At the start of his recent BBC documentary series, The Story of Us, British historian Simon Schama asked very pertinently “who are we now?”. He suggested that to find the answer we should “search where the beating heart of every society truly lives: the bottomless creativity of our common culture”.

While Schama was referring to definitions of Britishness, it is a question that every brand needs to ask itself as it seeks to grow. Who are we now, where do we want to be, and how do we get there?

A key response to these questions lies in the same place as Schama found his answer: understand ‘our common culture’ and how it is changing. CMO’s and brand stewards can find actionable opportunities and distinctiveness through using cultural meaning to shape their brand strategy and execution.

Our experience is that businesses that put culture at the heart of their brand building succeed over the long-term. We have defined 5 cultural fundamentals that are a framework to deliver brand-centric cultural outputs to unlock the beating heart of your brand:

  1. Cultural Fit

  2. Cultural Alignment

  3. Cultural Consistency

  4. Visual Cultural Triggers

  5. Verbal Cultural Triggers

Traditionally, brand marketing starts with Philip Kotler’s famous ‘4 P’s of marketing’ – product, price, place, and promotion. Mark Ritson has built on these fundamentals with a focus on diagnosis: “Marketers don’t start with tactics; they don’t start with strategy. They start with understanding the one thing no one else in the company understands, the consumer. We are market-oriented. [1]” His emphasis on salience and long-term consistency underpin this.

The groundbreaking work of Byron Sharp told us that mental availability (being the brand consumers think of when they consider the category) & physical availability (always being in the right place, at the right price, at the right time) is crucial to driving brand penetration and defining our investment choices. 

But whether you start with the 4Ps or Sharps’ availability model, whether you believe in difference or distinctiveness, creativity or strategy, brand onions or where to play, etc., brand success has always come down to a simple journey: unlock insight about your consumers; make products and solutions that both meet and create needs; then invest (consistently) in building a distinctive brand.

So where does cultural meaning fit in? All the above, the proven marketing fundamentals, focus on a set of conscious actions to develop competitive advantage through distinctiveness, differentiation and relevance. But the context for brand building is the lived experience of consumers. These lives are unconscious, nuanced and complicated, difficult to understand and beyond our control.

Making sense of this is critical to brand building and we believe that brands increasingly need a set of ‘Cultural Fundamentals’, a simple set of proven inputs designed to do this. Cultural inputs need to be strategic in that they support strategic alignment or sometimes highlight the need for strategic step change, but of equal importance is that they must work at a shorter-term executional level. They must help unlock marginal gains in your brand delivery, the small distinctive assets we create that can collectively build cultural meaning. Culture influences how consumers view your big strategic idea AND how they respond to your micro-executional detail.

These cultural fundamentals must work to add value in the day-to- day not just at big moments of brand or category change. Take a simple example, like your CUJ (customer user journey). It maps out how the category fits with the consumer’s life and where and how they make decisions and choices. Most of the points on the journey have a cultural dimension. So, for instance in shampoo: there are cultural elements in how I feel about my hair, in my choices about chemical vs natural ingredients, or about how I style my hair. All these attitudes are built on the shoulders of cultural issues and opportunities. So, when your shampoo hits the shelves if you’ve considered and implemented the cultural dynamics of your pack, comms and user experience, to make your brand more culturally sensitive and relevant (e.g. by using sensory triggers) it will signal, often unconsciously to the consumer, that your brand is better responding to their needs. This builds deeper meaning and connections for your brand.

Brands inhabit a hyper-competitive world. It is imperative that we lift every stone to achieve that holy grail of difference, distinctiveness, and relevance. Culture is not something that consumers leave at the door of the supermarket, they carry it with them in their minds, hearts and their ideas of their own place in the world, their identity, their belonging to their family, community, nation, and as a way of giving them purpose and meaning in daily lives suffused with routine and expectation. It matters for the most the mundane and everyday low-interest purchases as much as for highly considered high-engagement purchases…

  • Buying Land O Lakes or Lurpak butter is part of an exploration of natural goodness and tasty pleasure.
  • Buying Colgate toothpaste is an ambition for health and beauty.
  • Buying Head & Shoulders shampoo expresses a need for security and confidence.
  • Buying Hornitos tequila is an aspiration for fun and glamour.
  • Buying Quaker Oats is an exploration of caring for your family’s health & wellbeing.
  • Buying Hovis bread is an expression of pride in your hearth and home.

