The Sociology of Business
A global weekly newsletter about how brands connect business with culture
The Sociology of Business is a global weekly newsletter about how brands connect business with culture.
This “how” is a cultural program. A cultural program connects cultural products so they best amplify each other. Cultural products are merch, collaborations, entertainment, content … that a lot of people pay attention to, share, and talk about. When a brand gets lucky, a cultural product becomes a hit. A cultural hit brings a company money, significant market share, and a strong stock price. A cultural hit becomes a market hit.
In fact, hitmaking is not a matter of luck. It’s a matter of cultural intelligence. Cultural intelligence is very similar to financial intelligence: managing portfolios, making multiple bets, monitoring the market mood, reacting in real-time, and amplifying the early winners.
That’s what the Sociology of Business is about. Read on …
Before 1999, the “Centurion Amex” was an urban legend. An invitation-only, no limit, titanium card did not exist. When American Express launched its Black Card, a cultural hit became a market hit.
Fifteen years prior, Michael Jordan received a ban from the NBA on his black-and-red Nike Air Jordan 1 sneakers. NBA historically mandated that sneakers worn on court have to be 51 percent white. Jordan kept wearing his sneakers for a $5,000 fine per game, paid for by Nike, throughout the entire season. Nike turned the ban into the - wait for it - “Banned” campaign. “On October 15, Nike created a revolutionary new basketball shoe. On October 18, the NBA threw them out of the game. Fortunately, NBA can’t keep you from wearing them. Air Jordans. From Nike,” the campaign said. As of 2024, the Jordan brand brings $6.59 billion in revenue, or 13% of Nike’s total sales. (It took NBA until 2018 to remove all sneaker restrictions). A cultural hit became a market hit.
Brands used to influence culture mostly through their advertising on mass media like TV, print, billboards, or public relations. Today, they influence culture through the cultural products they create: entertainment, merch, collaborations, exhibitions and awards, capsules, content, brand codes, experiences, archives, drops, fandom.
Hitmaking is the strategy of cultural influence. In the post-mono culture, media, and retail, brands are pushed to operate like a portfolio of products and categories that target different niche audiences. Mass is achieved through aggregation of niches. By targeting its different audience segments, a brand creates many doors in and increases it hold on the market.
A portfolio approach addresses the fact that not all of the brand’s cultural products will become hits. Cultural markets are known as “ambiguous markets” where success is random and unpredictable. Now-iconic Fight Club was originally a flop, and so was equally iconic Blade Runner, which at the time of its release, barely made its budget. Assassin’s Creed became a Netflix Top 10 hit seven years after its release.
Success in ambiguous markets is mostly a matter of cultural moments and moods. Humans are social animals, and they never make decisions in isolation from each other, their social media, streets they walk in, content they watch/listen/read, and images, products, and people they are surrounded by.
How aspirational or desirable people assess something to be is more influenced by pop culture than personal choice. Calvin Klein’s Jeremy Allen White’s ad was released three days before White’s first Golden Globe’s win, and at the beginning of the awards season, where his successful hit “Bear” was nominated for the first time in multiple categories. The mood for the campaign was right - White plays an underdog in his show, the show itself was an underdog in the awards season, and White has been an underdog on the awards circuit. The ad was released at the right cultural moment, but even then, it may have note become a hit (what if White didn’t win?)
To turn some of its cultural products into hits, brands need to create a lot of them. This is a matter of creative production and media amplification. When ideas are tested in the real world, the creative, organizational, and operational balance shifts from strategy to execution, and from a couple of big ideas to a lot of smaller ones. Job of media is to amplify the cultural products that show early promise in terms of audience pick-up. Cultural products and media amplification always go together: without media amplification, cultural products would stay niche; and without cultural products, media is just increasing click-through rates without creating cultural influence.
Media amplification of cultural influence is a creative exercise. It revolves around identifying all the different cultural contexts for a brand to participate in and all the different audiences to address.
When a brand is present across different cultural contexts, it is nimble and reactive to unexpected cultural moments, and can seize them quickly. A sudden wild popularity of Stanley Cup immediately caused a series of media amplifications, leading to a spike in sales to $750M in 2023 (more than 10 times its usual annual revenue). By being present across cultural contexts, brands are able to recognize early cultural conversations, trends, and emerging aesthetics, and use them to amplify their own cultural products.
