CHASING CULTURAL RELEVANCE
BRAND DILUTION in an always on race for relevance
Wanting to be “culturally relevant” has become the latest in a long line of new new things people suddenly want to achieve for the brands they work on. But through lack of understanding and short term focus, the output is all very culturally irrelevant as brands dilute who they are by chasing anything and everything that is happening in culture and thinking if they do the same, the rewards will follow.
Brands have started calling every release a drop, as if adopting streetwear terminology and the scarcity retail model led by Supreme, will suddenly earn some cultural relevance with people.
Or brand collaborations, another staple of streetwear has become all filler and no thriller as part of a vanilla playbook to releasing products. Originally a great way for two brands who respect each other to show mutual respect and cook something up, or two very different worlds colliding to make something innovative and interesting. Now it’s just generic product that’s being pushed to gain some traction in the feed.
Here’s another brand making a football shirt because football shirts have moved from the terraces to the streets as fashion. Some football shirt releases push the bar, but a lot have simply replaced the branded tote bag as the latest brand swag to create.
Micro trends and moments started by consumers now see a flood of brands joining in like the older guy that has yet to move on from their college years and should know better than to hang around college bars still. For a few days brands wanted to be demure or brat.
I don’t want to call out specific brand examples in the above scenarios because as a rule I’d rather compliment, praise and highlight the great examples than just trash the bad, as I also understand the realities of the job and why these things come to life, but you get the picture.
These are just some scenarios where brands attempt to show up in culture and make the right noises to fit in as an attempt to be culturally relevant but instead, just add more to the noise and clutter we see in our feeds day in, day out. I think they end up doing more damage than good as if you’re chasing cultural relevance by not being selective about how you show up as a brand in culture, your brand starts to look inconsistent.
Treating Culture as a Tactic
Culture is getting reduced to a marketing tactic. We had our social media phase, the content marketing phase, the pivot to video, the tiktokification of content, now it’s the culturally relevant phase.
I understand it, as we as an industry like shiny new things and also, if our brand is connected to culture in a positive way then it can only be a good thing.
But the ideas we see, the content we consume, the products we buy and the brands that make them all appear to be running plays from the same playbook. It’s quantity over quality. More recycled ideas and products thrown at the wall to see what sticks.
The great blandification. Age of Average. Filterworld. Sea of Sameness. These terms, books and articles are increasingly regular now in this algorithm and news feed era that is increasingly putting consumers and brands in a chokehold over what we see and what we create.
If we are all seeing the same things, then it can’t be a surprise that we end up creating the same things. If everyone is creating the same things, it offers comfort to the crowd that it’s the right way to go and the endless loop of sameness repeats.
The more brands chase this sameness as an attempt to drive cultural relevance, the more we see brands lose sight of who they are and what actually gives them the chance to be relevant in culture in the first place.
WTF is Cultural Relevance?
The terms culture and cultural relevance have become overused, thrown around and misunderstood.
To be fair, as I’ve spoken about before, culture as a definition is hard to pin down, has multiple variants depending on who you’re reading and whether you’re approaching from an arts, organisation, anthropology or societal angle.
We’re often looking at culture through two ways; around social behaviours or arts output.
The Oxford Dictionary states the two as:
the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society.
the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.
These definitions cover artistic output in a traditional sense - music, theater, art and literature as well as definitions on the rules (written and unwritten), behaviours and views of groups of people. It covers arts and humanities as well as human and social sciences.
Being culturally relevant is creating cultural output that people and the part of culture they are in find relevant because it meets the expectations, codes, conventions of said part of culture, and contributes to shaping a person’s status and identity within.
How relevance is defined within a part of culture will depend on how the values, codes and conventions are understood consciously and subconsciously by the community and people within them. These cultural groups and communities can be anything from the dominant pre-social media age subcultures through to the niche communities we’re now seeing more of, to anything in between as well as broader when it comes to popular culture, now in this algorithm era commonly taking place and defined in newsfeeds.
At one end of the spectrum the values, codes and conventions of subcultures and niche communities will tend to be more set in stone, with refinement over time, while at the other end of popular and mass culture things will be looser and broader as what’s ‘in’ continuously changes.
How much it defines a person’s status and identity will be down to the importance a person puts on the type of cultural output and their attachment to a part of culture.
For pre-social media subcultures like Mod, Goth, Punk, Skate and Casuals there is heavy emphasis towards its influence as the cultural output - the uniform, sounds and values that shape one's identity and status within said subculture are more rigid and give difference to wider society and culture.
In a social media world of fast trends, cores and aesthetics there is still considered influence but compared to more established subcultures, there is more emphasis on cultural clout, knowledge and being on trend, so the output that contributes to this is more fluid and interchangeable, depending on what is happening in the cultural discourse.
If subculture and communities of all sizes are about belonging, then the world of fast trends, cores and aesthetics is about acceptance.
The more your brand is being spoken about, referenced, used by tastemakers and talent, acts as an individual or group's badge of honour, shapes identity and elevates one's status, the more culturally relevant your brand is.
But It’s worth remembering, not every brand needs to be culturally relevant to be a commercial success. Cultural brands are symbols of people’s expression, identity and status. Other brands simply fulfill a basic need or function.
RENTING RELEVANCE
If I could ban any phrase I’ve heard too much over the last few years it would be “tapping into culture” as it indicates you’re doing this for the wrong reasons. It’s treating culture as a marketing tactic. Culture is bigger than that. You can’t simply tap in and take what you need.
