Cultural influence is not about hiring influencers

Don't confuse the two

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At the end of June, there was a study about cool in Journal of Experimental Psychology, titled “Cool People.” Global media jumped to write about the study, because it’s summer and because we will apparently never cease to care about what, where, and who’s cool.

Even the spokespeople of cool, quoted in one of these articles, are not immune to criticism. “I listen to How Long Gone and try to make sure I do the opposite of whatever Chris Black says is cool,” one person said. Others say Labubus are over, because there isn’t such a thing as mass cool. The moment something hits mainstream, it stops being cool (except Rihanna).

But cool things are massive now. “As Scarlet Johansson found out and Hayo Miyazaki now discovers, their lives work and the attached potential to evoke emotions and attention are being used to summon massive, sandworm like hype waves that sweep with the zero nuance style of memetic warfare through the internet, creating awareness for the products he wishes to peddle,” Georg Zoeller recently wrote (thank you Lee Maschmeyer for sending the link).

Back to Labubus, I was recently at a party in Paris where I ran into stylist Gaultier Navarre with a rare Labubu, which went perfectly with his gold and black patent RL Ricky bag.

Gaultier told me that he first heard about Labubus from his stylist friend some six months before everyone else started talking about it, and this is why he was able to get ahold of his now-rare and still very much coveted item. This, in turn, reminded me of a question about the difference between cultural programming and influencer strategy.

If stylists did not chat among themselves and share new items, brands, accessories, and looks, Rihanna, Lisa, and David Beckham would never heard of Labubus, would not put them on their Birkins, and their fans would be deprived of these little creatures.

Celebrities may have amplified the trend, but if the cultural, social, and economic context was not already there, the trend would not have caught on. After all, celebrities wear and promote a lot of things; not all of them are deemed cool. Context matters more than individuals. Robin Givhan, a fashion editor of the Washinton Post, in her recently released biography of Virgin Abloh, Make it Ours, writes: "His success was made possible because of the ways in which fashion had already evolved.”

Jonathan Anderson Campaign

Celebrities are like mass media, so their audience doesn’t necessarily translate into customers and reach doesn’t always equal influence. They are best used for awareness, with CPM as the core metric, and best is to accept that you’d never know which part of your budget is wasted.

Cultural programming is the strategy of creating a portfolio of cultural products (merch, collaborations, brand codes, aesthetics, events, etc) that are distributed in various cultural contexts. Cultural programming is creating new cultural associations.

Cultural programming is based on the approach to cultural influence that doesn’t rely on celebrities, but on products, conversations, people, and trends that are generated in different cultural contexts and that bubble up into the mainstream thanks to a combination of the right cultural, social, and economic mood. (Companies can also create the right mood for their products by creating a relationship between fandom, brand and culture; read about the mechanism of the how below).

This mood can be likened to forest fire: if there’s dry wood, lack of rain, direction of the wind, density of trees and remoteness of the fire department, any spark will cause a fire. A fertile social or cultural context, not any particular influencer or a celebrity, will make something cool.