Cultural Insights and the Power of Futureproofing Your Brand

Recent years have produced some of the most salient trends and cultural shifts to date – driven by the advancement of technology, the booming state of social media and the expansion of the global sharing economy. The result is an increasingly fast-paced marketplace that leaves behind brands that are unable to gather and act on cultural insights. Marketers are faced with hard-hitting questions around how to best use consumer insights to tap into these shifts to maintain relevancy.

In recent years, more marketers have started leveraging cultural insights to help drive solutions that resonate with their audience without being out of step with culture. But what is cultural insight, and more importantly, how can it actually work to improve the state of your business?

So…what is cultural insight?

The practice of analyzing culture, known as “cultural insight,” tracks, measures and highlights the invisible cultural forces impacting the lives, perceptions and choices of consumers today. It provides brands and marketers with the knowledge and resources necessary to create resonant messaging strategies that can stand the test of time. The forces it studies include the values, beliefs and traditions a community shares, along with the history behind them.

At Material, we believe that understanding behavior is the key to unlocking comprehensive consumer truths, beyond reliance on consumer input. Our cultural strategists are trained anthropologists who study culture and human behavior. They utilize semiotics and trend scanning – along with a full portfolio of cultural insight tools and methodologies – to help brands and marketers see a fuller picture of their consumer today and in the future.

Why Are Cultural Insights Important for Brands?

Cultural insights are important because they tie a brand’s strategic decisions to how people live and what they value right now. Without that tie, a brand starts losing relevance as the culture around it moves.

Uncover the “why” behind numbers

With the boom of the data-driven economy, many marketers rely on hard numbers to determine where to go next and how to reach consumers of today. However, focusing on data alone can lead to some serious blind spots. Marrying numbers with cultural insight, and taking the time to understand what is driving and influencing those results, differentiates truly culturally immersed brands from those who fail to be a part of the cultural conversation.

When used correctly, cultural strategists can help marketers paint the space between the data and bring life to often static metrics of measurement, ultimately creating a way for data-dependent decision makers to make better, more informed choices about the direction of their marketing strategies.

Identify the origins of each cultural phenomenon

Understanding how certain trends, consumer perceptions and behaviors came to exist is the first step to creating messaging strategies that are authentic and meaningful.

Cultural strategists are able to examine the cultural atmosphere both before and after a key trend or shift hits the marketplace, enabling marketers to make more savvy decisions about the direction of their brand marketing initiatives. By asking the right questions to determine the origins of a trend, cultural strategists equip marketers with the tools necessary to futureproof their brand – especially when, through that process, the full historicity of those shifts is recognized and acknowledged. Only then can brand marketers understand the impact certain trends and shifts have had on consumer perception, behavior and purchase decisions.

Latch on to cultural shifts – not trends

Trends are a great way to get a read of what is happening in the now, and to understand key cultural artifacts that are pushing consumers to think about themselves and the world differently. However, trends can be risky investments for marketers to consider, especially given the amount of time and energy it takes for an idea to be developed, produced and activated against. Often, the digital world has already moved on to the next new thing by the time most brands have trends figured out.

This is why the examination process of identifying the origin of each cultural phenomenon is so important. When cultural strategists take the time to investigate trends, the end result is often an identification of bigger, meatier territories in the form of “cultural shifts.”

When these larger cultural shifts are identified, marketers gain access to a broader foundation on which to ideate, create, test and develop strategies that can withstand the constant changing nature of trends. What’s more, the permanency of these shifts means that the race for marketers to integrate those learnings into their own organizations can be done in a more informed, purposeful way, ensuring marketers enough time to get it right and improving the odds of a positive ROI.

Understand the link between multicultural insights and cultural shifts

The relationship between multicultural insights and cultural insights can be a complicated one. This complexity results from the very well-known fact that multicultural consumers often serve as catalysts for the very cultural shifts that marketers find themselves needing to pay attention to, even though they have historically been underrepresented.

Communities of color exist both as curators of cultural trends and as the receivers of the cultural shifts those trends ignite. So, when utilizing cultural insight, it is important for marketers to first acknowledge the role these communities play in driving those shifts and how they are impacted by them.