Everyday purchases are injected with cultural importance (storytelling and myth-making) that we as consumers – people – depend on to make, navigate and reinforce our choices. As brand guardians the Cultural Fundamentals offer a simple framework – an expert shortcut – to enable you to make brand centric cultural choices as part of day-to-day brand management.

As human beings we are making sub-conscious cultural choices every day: whether we order an espresso, a cappuccino, a cup of tea or an iced latte is never an isolated choice made instinctively in the moment, it is a cultural choice built from deep foundations of meaning. If you are meeting for work then ordering tea – a drink which signals cosy gossipy conversation sends a message that you would like a casual chat, whereas ordering an espresso or a cappuccino because of its complexity, its richness, and its international sophistication, signals that you are in a mood for engaged business transaction.

Culture is present and central in every brand choice or interaction and the 5 Cultural Fundamentals can help you harness it to drive growth. So what are and how do the cultural fundamentals work?

  1. Cultural Fit: Do we need to keep up or get ahead? Is our brand culturally relevant; a leader; a follower; or stuck or more worryingly lost? This should be the first input to strategic diagnosis. This is an outside-in approach – how do we fit with the world?; what’s going on and changing in culture outside of our category which influences our consumers?

    Beauty and skincare is big business. Starface acne patches have transformed embarrassment into a celebration of coolish style. Their brand world and their products tell the same story of playfully rethinking norms/expectations, from strawberry pimple patches to less-expected collaborations with rapper Central Cee, Glossier, and Hello Kitty. With millions of videos and posts on social media sites mentioning them, Starface has become a status symbol for Gen Z & Gen Alpha. Before their arrival on the scene, acne treatment was functional and socially uncomfortable, but Starface subverted category codes by making pimples a natural inevitability. They recognized that younger generations were more comfortable with honesty, and distrusted a beauty category that had portrayed unrealistic perfection as the necessary standard. Instead Starface injected colour, vibrancy, fun, and performative energy into the category, creating a new space combining skincare with fashion in which celebrating being your true self – with all your natural flaws – was the greatest cultural fit for their consumers. Its cultural capital has translated into actual financial capital too – with a $90 million revenue in 2024. Boom! The question more established brands should ask, is why did it take a challenger to unlock this culturally driven space?

  1. Cultural Alignment: Define and have a clear cultural narrative – where you fit in the category so you can be more competitive – have you attached a relevant cultural story to your brand that allows you to both play within the category rules and also to stand apart from them. By integrating your brand and cultural narrative as culture evolves, you can reduce the need to undertake major re-positionings and high risk executional change. This is an inside-out approach – we stress-test whether your brand is aligned with the cultural shifts in Cultural Fundamental 1 and how you stack up against your competitive set. This will drive the direction for any change.

    Lucky Saint recognised that there was an opportunity within the beer category. On the one side were the traditional beers that were outdated, with high alcohol content, and formal aesthetics that drew on European aristocratic heraldic symbolism to communicate prestige, quality, and serious brewing heritage. On the other side were craft beers, with their loud and brash attitude and aesthetics to match which applauded their independence and anti-authoritarian tonality. But as younger drinkers began to become more health conscious, socially responsible, and attracted to cocktail coolness, sales of both traditional and craft beers declined. Into this maelstrom stepped Lucky Saint, a low & no alcohol beer that borrowed the traditions of the category with its more bulbous brown bottle format (vs the tall slim green bottles favoured by the category) and claims of Bavarian brewing heritage but employed a minimalist label aesthetic which nodded to the more understated and responsible state of mind of the Gen Z drinker. Their comms campaign mirrors the irreverence of the craft beer category but differentiates it by ironically referencing the ‘purer’ nature of both its product and its consumer for whom Lucky Saint is a religious saviour from both the ‘dangers’ of alcohol and support for their own more aspirationally healthy and responsible lifestyle.

 

  1. Cultural Consistency: Consistency is a marketing fundamental, and brands regularly need to overcome cultural tensions they may unintentionally This undermines your ability to stick to your brand narrative, and potentially confuses consumers. Brands should check the relevance of their cultural presentation across all channels over time.

