Cultural relevance cannot be achieved with major rebranding efforts and media and PR blitzes. It needs to be organically grown and fostered throughout the organization.

The question is, how?

I have worked in cultural branding for more than two decades. Through my experience, I believe marketers must understand four interrelated concepts especially well in order to rewrite their marketing playbook for greater cultural relevance.

__Cultural relevance__
Let’s start with the objective itself. Cultural relevance refers to a brand state when people feel compelled to talk positively about that brand and advocate for it, at any time (not only during the campaign cycle) because it deeply connects with them within the context of what is happening in the world. This connection is established when a brand makes a positive impact (that doesn’t always have to be “worthy”) on and with their communities and engages with them credibly, meeting them how and where they are. 

__Cultural marketing__
For me, culture marketing is marketing. Even before 2020, global cultural shifts, such as the climate emergency, technological advancements and political influences started changing audience behaviours and mindsets and called for big brands to embrace "cultural relevance" as an opportunity. 

Understandably, the past few years have forced businesses into survival mode, leading to a surge in traditional lower-funnel marketing strategies. The prevailing belief is that the bigger the brand, the larger the media spend, and the more eyeballs reached, the more successful the brand becomes. 

However, in a post-2020 world characterised by uncertainty, complexity, and a new financially empowered generation that values privacy (impacting 3rd party data) and seeks meaningful relationships and shared values with brands, the traditional funnel is no longer sufficient for reaching and engaging audiences. 

Knowing how to read and analyse cultural shifts specific to our clients, then flex brand plans accordingly, is how we drive reach & relevance, hype & depth, numbers & nuance. 

This is modern marketing.

__Cultural positioning__
To be truly culturally relevant, you must rethink your entire approach to product, culture, consumer and commerce. You must realign your brand, to discover your brand’s special role and place in the world for your audience, and community—a role only your brand can fulfil, addressing or navigating the global shifts affecting the target audience and positively impacting that much desired brand differentiation score. 

If executed correctly, this can put companies on the path to sustainable, equitable, and meaningful business success.  

__Latent audiences__
One important byproduct of the cultural positioning work is the identification of “latent audiences”— communities and consumers who already engage with, purchase products and services from, and even possibly love a brand—but who are currently not part of the brand’s traditional target audience. 

In many cases, the brand may not even be aware of these audiences. Think Timberland with Hip-Hop culture in the 1990s. Or sportswear brands and/or music artists in gaming culture today. 

Cultural relevance does not happen in a single moment. It is earned through positive contributions to communities and genuine connections with consumers over time. 

It comes not from new mission statements or isolated social initiatives but through a continuum of strategic, creative, and operational decisions to address the global shifts affecting a target audience.

Tapping into and resonating with latent audiences creates previously additional and unconsidered business growth opportunities and can facilitate curiosity and an innovation mindset internally. Respectful acknowledgement and support can give a brand true credibility in that culture or with those communities. 

But to be successful, the right people need to be managing and handling this type of marketing to ensure the nuances and expectations are respected. This may be outside of rostered agencies and the current internal talent pool.

__How Guinness Found its Flava—and a Latent Audience__
One notable brand that tapped into a latent audience is Guinness UK. In 2020, the 250+-year-old beer maker sought Platform13’s help to become more culturally relevant and meaningful to consumers outside the brand’s traditional target audience of older white males.

During my time in-house at Diageo, I discovered that Guinness had been exported to Africa and the Caribbean since the 1800s. In the UK, the movement of people from the colonies (West Indies, Africa, and Southeast Asia) in the 20th century shaped the multicultural demographic that exists today. 

These latent communities brought with them their cultural expressions, including food, art, music, and fashion—alongside their beloved Guinness.

Among the insights we gathered, one statement from a Jamaican record label owner stood out: “I thought Guinness was Jamaican. I had no idea they were Irish.” 

Culturally, Jamaican culture has a massive influence on the world and on Black British culture, particularly in music and food. Given Guinness’s history in the Caribbean and West Africa, we had a unique opportunity to celebrate the stories and heritage of the elders in a way that resonated with the current generation—a reflection of the ongoing cultural and global shifts.

