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WARC, SEPTEMBER 24
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Future of Strategy 2024: Welcome to the era of culture-led brands

It’s time for big brands to embrace "cultural relevance", says Leila Fataar, founder of Platform13. This means culture-led strategy coming to the forefront, upstream with brand and business strategy. It’s time to evolve the traditional brand playbook to update that funnel and make it fit for purpose in the 21st century.

Culture is the stuff of life, living and breathing, always changing and evolving. Culture is a reflection of reality and a global connector of intersectional communities. It's how we communicate, what we wear, eat, see and listen to. It’s how we behave and what/who influences us, permeating every part of our lives. For brands and businesses, cultural shifts impact us all – you, your stakeholders, your employees, and especially your fans and consumers (core, target, latent and potential) – evolving their behaviours and mindsets. For me, a culturally relevant brand refers to a brand state when people engage positively with that brand, work for that brand, advocate for it and buy it, at any time (not only during the paid campaign cycle). They will do this because it deeply connects with them within the context of what is happening in their own, and the wider world, meeting them how and where they are, credibly. Done well, a brand can transcend its category and become part of or even shape culture. These are modern brands, culture-led brands.

The past few years have proven what we, who have worked in ‘culture’ for a while, have known for the longest time – that the nuance, context and interconnectedness of geopolitics, the climate emergency and social justice, the narrative around it driven and spread by both the mainstream news outlets and social media truth-tellers has and is shifting global dynamics never before seen in history. 2024 is shaping up to be a pivotal moment in history, setting the scene for supercharged unpredictability. Set against this background, the pace of technological advances in AI, Web3, mixed reality media and spatial computing is accelerating marketing, product and commerce innovation, upending traditional brand management like never before. Successful brands need to be able to credibly tap into cultural nuances to become and stay relevant and adapt for growth and/or even survival.

Having worked on the brand side at adidas and Diageo, 7 years ago, I created Platform13 to answer challenges faced by big brands in the ever-changing world of consumer behaviour, technology advancements, creative innovation and the swiftly moving cultural landscape. Since inception, our project teams have been curated, assembling world-class experts and cultural voices matched to our clients' territories, categories and target audiences to answer their specific challenges, needs and objectives. This helps us read and analyse cultural shifts specific to both our clients and their audiences through real-world insights, then create and/or flex our clients' plans accordingly. To do that all our work starts (and continues) with our pioneering methodology, a "cultural positioning" for the brand. This unique cultural positioning involves aligning the brand (and/or its products and services) with all its audiences and communities by understanding the global issues impacting them, and unlocking the brand's special role and place to those audiences in their lives and in the world – importantly, this is a role that only that brand can fulfil. We then execute this cultural positioning hand in hand with these cultural voices, grabbing the right attention with the right creative for the audiences and building relevance through resonance (and therefore shareability) with all audiences.

Guinness x Notting Hill Carnival

A good example is the work I and Platform13 did for Guinness. The brand has been exported to the West Indies since the 1800s, and is as much part of Caribbean culture as Irish culture. I knew this from my time as the first Head of Culture & Entertainment at Diageo…and a visit to the wonderful archive as well as through friends and cultural institutions like Notting Hill Carnival, which I have been attending since I arrived in London almost 30 years ago. For Carnival’s 50th birthday in 2016, we (myself and Boiler Room – a pioneering global online music streaming service) wanted to show the positive side to an event that has stood for diversity and love for 50 years. With Guinness and their then tagline, ‘made of more’, legend was born. A content series of Interviews and broadcasting from 8 original sound systems at Carnival that weekend, merch that went viral and our own sound system hand in hand with Deviation, we told the stories of the people who made and make 50-year-old Carnival what it is, those people who are ‘made of more’ and those standing up for one of London's most loved, culturally important and events today. The results: 36m reached globally, across 2 days, and 100m+ earned PR impressions. A personal and career highlight.

After leaving Diageo to set up Platform13, I continued working with the brand on a number of projects. With increased interest in heritage after the global BLM movement, in 2021, Platform13 created a new cultural platform for the brand with real people and real stories at the heart. Part of this was partnering with people from communities where Guinness is deeply embedded as part of their culture, to tell their story, their way. So, for the Jamaican community, around the year that Carnival did not happen (2021), we wanted to celebrate with cultural voices, Caribbean food sensations, Original Flava (the wonderful Craig & Shaun) and their amazing Nanny (RIP), who used Guinness in her cooking for years. Key for us was Nanny front and centre in the campaign as the inspiration for her grandsons, proudly standing under her statement “My husband love him Guinness Punch”. A city-wide poster campaign, (including in their home town of Croydon) on Carnival weekend and a social first three-part mini-series featuring Nanny’s annual BBQ and recipes for Guinness Jerk Chicken and Guinness Punch drove social organic impact as the community felt seen (and commented and shared accordingly). The paid social campaign also performed exceedingly well, achieving 59% over planned reach. This is because we achieved a lower CPM than planned. The Diageo media agency believed that was because the audience targeting we used for the campaign was more likely to resonate with the ads.

Obviously, this type of work can build positive impact for the brand, drive meaning and loyalty, and if leveraged respectfully, can ultimately drive sustainable, meaningful, impactful, equitable, and lasting business growth. This is how we mitigate risk internally and drive reach and relevance, hype and depth, numbers and nuance externally. But this also means that your brand playbook and how your organisation is set up needs to evolve, involving utilising ongoing cultural intelligence as a tool for innovation in marketing, moving beyond traditional insights for mere validation. It requires reevaluating procurement processes in order to work with new types of external partners, like Platform13, in order to embrace new approaches rooted in culture, credibly. Only then can a brand remain culturally relevant and avoid fading into the background.

Practical steps to take

  • Invest in your Cultural Positioning to identify the unique role your brand and/or your product/service plays in the lives of your audiences and the world. This enables you to tap into your audience's RELEVANT passion areas, credibly and RELEVANT for the brand, and helps to mitigate risk and drive resonance with your audiences and create a culture-led strategy for your brand and your business.
  • Ensure ongoing cultural intelligence using real-world insights through the lens of your cultural positioning can support decision-making on short-term trends as well as how to address cultural shifts.
  • Reassess procurement processes to open the gates to new types of partners and new perspectives.
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