AI Optimizes the Present. Culture Predicts the Future.
Marketers are swimming around in a massive ocean of data and trying to get more data at the same time. Constantly fussing with metrics and dashboards, adding new analytics tools. That’s all fine, but data can only ever tell you what’s happened. Data can’t tell you why. Nor can AI tools.
Marketers need to get to the why of their data. That’s where Cultural Intelligence (CQ), comes into play. CQ is about decoding the shared stories, anxieties, values, status games, reciprocity systems and more that are emerging in culture. Be that broader society or niche audiences.
I’m going to cover three things here; 1) why CQ comes before buyer psychology, 2) why AI (LLMs) can’t predict or show emerging cultural trens and 3) the limitations of data.
Why Cultural Intelligence Comes Before Buyer Psychology
Individual buyer psychology is downstream of culture. Always. Before consumers enter into the buying phase, their underlying influence on preferences, styles, taste, all comes from the culture they grew up and live in.
Once you understand these cultural variables around your audience and target markets, you can design better, more focused buyer behaviour strategies for your marketing strategy. It ups the game on your creative, makes sure campaigns are culturally safer and improves the results across the board. Culture built the menu, buyer psychology just picks from it.
As anthropologist Lévi-Strauss showed us over 100 years ago: people think they're making individual choices, but they're really selecting from pre-existing cultural structures. Your buyer persona is just playing a cultural role they didn't write.
Why AI Makes CQ More Valuable, Not Less
LLMs are perfect historians. They can quickly analyse every documented cultural artifact brilliantly. But they can't do three things a trained cultural anthropologist can:
1. Spot weak signals in liminal spaces – Culture forms in the cracks and on the edges of society way before it's documented.
2. Decode embodied practices – What people do versus what they say (CQ’s sweet spot). It’s why surveys don’t get to the heart of the issue.
3. Predict phase transitions – When meaning systems are about to flip. Catching those weak signals in the noise of the digital aether.
AI optimizes for the game already played. CQ reveals when the game itself is changing.
The Limitations of Data In Marketing
It’s quite common for marketers to just go and find more data when they can’t find answers. I’m guilty of that in the past too. Did it all the time. But at some point, the more data you add, the worse things get. Analysis paralysis anyone? So some see this and then just go with their gut. It can work.
If you bring CQ into the picture, well, Cultural Intelligence steps outside of your lagging data and starts looking for the signals in the noise. That’s where the magic happens. Where the gold is. The alchemy if you will.