We launched the series by telling the story of Original Flava—a pair of brothers born in a London suburb, Croydon, who transformed their passion for flavoursome Caribbean cooking into a unifying platform that blended British and Caribbean culture through food and flavour, with many recipes taught to them by their incredible grandmother, including the iconic Jamaican Guinness Punch.

The Guinness campaign we launched targeting the Caribbean community took place on the last long weekend of August 2021, coinciding with the end of summer and Notting Hill Carnival—an annual celebration of Caribbean culture (which had been postponed to Covid that year) which attracts over a million attendees.

A citywide OOH campaign featuring Nanny and the Original Flava brothers, along with social content on how to make Nanny's Guinness Punch and Original Flava’s Guinness Jerk chicken, received an overwhelmingly positive response from the Caribbean community. 

The comments we received from these long-term latent audiences were truly goosebump-inducing, as for the first time, this community felt seen, heard and celebrated by a brand that was already deeply embedded in their culture. Added to that was how the project surpassed the traditional metrics and benchmarks, achieving 59% over planned reach, which was the main brand-set KPI for the campaign. 

The results are clear, a brand can have both reach and relevance - this is where culture marketing wins.

__Cultural relevance as a growth driver__
Now imagine if this approach moved from marketing activity to business strategy. 

Your employees are also part of cultures and communities. We know the new generation of incoming intersectional talent want to work for brands and companies who have a point of view on the world…and stand up for what they believe.

Done right, cultural relevance will foster curiosity (of what is happening in the world and the credible role that brand has to play in it), encourage creative new ways of working and drive innovative ideas (updating processes and systems to make it fit for purpose for the 21st century) to build resilience (can help in decision paralysis and concern around call-out culture) and achieve resonance by credibly engaging with existing, latent, and employee communities and consumers. 

Such an approach could ultimately future-proof the business and the brand. 

But it’s not enough to simply add the word cultural to your title. It can only work if you can, know how to or bring the right people in to help evolve the traditional marketing and business playbook to make it fit for purpose today. 

It’s time to embrace cultural relevance as a powerful force that can shape the trajectory of brands in the 21st century.


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adweek - cultural relevance

adWeek VOICES, August 2023

Marketing gone awry recently cost Bud Light its long-held crown as America’s bestselling beer.

But the brand’s owner, Anheuser-Busch InBev, was here at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity—a lavish annual gathering in the south of France, often called the Oscars of the ad industry—collecting one of the event’s highest honors: Creative Marketer of the Year.

A collision this spring between Bud Light’s marketing hub in Manhattan and many of its loyal drinkers across middle America resulted in a case study in how not to market through the culture wars. A consumer and celebrity backlash against a Bud Light social-media promotion with the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney snowballed into a boycott and plummeting sales. The uproar prompted AB InBev to put on leave two marketing executives who oversaw the promotion, leading to more criticism.

In the wake of that controversy, across the Atlantic on Monday, AB InBev’s global chief marketing officer, Marcel Marcondes, took to the Cannes Lions’ main stage to give the event’s opening seminar. The session was described in programming notes as a talk in part about AB InBev’s “relentless focus on connecting with consumers in meaningful ways.” Marcondes also touched briefly on the Bud Light situation stateside.

“In times like this, when things get divisive and controversial so easily, I think it’s an important wake-up call to all of us marketers, for us to be very humble,” Marcondes said.

AB InBev is “really reminding ourselves of what we should do best every day, which is to really understand our customers, which is to really celebrate and appreciate every customer that loves our brands, but in a way that can make them be together, not apart,” he said. The words echoed comments by Brendan Whitworth, chief executive of AB InBev’s North American business, made immediately following the backlash in April.

Cannes Lions made its debut in 1954 as an advertising film festival, but over the years has evolved into one of the industry’s most important annual conferences.

Technology companies, consulting firms and legacy Madison Avenue agencies alike hold meetings and pursue deals in Belle Époque hotel suites. Chief marketing officers from around the world helicopter in to speak on panels. And rosé-soaked parties, soundtracked by top DJs, continue on until the small hours of the morning. 