    Burberry, the high-end British fashion brand, encountered a problem in the 1990s when their famous check proved to be too ubiquitous and therefore less premium. During the financial boom it became a symbol of affordable luxury now accessible to a range of consumers not an exclusive few. While this drove sales and share price, it lowered the ideal of quality the brand had always stood for, and its over-exposure led to connotations that the wearer lacked taste and style refinement. But now Burberry has re-launched itself for Spring 2025 following a number of years in which it struggled to identify its cultural fit. In a series of films released for Spring 2025 they brought their key brand asset – the knight symbol – to animated life. “With a real focus on craft to execute this, 120 stitched frames are used to tell the story of the Burberry knight journeying across London” declared director Daniel Quirke. By animating this equestrian knight symbol and paired it with a website film featuring both older style icons (Naomi Campbell, Kate Winslet, Richard E. Grant,) and younger trend-setters (Aimee Lou Wood, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Nicholas Hoult) all wearing the traditional trench coat in the London rain, Burberry has connected its historical brand and product design to a contemporary dynamic and energetic lifestyle, overcoming any remnant of its 90’s cultural detachment. The image can also become a key visual trigger (see below).

  1. Visual Cultural Triggers: At an executional level are you using the right visuals; is your look and feel evolving in line with cultural change? This is an analysis of your visual assets to ensure your messaging is culturally relevant, and if not how it can evolve. Short term enhancements/refinement ensure cut through, and close the gap between the intended meaning and how it’s received so that the message lands optimally. This helps create distinctive brand assets (see the great work by Jenni Romaniuk in that context).

    Oatly, the milk alternative drink, evolved its cultural fit from originally positioning itself as a functional still liquid in a drinking glass mirroring the commodified nature of dairy milk, through to a more active drink splashing into the glass and connoting the energetic functional benefits that the low fat, vitamin and calcium supplements enable. But the crucial cultural misjudgement was presenting Oatly as a drink, rather than as a hot drink additive at a time when on-the-go coffee was reaching it 4th wave in independent coffee shops. Its current visual identity system (which has been around for quite a while now) shifted the brand from focusing on its product benefit to its cultural value by understanding that by adopting a cartoon/illustration visual style and conversational tone of voice, it could code itself as a hot drink additive relevant to a hipster generation concerned to marry healthier drinking/eating choices and ethical & sustainable practices, with a dynamic on-the-go lifestyle which subverted the traditions of the commodified dairy milk industry. But more recent accusations that their product is ultra-processed, full of sugar, and owned by a less ethical VC business, now contrasted with the re-emergence of dairy. Oatly therefore are ripe for a new cultural audit to understand where the category is moving to, and what kinds of visual cultural triggers they need to adopt to communicate its cultural fit in the future.

  1. Verbal Cultural Triggers: Culturally are you using the right language – are you of the now; are you distinctive; are you easily understood (claims, descriptors across channels)? This is the kind of executional detail that would add value and marginal gains to ALL your investment in the brand. This is an analysis of your language assets (claims, descriptors, comms copy) to ensure your messaging is culturally relevant, and if not how it can evolve to be more effective and engaging.

    Across the snacking category there has been an evolution of healthy language from the promise of dietary control – reduce this, less that, and focusing on what’s been removed – to added benefits of functional ingredients and supplements – from what’s not in it to what is in it for you. Kind bars, for instance, have product descriptors trumpeting their use of whole ingredients like “nuts, fruits, and grains”. Many of their products also use the language of being “gluten-free” and claim to be “made without artificial additives”. More recently though, they’ve expanded into adding supplements such as “probiotics, omega-3s, and plant-based protein” yet also promising that they use ingredients “you can see and pronounce” – a tone of voice which acts as a cultural trigger for aspirational healthier lifestyles among a certain demographic cohort. This simple shift has created a conversation with consumers in which, while the media focusses on what’s bad for you to eat, snack brands emphasise the healthier benefits of their ingredients in their claims and descriptors, defying the nay-sayers and those whom some would say spoil the simple pleasures of on-the-go eating pleasure. 

All 5 of the cultural fundamentals are discoverable. All of them are actionable and instantly applicable tools. All of them can be tracked to add on-going value. All of them help build stronger, more relevant and distinctive brands.

These 5 cultural fundamentals are the beating heart of your brand and applying them is increasingly critical for short-term and long-term brand building success – and not doing it is a missed opportunity and sometimes, a meaningful risk!

Alex Gordon, CEO

Beating Heart: The 5 Cultural Fundamentals for Marketing