If you stand still, culture will steamroller over you on its constant march for future change.

The C-Suite is under pressure from shareholders. There are two ways to meet that: the first is to reduce costs and overheads which we have seen, the second is to build even more powerful brands. 

There are many ways to do that. 

Philip Kotler offered us the 4 Ps – product, price, place, promotion, Mark Ritson favours salience and long-term consistency, and Byron Sharp talks about the need for mental availability. 

But whichever route you follow, 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 culture fit in? 

All the above, the proven marketing fundamentals, focus on a set of conscious actions to develop competitive advantage.

But the context for brand building is the lived experience of consumers. These lives are unconscious, nuanced and complicated, difficult to understand, subject to change, and beyond our control. 

In this extremely challenging consumer climate, it is realistic to assert that brands with a clear cultural agenda grow and win. 

Great strategy grows brands BUT great culturally-led strategy builds iconic brands – those that transcend product function and elevate it to become an artifact helping to define the society in which we live and reflect how it’s changing.

In other words brands able to achieve that shifted from being vehicles or wrapping for products but became part of the cultural practice of the lived experience of people.

  • Dove helps me feel and express my own beauty,
  • Nike helps me overcome my sporting limitations and fly,
  • Patagonia helps me to feel more connected and responsible to the natural world,
  • Colgate ensures I have professional and social confidence as well as oral health,
  • Hovis gives me pride for my home and strengthens my family bonds.

Everyday purchases are injected with cultural importance (storytelling metaphors and myth-making) that we as consumers – people – depend on to make, navigate and reinforce our choices. 

These are culturally powerful stories anchored in human aspiration and create difference for people as well as profit for the brands. 

Applying the learnings of cultural insight ensures greater brand effectiveness. It’s a key way to win in crowded categories. 

Understanding how cultural change & cultural conversations affect your brand can magnify and sharpen its difference, distinctiveness and relevance.

Big brands tend to work from the same data set – so it makes sense to start looking under different rocks. Because cultural analysis looks in different places, it is powerful at finding distinctive points of potential difference.

It will bring to life the macro of the consumer world and the micro of your brand and category.

Because cultural insight is codifiable, it is actionable and repeatable in 3 ways: 

  1. Creates Cultural Fit – (future-facing alignment because culture doesn’t stand still)
  2. Creates Cultural Consistency – (adopting & maintaining a cultural attitude)
  3. Manages a brand’s Visual, Verbal, & Sensory impact

Applying brand-centric cultural thinking:

  1. creates relevance & distinctiveness
  2. delivers brand-centric commercial/actionable outputs helps both long- and short-term impact – from strategy to execution
  3. combines AI inputs with human analysis to make the deep cross-cultural connections your brand needs
  4. ensures results: 1000s of global projects, multiple categories with the world’s leading brands

Clients are under pressure from the profit motive, but that business imperative has to be supported by understanding the cultural motives of consumers – for they unconsciously influence purchasing decisions and attitudes to brands. 

Ignoring those cultural motives is perilous especially because we now live in a world where emergent codes don’t go in one direction but in many alternative directions – culture is divergent not linear. Without understanding that you risk damaging your brand.

Cultural insight is a fundamental way to understand those unconscious consumer motives, especially in times when business decisions are critical to brand success.

So, are you going to let culture steamroller you brand, or are you going to act to ensure you gain or maintain cultural relevance, to support short term communications effectiveness, and drive longer-term brand building memorability?

Alex Gordon, CEO 

Stopping the Steamroller: Building Culturally-Led Iconic Brands