But in offices back home, Cannes delegates are facing slowing advertising markets, widespread layoffs and questions around artificial intelligence’s ability to replace a variety of roles across the marketing industry—sure to be another big topic at this year’s ad festival.

Marketers are also dealing with a split in consumer attitudes toward using social causes such as LGBTQ rights as a basis for advertising. Cannes Lions judging panels have in the past been criticized for favoring such campaigns above less socially-minded equivalents that shifted more product for advertisers.

AB InBev has had other marketing successes this year. Budweiser’s quick reaction to a last-minute alcohol ban at the World Cup in Qatar has been shortlisted for a Titanium Lions, one of the event’s most prestigious. And campaigns from its brands including Michelob Ultra and Corona have been shortlisted for a raft of other categories in the 2023 awards.

Cannes Lions honored AB InBev as Creative Marketer of the Year during the 2022 festival as well, making this summer’s repeat honor the first consecutive such win by any company, organizers said. 

The awards body, which is owned by London-based Ascential Events, announced AB InBev’s back-to-back win in March, months ahead of the Cannes Lions festival itself and just before attention around Bud Light’s work with Mulvaney began to swirl.

“The award recognises AB InBev’s sustained creative excellence that has driven sustainable business growth—as well as their body of Lion-winning work amassed over a sustained period of time, and reputation for producing brave creative and innovative marketing solutions,” Cannes Lions said in a statement released in March. 

Some marketers on the ground on Monday said Bud Light’s difficulties in the U.S. should not negate the achievements of the company’s creative success across the world.

Other delegates said they were skeptical about the company’s acceptance of the creative marketer title in light of the Bud Light fiasco. 

One social-media post can now travel faster and further than an advertising campaign, said Leila Fataar, founder of cultural and marketing strategy firm Platform13. “In the spirit of fairness and credibility, I think it would be a big and the right gesture for AB InBev to give the 2023 award back, make the changes necessary and come back even stronger.” 

Organizers of the festival and AB InBev weren’t available Monday to comment

wsj 

wall street journal, june 2023

LHC pod

Love, Hate, Create POD, May 2023

As the oversized statue of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama presided over the entrance to Harrods, beneath it a pile of freesheets faced upwards, the front pages dominated by foreboding headlines of economic headwinds, tragedies and an ongoing cost-of-living crisis.

The often frivolous and excessive nature of luxury fashion has long been exposed during recessions, but as the news headlines during last month's London Fashion Week rolled out, it became increasingly evident that it is becoming increasingly challenging for luxury brands to stand out.

Nonetheless, as both a consumer calendar moment and a business event that demands the collective of buyers, fashion houses, media and designers all coming together in one city across a week, many luxury brands have chosen the gateway of LFW to create standout experiences and campaigns to fuel chatter and gain cultural currency.

Think Loewe: the brand brought its latest capsule collection with Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli to life at Selfridges with a series of immersive installations.

Timed to capitalise on LFW, the spaces based on Howl's Moving Castle included The Cloud Room, which housed an exhibition telling the story of the collab and Calcifer's Kitchen, a "culinary experience" named after the film’s fire demon.

And Vogue used the moment to unveil its second iteration of Vogue x Snapchat: Redefining the Body, an exhibition curated by British Vogue’s editor-in-chief Edward Enninful that explores the future of fashion’s physicality, harnessing AR to bring the high fashion of Dior, Versace, Thebe Magugu and more to the digital masses, not just the FROW.

The experience fell under LFW’s City Wide Celebration programme of events and attractions that ran alongside the LFW show schedule, which included creative workshops, styling sessions and brand activations, including Anya Hindmarch’s World’s Smallest Department Store.

As Oliver Lloyd, strategy director at Attachment, who works with The British Fashion Council across its entertainment strategy, talent and brand partnerships, says: “Throughout the pandemic there was a democratisation of experiences as consumers really embraced live streaming, something which TikTok does so successfully.

