Innovation is an essential driver of brand growth. When the economy is tight and consumer spending is limited, exciting people with brands and products that answer unmet cultural needs can create new commercial advantage.

To deliver this, brands must constantly navigate the incessant cultural churn. Sign Salad exists to help them understand the changing cultural landscape, so they can unlock long-term enduring trends and short-term opportunities, while avoiding the pitfalls of riding the wrong cultural waves and quickly becoming outdated. Our work can be a unique distinguishing contribution to innovation, or as Henry Ford might have put it, cultural foresight can help you do more than just make faster horses.

Our cultural foresight practice tracks emerging new meanings, and can look across categories, and beyond geographic boundaries. Brands need to be aware of the accelerated shifts from margins to mainstream, and aware of why brands move from being current and in vogue, to declining to irrelevance.

Change that sticks does so because it creates important meanings for consumers.

The craft coffee movement that has shifted us from instantly convenient granules creating generic cups of ‘coffee’ to the pod-machine’s continental sophistication of café-style cappuccinos and espressos. This has created a more meaningful and desirable daily indulgence ritual to the lives of consumers where previously there was only a process of mindless caffeine fuelling. In this scenario the innovation was in transforming ‘convenience’ into a more creative activity leading to a better product experience.

Similarly, cultural narratives of wellness have moved from a physical focus on dieting and the gym to embrace a more holistic consideration of mental and emotional health. This has happened not because these mental and emotional health needs are new, but because consumers became tired of the restrictive dieting and exercise practices of the physically-focused narratives. The more holistic conception of wellness is not only tolerant of, but it encourages, enjoyable moments of ‘self care’, communicating to consumers that they are more than simple machines, and that it is important to pursue your interests and dreams.

These changes build meaning, add pleasure, and increase self-confidence and fulfilment in the lives of consumers. Framing the our needs as sources of joy, adds emotion to previously logical activities, helping these respective cultural shifts gain instant short-term meaning and become widely integrated into the consumer space, retaining longer-term cultural relevance.  

The cultural power of these shifts may seem easy to identify in retrospect. But how can we tell in advance the cultural narratives that will be meaningful? This challenge is fundamental to any innovation, brand redesign, or NPD initiative, and astute companies approach this question intelligently.

Sign Salad’s cultural foresight approach is the perfect tool for getting beneath the surface of the chaos of culture, and identifying enduring brand meaning.

For consumers, the product is the start point. Once we get beyond the product doing its job, then you get into how well it is delivering on its promise, its availability and price etc. Having achieved those initial critical marketing essentials, harnessing the brand’s meaning – that is its cultural storytelling power which stimulates and enables the traditional metrics of its success (likeability, recognition, memorability, etc.) – is a powerful way to build relevance and distinctiveness in both the short and the long-term.

By unlocking cultural meaning (its storytelling power) you can build stronger and more enduring/sustainable brands.

This is the core motivator of consumer purchasing behaviour, and is the ‘why’ behind consumer desire to pay more for a premium brand, or switch from a familiar product to something new. Sign Salad’s unique cultural analysis (combining semiotics, linguistics, AI, foresight, and brand expertise) is therefore fundamental to unlocking the power of brands.

It’s important to recognise that the utility of a product is not the sole motivator for purchase. We also purchase them because of what they allow us to communicate about ourselves. Am I a Pepsi person or a Coca-Cola person? Tropicana or Innocent? A peaceful Dove or an Aesop fable?

What these brands communicate to us, and thus allow us to communicate about ourselves, is fundamental to our purchasing decisions. Consumers – people – find it hard to articulate the ‘why’ behind their decision making, and in particular struggle to fully communicate their changing attitudes and emerging interests.

This is where the power of cultural foresight comes into its own, as it allows us to dig beneath the surface of culture, and explore the deeper currents of change, indicating the emerging meanings that are starting to direct consumer behaviour and will govern their decision making now and for the next 2-4 years or more. Sign Salad’s approach to cultural foresight delivers this in an immediately actionable way that will impact your brand execution in the short-term and strategy for the longer-term.

This is not about abstract prediction – cultural foresight observes changes happening in the world now – but crucially takes an extra step to unpack why these changes hold underlying meaning for consumers.

Our work can deliver practical ways to disrupt and innovate in a category. For instance, to help short-term comms, we can help to clarify that younger Gen Z consumers use TikTok to search for financial advice (vs traditional banking or IFAs) because they distrust ‘traditional’ sources of cultural authority which let them down (banking crisis of 2008 leading to cost of living challenges), and desire a more peer-to-peer tone of voice. 

While for long-term strategy, we are able to unlock a disruptive platform which can align with emerging culture, identifying ideas that enable long-term brand success. For instance, Cadbury’s success over the last 10 years has been driven by a clear focus on a brand platform of generosity, which is built on strong cultural storytelling power of sharing, belonging, thoughtfulness, and care, all symbolising a product which enables redemption and positive emotional connection with other people. While the digital ‘selfie’ world became more individualistic, Cadbury found a way to wrap itself in a disruptive sentimental value that drives distinctiveness. All of this fits with the long-term brand values and identity of a business built on a virtue of caring for others through its religiously-derived Quaker heritage. BUT the core to their success was identifying a contemporary counter-cultural and essential human idea. 

Understanding these underlying meanings allows for opportunities to deliver new products, packaging, or brands that don’t simply repeat the surface trend, but deliver against the underlying motivation e.g. a bank not just opening a TikTok account, but changing their overall tone of voice and visual identity to be more approachable, and increase their appeal across platforms. Or a brewer not just moving to 330ml cans, but developing new products framed as worthy of slower consumption and connoisseurial consideration. Or a confectioner not just developing larger ‘sharing’ packs of chocolate, but reframing their essential value as an empathetic connector of people which lifts spirits and binds a community. 

Finally, the best opportunities for innovation come from being open minded and taking a cross-category perspective. If you are a snack brand, new/emergent meanings in bread, fresh produce, or wellness and socialising, may all offer opportunities for you. Identifying new meanings that currently sit outside your category but exist in adjacent categories and are applicable and transportable into your own, permit you to do something disruptive and novel within your space, while also aligning with broader cultural conditions.

Understanding changing cultural meaning empowers innovation that is not just novel, but disruptively relevant and of enduring cultural value. In chaotic and challenging times, it is more important than ever to pay attention to the currents of meaning in culture that can offer a steadying and enduring compass for exciting innovation. This will allow your brand to endure the cultural storms and ride the waves successfully.

Three key takeaways for brands:

  • Culture operates on multiple levels, and without careful cultural analysis it can be easy to get distracted by the chaotic surface and miss the deeper currents of meaning running below, where true short-term and long-term opportunities lie.

  • Understanding changing cultural meaning offers opportunities for powerful storytelling innovation that will not just follow trends, but embody short-term emerging consumer desires that will drive the next 2-5 years. It will also help identify opportunities for short-term executional refreshes for launches over the next 6 months e.g. new product (e.g. exciting variants), and also to create new visual identity, pack design, & digital comms.

  • Looking beyond a brand’s category to analyse adjacencies, can identify meanings and generate long-term cultural opportunity spaces and ideas that will be disruptive among your competitors, while fitting with emergent and increasingly desirable consumer needs.

Mark Lemon, Director & Alex Gordon, CEO

Currents of Meaning: Using cultural foresight for innovation that lasts