#18 How to Identify Cultural Patterns and Improve your Strategic Thinking

Applying cultural studies and semiotics to brand and creative strategy.

This newsletter is called Cultural Patterns because culture sits at the core of my approach to strategy. Why the name? Culture is constantly changing, but patterns emerge when similar changes happen across different spheres of culture, indicating a more profound change in the values, needs and systemic structures of society.

Today, I want to share some simple steps to identify cultural patterns and show you how it helps my strategic thinking. This is what I do every week for my newsletter, but I won’t go into full detail, I’ll keep it practical while also rooted in qualitative research techniques and strategy fundamentals. This is part of my framework for cultural strategy, so if you’re interested in learning more about that or work with me, contact me here or reply to this email.

Culture as a strategic asset

The golden insight sits at the intersection of brand, consumer, and culture, yet marketers often prioritise the business and consumers over culture. As culture is de-prioritised, marketers are missing a trick. I argue for giving equal weight to all three and recognising culture as a strategic asset and source of intelligence that can drive brand value. Brands are built on mental associations and meaning, and culture establishes shared meanings, so understanding changes in culture allows marketers to open up new commercial angles.

It's important to clarify though that being a culturally led brand doesn’t mean to support a worthy cause, ‘take a stand’ on something or have a purpose. Culture is so ingrained in us that it becomes part of our system 1 response. As Curphey (1) puts it:

“Most of what influences what we buy and why we buy it is a result of this surround - what has gone on around consumers; what they have been using and doing, and what they have been seeing, hearing and communicating. This is how our needs develop, and how we decide (without deciding) that we want one thing or another.”

By analysing spheres of culture (like art, entertainment, politics, tech, lifestyle, media, environment, etc) we can uncover new configurations of meanings, identify new social signals and signifiers, leverage opportunities before they become mainstream and align our brands with emergent and relevant meanings. It has countless benefits and I will provide a glimpse into the theoretical framework behind this at the end of the post.

Now, let’s get into the 5 steps to identify patterns and improve your strategic thinking.

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1 Get in the right mindset

First, you’ll want to put your ethnographer glasses on. As Leschak (2) said:

"All of us are watchers — of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway — but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing."

Ethnography looks at the cultural context of consumption, the conscious and unconscious factors that make people do what they do (from choosing a brand to using a specific hashtag on an Insta caption) so everything is ruled by the cultural context.

Look wide around you, start getting into the practice of noticing things that prompt behaviour, the adaptations, things people care about, and for the unexpected. Look at things as if they were all new and different every time.

Practical tip: take an active approach to seeing and think of yourself as an outsider. Don’t take anything for granted and embrace being challenged.

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2 Pick up the ‘unusual’ signals

Ethnography tells us that we can understand culture by observing and interpreting three main cultural elements: tools, behaviours and meaning. This is what we will be looking for and what we want to train our brain to do: look for signals.

Notice everything that goes against the orthodoxy of what you’ve seen before in the product category, target audience, platform, behaviour or any other key aspect.

As an example, later today I’ll take the Northern line and I’ll see people wearing face masks, which wasn’t part of British culture only a few weeks ago. So, ‘Is this a signal for something? Why?’. Most people are wearing white, surgical masks usually found in hospitals as a reaction to the spread of coronavirus. But if next week I start seeing fun, colourful face masks like the ones teenagers use in Asia, their cultural meaning will probably have changed from an anxiety-driven purchase for prevention to a quirky fashion accessory that is also thoughtful of fellow commuters.

Most signals won’t be entirely new (what we see is probably taken from other industries, markets or cultures) but they stand out when they appear in new contexts and take up new meanings. That’s when we are able to spot cultural change.

Practical tip: take notice of the things that grab your attention and make you ask ‘Why is this happening? What is going on here?’

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3 Think Fast & Slow - and start labelling

Every strategist should be attuned to culture, but many mistake this for merely keeping up with pop culture, which isn’t the same. I like the distinction between fast and slow culture, coined by anthropologist G. McCracken (3):

Fast culture is like all the boats on the surface of the ocean. We can spot them, number them, track them. Slow culture is everything beneath the surface: less well-charted, much less visible.

Fast culture is what changes every day, like the trends in fashion or the viral TikTok challenges - they come and go. Slow culture is everything deeper driving those changes, those bigger societal changes in society, religion, environment, politics. This helps us categorise our signals.

