘patriotism’ in the United States.”

The poll was done with a sample size of 4,750 consumers, ages 16 to 65.

Wayne was among the top box office draws for much of the 1940s, 195os, and 1970s. He made his last film, The Shootist, in 1976. So, what is he doing at the top of the Brand Keys list 40 years later?

Wayne’s scores above living people which include Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) CEO Tim  Cook (N0. 16); No 2. Tom Hanks, 3. John Stewart, 4. Taylor Swift, 5. Stephen Spielberg, 6. Oprah Winfrey, 9. Stephen Colbert , 10. Ruth Bader Ginsberg, 13. Antonin Scalia, 14. Angelina Jolie, 17. Bill O’Reilly, 19. Gloria Steinem; and, 20. John Oliver.

He scored ahead of 11. Martin Luther King and 12. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Wayne died less than 3 years after “The Shootist” was made. That was after he made another 169 movies.

Wayne biographer Ronald Davis wrote:

John Wayne personified for millions the nation’s frontier heritage. Eighty-three of his movies were Westerns, and in them he played cowboys, cavalrymen, and unconquerable loners extracted from the Republic’s central creation myth.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Garry Wills, wrote in “John Wayne’s America” published in 1997:

Why was Wayne the Number One Movie Star, even as late as 1995? He embodies the American myth. The archetypal American is a displaced person — arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, fearred by others, a killer but cleansing the world of things that “need killing,” loving but not bound down by love, rootless but carrying the Center in himself, a gyroscopic direction-setter, a traveling norm.

Robert Passikoff, founder and president of Brand Keys wrote about the results of the study, “John Wayne was never shy about his love for America – on or off screen.”

While America is very different from when Wayne made most of his movies, based on current political debate, the country is moving his way again. Rugged and part of the myth: there is America, and then there is everywhere else.

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