Finding Lasting Cultural Relevance
Every year there’s a new buzzword that ‘all brands need to tap into’ - micro-communities, AI, corporate responsibility and sustainability. But they are all just reactive facets of the same broader search for a brand’s place in culture. There are a few core issues with how most brands approach relevance. First is that they view it with the same performance-first mentality they apply to their marketing spend, especially in times of uncertainty. Intrinsically tied to this is a false urgency around speed to market many brands associate with maintaining relevance. These culminate in a lack of confidence, where brands chase after trends and what the competition is doing instead of asserting their own unique place in culture.
While the proportion of spend between long-term brand-building and performance marketing is an age-old tug of war, economic volatility, election year jitters, and pandemic PTSD have got brands laser-focused on short-term gains. While the merits of this approach are for a future debate, a very immediate consequence of it is that marketing orgs are increasingly aiming to capitalize on flash-in-the-pan cultural trends to drive engagement. There are myriad pitfalls to this approach, principally that it comes at the expense of developing strategies that uniquely position their brand based on differentiating factors. There is also potential to create rifts with the target audience from the standpoint that blindly following culture without a distinct and ownable point of view drains any meaning derived from engagement with a brand’s content.
The second major pitfall with leveraging buzzy trends in a quest for relevance is the speed at which a marketing org needs to produce to simply keep up. Small and mid-sized companies simply don’t have the resources to capture the massive volume of content needed to get ahead and big brands are too bloated and sluggish with contracts and processes to take advantage of a constantly-shifting trend landscape. This reveals a real need for brand introspection, creating filters for when, how, and most importantly WHY to participate.
Finding lasting relevance lifts brands out of these torturous content cycles and frees up a marketing orgs brain power for strategic thinking. There are three key dimensions any brand can lean on to find its lasting place in culture:
Know The Cultural Zeitgeist
Again, it’s not about every flash in the pan, it’s about understanding the difference between trends and shifts. Are people acting the same but in a different modality? That’s a trend. Has something fundamentally changed about how consumers are approaching media, buying patterns, and each other? That’s a shift.
Know the Consumer
Anyone can uncover a target demographic, but the key to understanding them is through rich behavioral data that uncovers their motivations, needs, and most importantly, what characteristics and passion points drive connection to your brand. This creates a crucial filter for any marketing org, helping a brand understand where they can activate with the highest value
Know Yourself
Directly related to understanding consumer motivations is knowing where the brand stands against its competitors and the perceptions of the brand’s offering itself. Many marketing departments are surprised to find the aspects of the brand they prize the most are far down the list of what they are actually known for in the market. Similarly, mapping perceptions against competitor offerings help define where the brand can create white space to reach people at key moments of receptivity.
Ultimately, chasing clout by attaching your brand to the cultural wave d’jour is a sign of an insecure marketing machine. The solution is not finding where your brand fits into culture right this moment, but looking to the broader cultural, sociological, and competitive signals that drive distinction. Honing this creates a unique opportunity for long-term growth and results in the confidence to know which trends to capitalize on to boost short-term engagement and keep consumers coming back for more.