Cultural Pre-Analysis: The Insurance Your Brand Needs
Some major brands have made some rather large mistakes of late. More than mere kerfuffles. Cracker Barrels disastrous re-brand attempt. The famous Kendall Jenner ad handing a cop a Pepsi during a riot. Apple crushing musical instruments. Brilliant creative. Flawless execution. Zero cultural intelligence.
Management never survives brand is one rule. And the thing is, all of these could've been avoided with a quick cultural scan ahead of these campaigns. We live now in weird times. Cultural shifts, often sparked by consumers online behaviours, happen fast. What's safe todaay is a field strewn with cultural landmines tomorrow morning.
And if you're thinking, "oh, I'll just run it by ChaGPT or Claude, the AI will tell me", uhm, no, it won't. AI can't because AI tools, specifically Generative AI like the ones above, can't "think" and the only thing they know about culture is what's gone before, not what's happening or about to happen.
We know this because Claude and Perplexity are in our daily workflows. We use them for strategy planning, some aspects of research and testing theories and hypothesis and they're great for that. But not for trend spotting. They can't detect the signals in the noise.
Every campaign enters a cultural landscape already in motion. Social undercurrents. Tribal boundaries. Symbolic meaning systems that existed long before your brand did. Bumble's "celibacy is not the answer" billboard landed during heightened discourse about women's bodily autonomy. The creative team saw edgy humour. The audience’s culture saw erasure.
What you remove matters as much as what you add in campaigns. Cracker Barrel's "Uncle Herschel" wasn't just a logo element, he was a boundary marker for a specific cultural tribe. And boy did they piss off that tribe.
A pre-campaign scan is essentially cultural cartography. Your data is the map, culture is the territory. You need to look at:
Mapping symbolic networks: What does this image/word/concept connect to? What meanings already live here? These can be found in social media. If you know what to look for.
Identifying tribal boundaries: Who claims this space? What signals "us" vs "them"? Given the state of cultiure wars and politics today, this is important.
Stress-testing adversarial interpretations: How will the least charitable reading unfold? (Because that's the one that will pop off like wildfire.)
Gaming second-order effects: What happens after the reaction? What coalitions form?
Understanding belief systems: What do people actually believe they're buying?
These are some of the key elements we look at in pre-campaign scans. The upside is is that it doesn't take very long, well, not when you're a cultural anthropologist anyway. We do offer some training for clients. But hey, if you've got a major campaign coming up. Do the cultural scan. If you don't use me, make sure whoever you do use has some degree of cultural knowledge.
