OPINION18 January 2011

Cultural insight is marketing’s untapped resource

Opinion

Truth’s UK managing director Leanne Tomasevic on why marketers must become the ‘cultural antennae’ of companies.

As we seek to understand the hearts and minds of consumers and put them at the centre of our organisations, research has homed in on the consumer psyche. However, in doing so we have overlooked a key to understanding behaviour: getting to grips with the external cultural factors that influence what consumers do. To understand this, we have to broaden out to take in all the things happening around us, rather than just focusing on individual psychology and behaviour.

“While it is important to understand what consumers think, we must understand what influences them to have a chance of changing how they think”

While it is important to understand what consumers think, we must understand what influences them to have a chance of changing how they think. In other words, we need to move away from the consumer and also see the context that they get their inspiration and knowledge from.

This view is supported by the anthropologist Grant McCracken, author of Chief Culture Officer, who stresses the importance of cultural expertise and how it can be used to create advantages and build successful business and marketing strategies. McCracken, who spoke at a recent Truth event, cites Levi Strauss & Co as an example of a brand that missed opportunities because it wasn’t tuned into culture – failing to recognise the hip-hop trend of baggy jeans and the lucrative new market opportunity it represented.

To achieve this extra insight, we need to research the significant role played by culture in shaping consumers’ thoughts and ideas, especially about brands. This means analysing both ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of culture, with a focus on communication. It’s everything from fine art, fashion and literature to technology, packaging design and advertising.

It is the analysis of these materials, which might include newspaper articles, clothes, YouTube videos, TV ads, art exhibitions or blog posts, that helps us to predict and understand how the world is changing around us, how people will change and what consumers will want, need and ultimately buy. A close examination of relevant cultural communications and objects will allow us to determine how to ensure that future offerings are relevant and stand out from the pack.

Consumer insight is good at identifying and evaluating what consumers want and need right now, but it’s cultural insight that enables us to understand how these wants and needs may change over time and the affect this could have on future consumption.

Take women’s health. An interesting shift has taken place whereby consumers talk much more readily about illness than in the recent past. This change is exemplified by the fashion activism of breast cancer advertising campaigns. We are now seeing this move on again, to what we have termed ‘medical aesthetics’, meaning women are using bespoke beauty products and procedures to make themselves look better while they are unwell. Blending both inner and outer health, it is now acceptable to use beauty as a means to feel better.

At the same time, changes have taken place under the surface that have provided the ground for these new developments to take shape. Think of the advancement of women in global politics and economics, or expanding definitions of beauty, with fuller-figured and older models in advertising, to name a few.

These may sound like fairly ‘big picture’ ideas, but they trickle down and affect how women are represented in all media, their needs for the future, the types of products they desire, and what they will seek out and want to buy. This is relevant to all categories with female consumers and can also be tailored more closely to particular sectors and brands.

So, while consumer insight might help you pick out changes like this once they’ve happened, cultural insight gives you a chance to keep up with them as they happen.

For a more specific example, take the dairy category. Consumer insight alerts us to dairy being a dirty word when it comes to health, but it doesn’t tell us how to respond to this challenge. How can we change perceptions and make dairy healthy in the mind of the consumer? Cultural insight can help us with this issue because it liberates us from a purely consumer focus, allowing us to look at the category itself and investigate how it’s changing. For example, by examining retail outlets and advertising of various ice cream and yoghurt brands we were able to create a set of guidelines to come up with a new definition of ‘dairy skinny’.

Sitting in a Snog frozen yoghurt store in Soho, we were able to pick up on an entire new set of ‘healthy’ cues relating to yoghurt and ice cream. Instead of the usual focus on rich, heavy and decadent creaminess, we observed a new language of fluorescent vibrancy and simplicity, as well an overriding sense of lightness, quite removed from what we typically perceive in ice cream.

Similarly, when we put the spotlight on some recent advertising for Müller yoghurt, we noted how they had subverted the cliché of a wholesome cow lazing in the country by showing a cow running along a beach like a horse. Like Snog, Müller has made dairy energetic, dazzling and fresh – another attempt to strip itself of the heavy, thick and slow associations consumers tend to have.

The retail space and television commercial (backed up by many other examples) indicated how dairy brands are evolving to capitalise on growing consumer concern about, and interest in, health. By learning, borrowing from and expanding upon these ideas, we were able to give our client a clear strategic and executional direction to move their brand forward.

Consumer insight alone did not give us this information; it couldn’t tell us how to create a new ‘dairy skinny’, whereas cultural insight revealed a clear visual and verbal lexicon, and helped us crystallise our solution to the brand challenge.

These cultural insights have real-world grounding and help us identify emerging patterns that are more than just fads. We can predict how these shifts may evolve over time and make the most of genuine opportunities to innovate and strategise for the future.

With this in mind, McCracken also highlights the importance of using cultural knowledge in the right way and the difference between simple ‘cool hunting’ and deep understanding of culture, which he defines as being either ‘fast’ or ‘slow’. Fast culture tends to get most of the limelight; it encompasses the latest fashions, fads, hot bands and movies, current slang and so on. Slow culture is more submerged, to the point that we often forget to pay attention to it: it’s the long-standing values and traditions that underpin how we live. In his words: “Fast culture is like all the boats on the surface of the Pacific. We can spot them, number them, track them. Slow culture is everything beneath the surface: less charted and much less visible.”

It is our job to understand both fast and slow culture in all its guises to ensure we have a complete and future-facing picture of the consumer. This includes both the visible shouting signals, as well as the underground more stable and slow-changing shifts, as it is this combination that provides meaningful and enduring directions that can be put to use by brands.

Consumers can tell us (or at least try to tell us) what they think, do, or have done in the past. But cultural insight goes a step further. It advises us about what influences what consumers think in the first place. Rather than focusing on what the majority are up to, it also informs us about the minority, the uniqueness of what a few are doing and what they will be likely to do in the future. Ultimately, it helps us influence consumers to think about our business and brands in the way we want them too.

If we understand culture we will know what direction a brand should move in before other brands have moved there. We will know what opportunities to take advantage of. We will know we shouldn’t ignore baggy jeans as a signal of bigger shifts. We will know in what ways we should be different and how to create that difference.

Knowing all these things allows brands to lead the way and position themselves well to make the most of now. By leveraging culture we are able to better understand the future, and can make the best decisions today.

4 Comments

13 years ago

Interesting and totally agree... Studied Cultural Studies some years ago and are glad to see it put into the MR context to help decisions....

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13 years ago

Leanne, from you article it seems that a critical part of developing cultural insight is knowing "where" to look, not just "what" to look for - what you called looking at the minority.For example, in the denim market the critical knowledge was to look into into hip-hop cultural groups, in dairy you knew to look into Snog's. I think it takes a bold and unusually persuasive researcher to buck the trend in that way.

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13 years ago

An excellent article and some great examples of how researchers need to be sensitive to cultural issues to help brands evolve. Looking beyond the category often delivers the greatest insights. Like you, we often talk to marginal consumers, those at the extremes of the market, to inform and direct. It not only takes a brave researcher to recommend this but also an open-minded client who wants to stay several steps ahead.

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13 years ago

Agreed! A great article, with messages that clearly all researchers should by mindful of and take on board. Obviously there is a need to be mindful of brand limitations as not all cultural trends necessarily present opportunities for all brands e.g. is the hip hop culture at odds with the Levis brand? Possibly. But more importantly, would those within (or even loosely associated with) that sub-culture be willing to appropriate the brand as their own? Probably not. None the less, I think this article is crucial in that it reminds us as consultants of the importance of developing and maintaining broader contextual knowledge around the work we do!

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