“Coming out of it, there’s a more hybrid approach. Additionally, fashion’s relationship with entertainment has also been dialled up and we are seeing unexpected celebrities now attracting new audiences.”

Partnerships with culture-defining celebrity talent are rapidly increasing. Daniel Lee marked his creative directorial debut at British luxury brand Burberry with "an ode to Britishness" – a campaign featuring some of the UK’s most exciting talent, from Shygirl and Skepta to Raheem Sterling and Lennon Gallagher, leveraging celebrity names to reach new audiences.

“Fashion has always been about self-expression and identity,” Platform13 founder Leila Fataar says. “Luxury is finally catching up and there are shifts from the old to the new, from status to self-expression, moving beyond only the cost of product to cultural credibility, shifting from traditional bricks and mortar retail in only the traditional fashion capitals to brand experiences and creative ways to drive sales, in new and unexpected places.”

And while LFW presents a rich playground for brands to activate and engage consumers alongside press, talent and retailers at scale, to gain cultural currency, badging exercises are over and brands need to co-create, argues Lloyd.

“Brands must come together to genuinely have an active role with the creative industries or give consumers, especially Gen Z, new, meaningful experiences.

“Beyond impactful talent, we are seeing brands cut through using unexpected collaborations that create conversation and big, bold experiences that involve a breadth of target audiences from press, buyers, talent and consumers.”

Collab culture 

One brand capturing the imagination of the experience seekers is Louis Vuitton, with its global takeover by Yayoi Kusama appearing from NYC’s Fifth Avenue to Place Vendôme in Paris and London’s Knightsbridge.

And the ultimate example of collaboration, in terms of scope, scale and vision, came this LFW, when Italian luxury fashion house Moncler unveiled a collaboration of mega proportions with its "The art of genius" event at Olympia.

Inviting in 10,000 consumers alongside a VIP crowd of global celebrities including Serena Williams, Naomi Campbell, Lewis Hamilton, Hailey and Justin Bieber, was a considerably risky move but one that paid off, given the PR coverage and social reach. 

Brand experience agency XYZ delivered event planning, logistics and event production, with Paris-based Villa Eugenie on creative production for the experience that stole the LFW spotlight with its evening of immersive experiences from brands including Mercedes-Benz, Adidas Originals and Roc Nation, plus a surprise performance from Alicia Keys, sporting her debut capsule collection.

XYZ’s executive creative director Paul Stanway believes that Moncler went for, in a controlled way, “the energy of chaos and disruption”, explaining the very deliberate choices the brand made to opt for a huge consumer crowd, beyond a select fashion set, and a wider VIP guest list than LFW traditionally commands, not to mention the millions that tuned in to watch.

“It didn’t matter if you were some hype kid from south London or a celeb flown in from Hollywood, the way you experienced the collabs was all the same – the way the artists had envisioned.” 

It's a view shared by Stefano Pierre Beruschi, senior design director, culture collaborations and partnerships, Adidas Originals, who described the brand’s immersive space within the event as an extension of the collection’s vision, “toying with the senses in order to confront guests with an experience that is inspirational and outside of the norm”. 

So, does this ambitious approach represent a further disruption of the traditional show experience? “Evolving the current system is a huge opportunity for luxury brands, as we move beyond the now uniform hype and drop mechanics of the past few years,” Fataar says.

“We love finding that cultural positioning – an intersection of the brand and its target communities, and then bringing it to life in a resonant way – always based on how the audience wants to receive it.” 

With LFW celebrating its 40th year in 2024, more brands should opt for the capital to engage the creative community and inspire young audiences.

“London is the home of innovation and creativity,” Lloyd argues. “For brands looking to tap into this, and genuinely position themselves in a purposeful way – there’s nothing comparative or as exciting in the UK.”

And luxury brands, emboldened by the success of Moncler’s unconventional approach to its Genius presentation, will look to expand their approach to experiences.

“The visual language of how you present fashion was so engrained and so traditional that it was ripe for disruption,” Stanway says.

“Breaking the tyranny of the catwalk is long overdue.”

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Campaign, March 2023

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adweek PODCAST, July 2023