What culture actually is
Before you can build strategy on culture, you have to stop treating it as an aesthetic.
Most brand teams use the word culture to mean a mood board. A palette, a soundtrack, a casting choice. That definition is convenient because it can be bought in an afternoon, and it is the reason so much cultural marketing collapses on contact with the people it borrowed from.
Culture is not a look. It is a set of shared meanings held by a group of people, produced over time, defended by that group, and constantly contested from inside and outside. It has history. It has authorship. It has economics. When a brand enters it, the brand becomes a participant in that contest whether it intended to or not.
This matters commercially, not just ethically. A community that recognises itself in your work will carry it further than any media budget. A community that recognises itself being taken from will spend the same energy against you, and they will be more accurate than your crisis comms.
So the first question is never how do we make this feel cultural. It is: whose culture is this, what does it mean to them, and what happens to them if we are in it.
Culture is not a style you apply. It is a set of shared meanings you either contribute to or take from.
Do this
Name the culture you are actually operating in, precisely.
- 1Write the community in one line. Not a demographic, a community: the people who would recognise this as theirs.
- 2Write three things that community believes that outsiders usually get wrong.
- 3Write who in that community is already doing what you are about to do, and whether you have paid, credited or spoken to them.
Checkpoint. If you cannot name three specific beliefs, you are working with a demographic, not a culture. Go and talk to someone before you go further.