For example, a few weeks ago I picked up the Goop Vagina candle as a signal. We can tag this to fast culture in branding (as a signal of a new concept in brand merch) and home decor. Then, interrogate how it relates to other spheres of culture to explore the underlying slow culture factor: what does it say about female sexuality and societal taboos? can you relate this to other sextech innovations? scents are usually from nature, why is this alluding to human scents? Go deeper into behaviours and meanings to address the ‘tide below’.

Practical tip: I use Pocket to categorise signals in verticals and themes, and also tag them as fast or slow signals. A tagging system makes it easier for me to find patterns between signals in different verticals.

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4 Organise in R/D/E framework

Cultural tools, meanings and behaviours can usually be identified by this framework:

• Residual: the old-fashioned ways of doing things, already replaced by what is dominant.

• Dominant: easy to recognise, the status quo, heavily present everywhere.

• Emergent: the new signifiers that challenge the notions of a category, which can be seen in new contradictions or unusual signs and behaviours.

Take International Women’s Day as an example. I see residual codes in the cheesy “Happy IWD” images my older family relatives send on WhatsApp. The dominant code is to celebrate women’s contribution to society, and the emergent code turns this day into one of activism that fights for women’s equality. I’m sure there are other even newer signals, and this is why looking at the fringes of culture helps to identify the latest developments on shared notions and meanings.

Practical tip: after doing this exercise, map the different tensions in an axis to identify a relevant cultural space for your brand to own.

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5 Identify the patterns

Take a critical and analytical approach to spotting repetition. Is the same behavioural driver or rejection of the old present in other verticals?

For example, here are some signals on how relationships are changing: female friends are co-parenting, CGI influencer Lil Miquela recently ‘consciously uncoupled’ from her human boyfriend, Love is Blind is the most-streamed show in the world, and Emma Watson rebranded single as ‘self-partnered’. These signals aren’t only relevant if you’re working on a brief for a dating app - they can inform the world of finance, policy and laws, entertainment, housing and social influence, to just name a few. Try answering the questions and draw the similarities (for me the pattern would be around the change in our attitudes to commitment, to ourselves and others.)

Practical tip: write down all the central themes that you think connect all those things. Just as there isn’t only one possible strategy for a problem, many patterns are possible.

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Apply it your strategic thinking

This constant exercise of codifying and monitoring cultural change allows brands to find innovation roadmaps, own cultural spaces, create more relevant marketing comms, better control risk (if we think about it, the biggest brand flops of the last years happened because of lack of cultural awareness - Gillette and Pepsi, I’m looking at you), and open up other new business opportunities. There are different ways of applying this cultural intelligence:

• Unearth cultural insights: the golden insight sits at the intersection of three truths - brand, consumer and culture. Most marketers focus on the first two, so pay attention to the landscape in which all of our behaviours, desires and attitudes live to move beyond a consumer insight. Understand the ways things are done, the ‘socially accepted’ norms, the conventions, the visual and verbal grammar, and then look for all the things that go against them. Look for codes, hidden meanings, narratives and archetypes in the spheres of culture to find opportunities.

• Reframe problems: widening your view outside of product, brand and category is useful to reframe brand problems. Reframing is at the core of strategy practice because it allows us to create and design the best context for our brand to succeed. A deep understanding of culture can help identify emergent needs and cultural innovations that address brand and category challenges.

• Use it for brand positioning: a cultural approach gives you the opportunity to explore old traditions and narratives, identify the codes and signs on their way out, and introduce emergent new meanings and configurations. All of this provides you with an edge for differentiation that can challenge the old. I think it was Adam Morgan from EatBigFish who said that if you have an average product, then you need a 10x strong point of view. That point of view will likely come from culture, so define the cultural world in which your brand seeks to thrive.

There are so many other benefits as well, but I hope you’ve enjoyed it so far and learnt something new. Would be great to hear from you and your experiences, connect with me on Linkedin or Twitter. If you’ve enjoyed this post, please share it around!

Thanks so much

Florencia

References

1) Julie Curphey, Andrew Dexter and Leanne Tomasevic, (2011) ‘Culture: Insight’s third space’ available here

2) Peter Leschak, (1991) Notes from a more real world, in New York Times, available here

3) Grant McCracken, (2009) Chief Culture Officer, Basic Books: New York.