In the first issue of MILK I wrote a piece about Making Culture, the idea that brands will become culture factories producing content and ideas to connect consumers around an idea.

Since then I think it’s fair to say that the notion of a brand’s preference and performance being driven by the capital it has in cultural relevance has continued to grow in popularity. Likewise my theories on cultural relevance and the practices a brand should follow have continued to evolve.

Shortly I’ll be publishing a new paper which aims to identify how the long-term cultural paradigm has shifted, how global context and hyper-niche and real time relevance will continue to fragment culture and indeed how lifestyles and changed lifestages have led us from a post industrial, post digital age into a new ‘Cultural Age’.

With this in mind, the success of brands will be less audience centric and more culture centric, bringing about a change in the way we measure brand equity, and anchoring brand relevance against it’s measure in culture.

Marketing in the cultural age demands a change in marketing practices and organizations will work with agencies to follow initiatives which focus more heavily on the cultural equity or ‘Cultural Capital’ of a brand.

Needless to say some brands intuitively perform in this way already. Nike consistently harnesses culture led initiatives like the above ‘Republica Popular do Corinthians’ in Brazil which bring capture the cultural passions of groups of people and bring their brand into centre of focus by providing the inspiration and experience for people to engage with.

Likewise brands I’ve worked with including Red Bull and Pepsi have been successful in leveraging cultural relevance by creating innovative ways to inspire groups with initiatives like Red Bull House of Media and Pepsi Refresh Project.

The key challenge is that while these brands mentioned are used time and time again as case studies of innovators or outliers, most companies are failing to understand how to operationalize their behaviors and change their brand management model.

However, this will change, because for brands to succeed in the Cultural Age it has to!

CM

Much of the work we do at MILK is based on understanding changing culture and trends.

The interesting thing is that generally the preoccupation with trends focuses around: What is the trend and where’s it going? This has been fueled by books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, focusing in on why something small fads become popular trends and others fade away without establishing themselves.

For us, the more interesting point to focus on is: What is the trend derived from and why? What in culture is changing to make something of interest bubble to the surface in general societal attitudes and behaviours?

One indicator we use as a point of reference is shown in the diagram above.

Just about anyone who’s studied or worked in marketing has heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but surprisingly few have come across Shalom Schwartz.

Schwartz took Maslow’s thinking and pushed it further to determine a map that demonstrates values states, it also proposes that these values sit opposite one another in a wheel like configuration.

Taking this simple reference point and applying it against society you can start to build a real picture of what makes us tick and more importantly why!

Now if you start to measure society’s values (like the smart folks over at Cultural Dynamics do!) then you start to understand the motivations and pressures driving shifts in values.

Understand this and you understand how trends form. Start to project values shifts based on known values movement and you can start to see how and if trends will grow!

For people in the communications industry or government this is like alchemy for ideas, it’s powerful stuff.