Making cultural influence happen
How brands can operationalize and execute cultural influence
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To capitalize on the influence that culture has on consumer behavior, brands should start from reframing their opportunity as strategy of cultural influence. Brands influence culture through their collections, content and entertainment, graphic design, visual language, brand iconography, special editions and capsules, brand partnerships and collaborations, fandom-management, and archival curation.
In the domain of marketing, strategy of cultural influence means developing a lot of ideas versus just one big idea; it captures a lot of cultural moments versus just one big moment. Its purpose is to expand your brand’s cultural and market footprint, renew brand associations, and provide a stream of always-on entertainment.
In the domain of media, strategy of cultural influence means developing, launching, and synchronizing multiple brand signals in culture.
In the domain of merchandising, strategy of cultural influence ensures consistency of your brand universe through integration of the main collection with archives, hero products, capsules, and collaborations.
In the domain of product, strategy of cultural influence partners with design on the annual fashion concepts and the seasonal brand and product rollout, promotes hero products, drives archival revivals and vintage curation, and markets special editions and collaborations.
In the domain of retail, strategy of cultural influence adopts customer-first view in product design, merchandising, media, retail and marketing communication.
In the domain of business, strategy of cultural influence incorporates promotional calendar into the annual sales and revenue goals, and ties it to the commercial and cultural initiatives.
The strategy of cultural influence’s connects all of brand's creative executions, across functions. It keeps creative output accountable in terms of business results, and ensures that commercial and marketing planning work closely together.
Design of a brand platform informs a company’s cultural strategy. This approach revolves around 4Cs: content, community, collaborations, and curation.
Content
For Gen Z, shopping is among the top of their entertainment activities. As traditional media formats, like print and TV, are decreasingly relevant for this generation, we need to gravitate towards entertainment production (examples are LVMH’s 22 Montagne, Nike’s Waffle Iron Entertainment, and Mattel’s Barbie movie).
Beyond full-length features, a brand has an opportunity to introduce fun snippets of always-on content, merch and products, and creative collaborations. It can also plan their seasonal campaigns as entertainment products, like movies: through teasers, trailers, opening nights, and launch. Seasonal collections are teased through content and merch prior their launch to drive interest.
In this context, brands need to consider:
Interstitial storytelling: a series of mini-stories that are connected into a web of a wider narrative. Start releasing brand collections like movies, starting with teasers, then trailers, then marketing activations, with the role of building anticipation for a collection release.