Marketers must also understand that, while each cultural shift may have one definition, the way they manifest within certain communities is – and always will be – nuanced and different than that of mainstream consumers. When marketers understand when, and how, to dial up or tap into the cultural nuances of their consumers, they are able to make more authentic connections with their core customer base.

Innovate while staying in step with culture

Along with shaping more culturally sound strategies, cultural insight helps brands spot unmet needs in their target market and innovate solutions for them.

Brands that are seeking to develop new products, points of view or positioning initiatives can tap cultural strategists to partner with and ideate new solutions that are both in line with consumer expectations and future facing, leaning innovation efforts into the direction that culture is organically moving toward.

In this case, the utilization of semiotics is key. Understanding all of the meaning and perceptions associated with an emerging idea or concept is critical to ensuring the best version of a final product is put into the marketplace.

Identify nuances in international markets

It is not rare to run into a brand that has created a product or communication strategy that is not well received or understood in all of its activation markets. Because of cultural differences, what may seem good or positive in the U.S. may be considered negative elsewhere. An easy way to avoid such a mishap is to utilize cultural strategists from the onset, and throughout the entire creative process.

When marketers and creative agencies incorporate cultural insights into their communication strategy, cultural experts can conduct a constant analysis of the signified meaning of verbal and visual cues and symbols within the collateral being deployed across a wide number of countries and international communities. This way, when a brand decides to create messaging around a central idea, they can do so with a culturally driven activation plan that highlights the nuances and cultural context of that idea, as well as the parts that will or will not resonate within particular marketplaces.

Collecting Cultural Insights Through Research and Observation

Brands gather cultural insights by combining research that asks people questions with observation of what they do and say when nobody’s asking.

• Surveys. A survey shows patterns in values and habits across a large group. That makes it good at spotting what’s common. On its own, it can’t say what those patterns mean to the people inside them.

• Focus groups. A focus group shows how ideas take shape in conversation. The way people agree and push back often reveals shared norms nobody would state in a survey. Like interviews, focus groups are qualitative research, built to find meaning rather than count.

• In-depth interviews. One-on-one interviews leave room for personal stories and follow-up questions. That deeper exploration often exposes the difference between what people say and what they do.

• Ethnography. Researchers spend time in people’s homes and stores to see routines as they happen. It captures behavior people wouldn’t think to mention because, to them, it’s just normal.

• Semiotics. The study of signs works out what a culture’s colors, words, images and rituals mean to a particular group. It shows how an idea is likely to be read before a brand puts it in front of people.

• Trendscan analysis. Strategists track media, product launches, social feeds and pop culture over time to separate passing trends from emerging shifts that are likely to last.

• Social listening. Social platforms show how people talk and argue in public. The language they choose often says more than the opinions they state.

At Material, we use semiotics, ethnography, trendscan analysis and value identification to reveal the trends shaping customer expectations, habits, motivations and beliefs.

Why Cultural Insights Are Hard to See From Inside Your Own Company

A marketing team shares many of the assumptions it’s trying to study, so the beliefs that most need questioning often feel like common sense. An outside team helps in three ways:

• Distance. Strategists who don’t share your category’s habits notice what your team has stopped seeing.

• Method. Training in anthropology turns observation into cultural analysis a leadership team can act on.

• Range. A team that works across many categories and markets can more easily tell a shift that’s specific to your customers from cultural change moving through the whole society.

Together, those three give a brand evidence it can act on with greater confidence than observation alone.

When used correctly, cultural insight is a powerful tool to elevate the output of your consumer findings

In this increasingly fast-paced environment, brands and marketers can only benefit from the additive effects of incorporating the cultural elements that impact and influence consumers on a daily basis. Cultural insights have a role in every part of consumer marketing, including understanding the full cultural context and historicity of a trend or cultural shift, identifying emerging trends, ideating for innovations, highlighting intercultural nuances and decoding concepts through a semiotic lens. Reach out to our cultural insights experts to learn more.