Hi friends! 👋🏽
I know, it’s been a minute. For the past month I’ve been soaking in the Mediterranean rays and snorkelling in the azure sea, spending quality time with my furry friends (Charlie, Millie & George) and creating memories with my faves back home. Malta Sajf (or Maltese Summer) really is the best. Coming back to the hustle of a grey city is definitely a hard adjustment. 💔
Here are some highlights from my trip:
Whilst in Malta, I watched the Barbie movie (twice and hopeful for a Ken spinoff), and it sparked reflections on its cultural impact and how it has resonated with audiences in recent months.
In today's landscape, brands often tout social impact, implying a purpose-driven approach. Yet, consumer decisions are more heavily influenced by popular culture. We make choices not just due to societal roles, but due to cultural influences.
The term 'culture' is frequently used, yet its essence is often elusive. Culture is an intangible, omnipresent force shaping our lives and decisions.
One of the founding father of sociology Émile Durkheim defined culture as a set of values, norms, and symbols shaping our identity and societal roles. This framework helps us understand and interpret the world around us.
Two kinds of culture exist:
Ascribed culture - inherited and expected, guiding how we interact with the world.
Subscribed culture - voluntarily chosen, identifying with a group and adopting its traits.
Both forms impact our identity, shaping how we behave, dress, and consume. When subscribed culture clashes with ascribed identity, we face cognitive dissonance, seeking congruence.
Change is inherent in life, influencing our identity and choices. This translates to shifts in behaviour, attire, and more. Culture's influence is significant, driving our consumption patterns and choices.
Brands must grasp culture's impact on meaning-making and the narratives people base their decisions on. Our choices reflect our cultural subscriptions, driven by the belief that "people like me" do this. As marketers, this is the key to influencing behaviour.
Sounds easy and straightforward right?
Understanding culture's underlying dynamics empowers marketers to shape product offerings, communication strategies, distribution methods, and pricing models. Yet, culture's fluidity poses challenges. How can marketers predict cultural shifts?
The thing is culture is fluid and ever-evolving. So as marketers how can we maintain a degree of predictability?
While data is abundant, we often mistake it for intimacy. True understanding demands radical proximity to subcultures. Culture evolves, requiring marketers to closely observe and comprehend changes.
Culture's evolution impacts language and meaning. Think about Sprite's 1990s ad "Obey Your Thirst." In that context it meant ambition, drive, hunger for success, and passion. And we resonated with that. Fast forward to today, thirst takes on a whole new meaning, it means you’re desperate and a little pathetic. Now if Sprite had to tell us to Obey Our Thirst’, we wouldn’t be responsive to that messaging because the language has shifted. Its significance transformed over time, highlighting the importance of understanding meaning shifts.
Nike is a great example of a brand that exhaustively explores the territory that it occupies. How does Nike do this? It knows exactly who it is as a brand, what its cultural characteristics are and which subsets of culture form part of that territory. It knows its beliefs, artefacts, behaviour and language. And because it’s crystal clear on its convictions and how it sees the world, it can easily locate the tribes of that territory that see the world similarly.
Nike exemplifies cultural alignment. By firmly anchoring itself in the belief that everyone is an athlete, Nike engages diverse audiences through nuanced conversations. This agility stems from an intimate understanding of cultural shifts.
The brand talks to football players, swimmers, runners, basketball players, all in nuanced ways through the cultural characteristics and lens that governs their cultural group, aligning with how they operate in and view the world.
Nike is often referred to as the voice of the athlete, and it’s the reason how Nike can be so agile in shifting and evolving with the culture through the eyes of the athlete. This is what enables them to react to cultural change so successful, they create cultural products thinking about athletes through a democratized lens. I’m an athlete, you’re an athlete and so is Serena Williams, and their ads are reflections of the culture and what it means to be an athlete.
Culture's impact is vast; brands need to adapt to maintain alignment with cultural evolution. Staying rooted in culture requires identifying and embracing a brand's meaning, aligning with its cultural group.
As a marketer it’s important to side steps conventional wisdoms of positioning and value proposition to instead focus on identity congruence (or alignment).
What does this mean? If our behaviour is governed by our cultural subscription which is anchored in our identity, then identity and product or brand congruency becomes way more powerful that any enhanced product feature.
For instance, Bose is a demonstrably better set of headphones than Beats by Dre, but the latter continues to outsell and has a larger market share than the former. Why is this? It’s because when I used Beats by Dre, it’s says something about who I am, they act as an accessory to my outfit, the product signals where I sit in the social stratosphere and that demands a premium. Premium so these brands do better in terms of social currency.
The bard (Shakespeare) said the world is a stage, and we are the social actors choosing our identity. The products embellish our identity and language associated with that identity. We go through world collecting artefacts and behaviours that reinforce this cognitive equilibrium. (Think of confirmation bias).
So what does it mean for a brand to be rooted in culture?
It requires first identifying what does a brand mean? Brands fail when their messaging isn’t compelling or clear - this is seen when they are out of touch with culture and an advert or campaign falls flat.
A brands language and behaviour must align with their identity within culture as well as the cultural group they subscribe to.
It starts with the small campfire of people and those believers get conversions for us by way of brand advocacy. From a segmentation perspective, they’re more influential than any marketer is. Think of any movie or series you watched in the last year it wasn’t because of the trailer or review, it was because someone in your circle recommended it to you or mentioned it in a group chat. It taps into our want to belong and this is precisely why influencer marketing is so powerful.
This doesn’t mean that product marketing has no place in a brand marketing strategy. What it does mean though is that it should be relegated to the middle and bottom of the funnel. We start with the soul and end with the sale.
Brands must focus on identity congruence and get intimate with people, not consumers, but real human beings, with needs and wants, feelings and beliefs. This means letting go of describing people the way marketers have done for decades (by demographic metrics like age, location, job etc….) and start looking at people in terms of their cultural subscription and how they show up in the world.
See you next week!
Have a contentful day 🌞
Emma