In my earlier definition of being culturally relevant, among the keywords was creating cultural output which is worth expanding on as a lot of the time what output we see people calling culturally relevant is simply jumping on trending topics or cultural alignment by proxy of some partnerships with key people and tastemakers.
It might look like you’re showing up in culture, but at best it’s some cultural amplification programme and at worst, nothing more than a paid media or reactive play.
You’re merely renting relevance.
Don’t get me wrong, if you’re making a complete shift as a brand to focus on a particular part of culture you’ve previously had no place in, you can’t just show up to the party all guns blazing and trying to take over the stereo. You’ve got to work your way up and build relationships, influence and credibility to earn the right to start contributing to what’s played on the stereo.
Working with a variety of tastemakers and key people in culture is arguably a way to begin building relevance. But the key word is begin, you can’t just stop there and think alignment is all you do to build cultural relevance. You have to create, contribute and participate in the culture you want to be in.
It’s a long term game and the best output always rises to the top, even in a world of algorithms. In the chase for cultural relevance and looking at a feed for what is deemed relevant, we can lose sight of some marketing basics on how you can begin gaining traction and relevance in culture in the first place.
OUTPUT FINDS RELEVANCE
We need to think of output first as it’s the output that gains the relevance and it’s true whether we’re talking culture in a more traditional sense of the arts, as it is with brands and products.
This article is geared towards brands but the moment we think of their place or role in culture, we have to hold ourselves to the same standards as other cultural output like music, TV, film, art, literature etc. if we truly want to make our mark. Ultimately we’re aiming to be a part of a person’s life just as the latest track is, or bingeable series is. Cultural brands are part of the cultural discourse. They create, contribute and participate in it.
While the examples in the chart might be influenced and shaped by the cultural discourse, what they’re creating is focused on the output and craft first, on staying true to the person or brand before finding its way out into the discourse and generating cultural relevance through the people and communities it reaches.
And this is the important thing to remember. Relevance is given by the people. Relevance is given by the community.
A clear example of this in action is when a brand or product finds relevance with an audience group or subculture that wasn’t necessarily the intended target. Brands like Carhartt, Ralph Lauren, Stone Island, Clarks, Hennessey and Pabst Blue Ribbon were all co-opted by groups and subcultures like Hip-Hop, Football Casuals, Dancehall, Creatives and Hipsters. None of these were the initial intended target and clearly demonstrate how relevance is given by the people and the community. All the aforementioned brands harnessed this newfound attraction in varying ways to cultivate, create and participate positively with the cultural groups.
Why the various cultural groups adopted them comes back to my earlier statements around brands impacting people’s identity and status. For example with Ralph Lauren, the brand set out to target its core consumer who was wealthy and upper class. What they also found within Hip-Hop and a particular group that became known as the Lo Lifes was a group and community of people that saw the brand as aspirational and gave a sign of status by wearing it.
Compare this to the examples I mentioned in the upfront section of this article of those brands that are all chasing relevance from the same playbook. None of them are thinking output or craft, brand or staying true first. All of them are thinking let’s do what appears to be working in the feeds. It’s not even reverse engineering what’s happening or might be working, it’s laziness in following the crowd.
Fast and Slow Culture
Realistically when brands are throwing cultural relevance around, they mean being deemed popular, cool or on trend by a wide audience.
You may still find success this way commercially, you might even have a moment culturally the day the press release and social post goes out, but it’s merely day trading attempts at cultural relevance. You have to keep showing up but when you’re so focused on the daily changes, you lose sight of the bigger picture and lose the chance at longevity required. If you’re only following things by the day in a feed, over time your brand will start to look schizophrenic as it zigs and zags to whatever is current in culture.
And that’s where the danger comes of thinking the feeds are the culture.
What we’re really seeing in the feeds is what the anthropologist and author Grant McCraken calls fast culture, which is “vivid, visible, obvious, and, yes, fashionable”. This is things like passing cores and aesthetics like blokecore & quiet luxury, or trending social moments like brat & demure. Newsfeeds and tech platforms have helped accelerate this.
If fast culture is all about the immediate surface level then, slow culture, McCracken states is “is everything beneath the surface, less well charted, much less visible”.
Too many brands are now focusing on the fast only which is the area that has most contributed to the sea of sameness and desperate attempts for relevance.
The best brands work at the convergence of both fast and slow culture. They are clear on the elements of slow culture where their brand sees a role, but they’re understanding what is happening in fast culture and know when is right to get involved and importantly, when not to.
Cultural Brands
Modern, cultural brands need to be receptive to the realities of today's consumer and the fact everything is moving at a faster pace and we have more choices than ever over where we spend our time and money. Traditional advertising doesn’t work in the same way it used to. You can’t just rely on one big campaign a year anymore and need to be communicating more frequently as everyone chases consumer attention. It’s not easy out there but it is easy to lose sight of what a brand is, stands for and how it can show up in culture.
Cultural brands focus first on who they are. It’s brand and product first thinking, not news feed and algorithm first. They’re locked in on what is happening in culture but are not totally led by it. Cultural brands know it’s important to create and participate in culture, rather than simply align with some paid for posts and influencer campaigns. Cultural brands know this is much harder to do, but find it much more rewarding and impactful in the long run.
For the brands that just want to align and chase what’s popular, it’s a false economy of success. You’re merely day trading or renting relevance. When you next think, how can we be culturally relevant, consider what are you as a brand doing that creates and contributes to culture? If your answer is a drop, branded football shirt or some demure content, you’re at risk of creating cultural irrelevance.