The cultural flywheel
How brands use cultural products to build communities
Building a brand community on social media is precarious and costly.
It also doesn’t work.
A better way is through cultural products—merch, collaborations, product drops, capsules, experiences and events—and the self-reinforcing loop those cultural products create.
Collaborations lead to merch, merch is dropped at events, capsules convey a brand message and an experience, and all of this creates content. Content is sequenced around each cultural product: merch, drop, collaboration, capsule, event, experience. There are teasers before, documentation during, community reaction after.
But the content platform does more than just amplify cultural products. It provides architecture that gives the community a shared lexicon, history, and reason to keep engaging between product moments.
In my last post, The show business of brands, I explored the formula of cultural production and asked what great entertainment can teach every CMO. If you are on the Substack, join the chat. With one of the paid subscription options, join Paid Membership Chat, and with the free subscription, join The General Chat on The Sociology of Business WhatsApp group.
Holding it all together—merch, collaborations, events and experiences, product drops, capsules, and content—is a cultural program (no, a cultural program is not a
Behind the paywall are a cultural program sequencing principles and a deep dive into how each type of cultural products creates community.
