In the modern marketing landscape, the term “content” has become a misnomer. What most marketers refer to as content is part of the onslaught of low-effort, low-relevance material foisted upon audiences — providing little value to them and even less ROI for brands. By Q2 of 2023, ad-blockers rose to over 900-million active users worldwide and expected to cost publishers $54-billion in lost revenue by 2024. Slowly but surely, brands are becoming a nuisance in the eyes of consumers.
The drivers of this trend are many. The pressure to be always-on, spurred by the rise of social media, has led to an oversaturation of digital spaces. The output of content mills is — producing “content” that is the cultural equivalent of junk food — devoid of nourishment, quickly consumed, and ultimately forgotten. Targeted advertising and remarketing, while sophisticated in honing in on individual consumers, has inadvertently created isolated cultural bubbles. This kills any possibility of a shared experience like advertising of old such as Volkswagen’s Think Small, Budweiser’s Whassup?, or Old Spice’s The Man Your Man Could Like. Once upon a time brands were meaningful cultural contributors. Nowadays they’ve relegated themselves to hangers-on — regurgitating culture rather than driving it forward.
We are at an inflection point. Now, more than ever, brands need to redefine their approach to move away from content mills to a strategy that incubates, celebrates, and ultimately drives a shared cultural experience.
Brands as Cultural Catalysts: Studies of Success
Several forward-thinking brands have successfully navigated this new cultural landscape, setting benchmarks for how to effectively intertwine brand storytelling with cultural relevance.
Nike’s 2018 “Dream Crazy” campaign, featuring Colin Kaepernick, is a prime example of a brand taking a bold stance and engaging in the cultural conversation about racial equality and social justice. This campaign transcended traditional advertising, sparking widespread public discourse and positioning Nike not just as a brand, but as a cultural commentator.
Dove’s ongoing “Real Beauty” campaign challenges the traditional beauty norms and promotes body positivity. By aligning their brand message with the broader cultural movement for inclusivity and self-acceptance, Dove has fostered deep connections with its audience that goes above and beyond the transactional relationship of selling beauty products.
Patagonia’s 2011 “Don’t Buy This Jacket” ad, exemplifies a brand embedding its core values into marketing that is equal parts rebellious and strategic. Taking a stand against fast fashion while also acknowledging their own negative environmental impact, Patagonia showed true authenticity. This kind of honesty and passion resonated with a growing demographic concerned about sustainability and wove the brand into a larger cultural fabric of environmental activism.
More recently, AirBnB has seen massive success in moving away from low-touch marketing tactics to more in-depth and deliberate brand marketing that positions the brand as a gateway to experiences rather than an alternative to a traditional hotel. Instead of haphazardly culture-jacking, the brand has positioned themselves a partner and platform within meaningful cultural niches alongside their audience.
The Way Forward: Building Shared Culture around Brand
The future for brands that truly want to drive culture lies in transcending traditional content marketing and embracing a role as an active participant in cultural dialogues. A deep understanding of your audience’s community, landscape, and point-of-view within it are table stakes. This is best achieved with first-hand engagement — working closely with stakeholders, influencers, and ambassadors who are embedded within that cultural fabric, exchanging ideas in comment threads, and testing new platforms first-hand to gain deeper understanding and insight. This ultimately will reveal the sweet spot where the brand’s and the audience’s cultural values align.
This kind of cultural archeology can then inform more thoughtful and expansive creative possibilities that focus on quality over quantity. Throttling down the firehose of content allows us to create shared experiences within and around the audience that in turn build conversation and community. When truly driving culture, we seek to both earn our audience’s attention and espect which over time turns into loyalty, and trust in the brand.
The final requirement is a commitment to consistency. Driving culture creates a platform where community can be nurtured, grown, and flourish around a brand, but this does not pop-up overnight. It requires a long-tail mindset — identifying niche audiences to foster, grow, and interweave into culture at-large. This slow growth approach means recalibrating expectations around timelines. Building a culturally relevant brand doesn’t happen in weeks or months. It takes a sustained and multi-year strategy to foster a brand that is ingrained in the hearts and minds of its audience.
The way forward is clear: brands who embrace their roles as cultural catalysts will transcend the transactional nature of traditional marketing and foster deeper and lasting connections with their audiences based on shared values and experiences. Brands that don’t risk spiraling down a void of creative regurgitation that comes when we take the easy way out through culture-jacking. Ultimately, this shift towards cultural relevance and community-building can be the beginning of a new era of brand world building — where the goal is not just to sell, but to enrich lives and proactively drive culture, instead of just riding its coattails.