How Digital Anthropology Helps Marketing Teams
Your marketing dashboard is flashing green, engagement is up 34% on the new campaign, sentiment analysis from social media is positive, you conversion funnel? Looks great too! A few weeks later, everything goes upside down. Suddenly, your brand has become accidentally associated with a cultural controversy raging across social media that you never saw coming.
Traditional marketing analytics excel at measuring what happened but they struggle with understanding why it happened or what it means within a broader cultural context. You may have an excellent suite of analytics tools and platforms, but they all miss the symbolic languages, ritual ecosystems and meaning-making processes that drive consumer behaviour in the digital age.
This leaves marketers making million dollar decisions based on cultural guesswork rather than cultural intelligence.
Competitive advantage today comes from understanding that in our hyperconnected world, cultural change accelerates rapidly and exponentially. The advantage for brands today will be those that can read and respond to cultural signals, not just behavioural ones. This is where digital/cultural anthropology can be a game changer.
As a digital anthropologist my work with brands is providing cultural intelligence, operating at the deeper level of cultural meaning and knowledge that drives human behaviours. Think of it also as a cultural radar, detecting shifts in meaning and sentiment before they show up in your metrics.
This layer of insights and intelligence is also an excellent form of risk mitigation for campaigns, creative and strategies.
Digital anthropology for marketing serves as an interpretive layer that makes quantitative data actionable. Your analytics only signal a what, not a why. With digital anthropology, quick, inexpensive research and analysis will give you a why, such as the cultural issue that caused the controversy above.
Cultural insights can also provide deeper insights that make personas, A/B testing and demographic data even more valuable. I often work with ad agencies and creatives who find so much richness in cultural insights that impact UX design, CX mapping and more to aid their work exponentially.
Just as you wouldn't launch a product without understanding the competitive landscape, you shouldn't launch campaigns without understanding the cultural landscape. A spike in organic food purchases might register as a health trend in your analytics, but digital anthropology reveals whether it's actually about purity anxieties, class signalling, or environmental guilt.
When and How to Leverage Digital Anthropology in Marketing
A significant upside to leveraging digital anthropology in marketing is that it is a fast, iterative and cos-effective way to gain insights. From a couple of days to a few weeks, depending on the project.
Key Use Cases:
Brand reputation analysis with added cultural insights that make it more meaningful
Campaign research to inform strategy, creative briefs and set metrics
Post-campaign analysis for both fails and successes
Building out on demographics, audience profiles and personas
Competitor and market insights with cultural understanding
UX and CX research that provides deeper cultural meaning
Research for annual marketing strategy and planning
Market research that's deeply informed by cultural understanding
There's more uses for digital anthropology in the marketing sector and sometimes, we get some interesting requests, which is what we love! An added advantage I bring to clients is my over 25 years in global marketing communications as a CMO and leader. My secret weapon all that time was my background in cultural anthropology.
Photo by Debagni Sarkhel on Unsplash