Creative media amplification also targets a variety of audiences: not just the brand’s current and prospective customers, but also cultural creators, commentators, observes, critics, and curators. All of these groups have a role in sharing and adoption of cultural products. They are critical for turning cultural products into market hits.
Timelines of influence of different cultural products vary: a piece of content or an ad gets picked up faster and can be amplified quicker than merch or a collaboration.
Even when something becomes a cultural hit, it may take time for it to turn into a market hit. Calvin Klein’s video was an instantly successful, with 40 million views on this brand’s Instagram and 86 percent of year-on-year brand engagement increase. During this same period, Calvin Klein’s stock fell 20 percent and sales in North America dropped 8 percent YoY. Revenue is a lagging indicator of cultural influence, and to close the gap, brands need to keep making cultural products and amplifying them through media.
The idea is to create a self-enforcing loop of different cultural products, each seeded in a different cultural context and targeted at a specific customer segment mostly likely to respond to it. After the wild success of its Jeremy Allen White video, Calvin Klein should have kept at it, quickly releasing merch, figuring out collaborations, additional content entertainment teasers and trailers, in order to keep the cultural influence going. David and Victoria Beckham made the most of their documentary scene, which quickly became a meme, then a t-shirt, and finally and Uber Eats ad over the course of six months - with each of these cultural products amplifying one another.
The first step in the process of implementing hit-making is to figure out the cultural moment and mood, and those setting it. This mood is going to turbocharge a brand’s cultural influence and be a fertile ground for its cultural products, increasing their chance of becoming hits. Hit making is the strategy of cultural influence that defines which cultural products should brands produce to tell their story, who is this story likely to influence most and in which context, what is the most opportune cultural moment, and what are the expected financial returns.
The Sociology of Business redefines brand marketing as the strategy of cultural influence, and readers will learn how to:
Develop a cultural narrative
Create cultural products and devise media plans to amplify their cultural influence
Set up marketing as creative production
Build your brand stack so all creative products and brand applications deliver on the brand promise
Segment your audience based on their relationship to culture
Define, develop, and execute the cultural program
Set the organization organizationally and operationally for hitmaking
In here, readers will find analysis, observations, case studies, news, strategy and tactics in the following four areas that make the strategy of cultural influence:
Building narrative worlds
A clear and compelling brand story ensures that a brand’s products and advertising cannot be mistaken for anything else. It gives company context and substance, which helps increase its desirability. When brands sell products, they are selling a story. When consumers buy products, they are buying into this story. A clear brand story internally unifies the organization and streamlines the decision-making.
Creating cultural products
A deep dive in the portfolio of cultural products available at the brands disposal to tell their stories. Together, this portfolio builds a creative universe. Some of the cultural products are: archives, content, capsules, moments of interest, collaborations, product reboots and sequels, experiences and experiential retail, entertainment, merch, styling and events. Each of these creative executions amplifies and augments one another, and synchronized, they together create a frequency in culture.
Media amplification
Media amplification inserts a brand’s cultural products in variety of cultural contexts. In some of these contexts, a brand’s cultural products will flourish; in others, they won’t get noticed. Media’s job is to recognize these contexts: cultural conversations, trends, and emerging aesthetics, and use them to amplify a brand’s own cultural products. In addition to seasonal campaigns, cultural influence strategy provides snippets of always-on content, merch and products, creative collaborations that introduce novelty, and to plan its seasonal campaigns as entertainment products, like movies: through teasers, trailers, opening nights, and launch.
The Creative Class
Media amplification segments audiences depending on their relationship with culture. It targets not just a brand’s current and prospective customers, but also cultural creators, commentators, observes, critics, and curators. All of these groups have a role in sharing and adoption of cultural products. They are critical for their potential success, and consequently, for the brand desirability and affinity. These audiences are known as the Creative Class. They direct wider consumers’ attention, time, and money towards aspirational things, places and ideas. No consumer makes decisions in isolation from its context - and members of the Creative Class influence and shape this context through their own consumption.