Marketing Fails & Cultural Language

A little while ago I looked at the CMO of my client and said "your cultural language is dead, that's why your campaign failed." That brought on the furrowed brows and some furtive looks. Then I explained how the campaign creative tested well with existing customers because they'd bought into the brand over a year ago, when the cultural language was different.

It was for a wellness brand looking to draw in a new demographic group their data suggested would be a good target. They checked some other data and decided to execute a campaign. Some creative, a little A/B testing and check the data. Looked good! Off went the "Self-Care Sunday" campaign. Crickets. Well, not even crickets because they make some sound. Almost zero on CTRs, blah impressions. Flatlined.

The cohort (I prefer cultural community) they were targeting had changed their cultural language. Online discussions showed that they thought a Sunday was too limiting and that self-care should be practiced through the week. The ideas had evolved, and so did the language to "productive rest". If the brand had done some social listening, paying attention to cultural cues, the campaign would've used different language.

Large brands have been paying close attention to culture for decades, some often influence cultural shifts. But those are big brands with big budgets to do cultural research. Smaller brands can do this too. At far less cost. But first, let's explain what I mean by cultural language.

What Is Cultural Language?

Cultural language is the shared symbolic vocabulary such as memes, grammatical shifts, narratives, emojis and myth-making systems that evolve within a community over time and can shift quickly. In the digital world, this can shift within a few days or weeks. While a cultural community will have it's long-term, structural language, it will also shift as new ideas and influences seep into that community.

Memes help to spread ideas, while changing phrases such as going from "self-care Sunday" to "productive rest" are surface-level changes in language. But use too old of a term and it will no longer resonate with your target community. Your brand will seem stale. 

So you essentially have two options, stick with what you know is consistent language, the structural elements of that community, or play into new language and ideas. Behind the language is the idea that turned into a myth that evolved a term to represent the idea or the myth. 

When we did the research for this brand, what we found was the underlying idea of the need to practice self-care on a daily basis, not just a Sunday.

A Practical Framework for Understanding Cultural Language

Cultural language in communities is also an emergent property in complex adaptive systems. And online communities are highly complex and adaptive.

So this is where you look at your social media data. Look for the highest engagements, look for signals where something resonated. Then go find the community you're engagement resonated with. Find where they hang out, Facebook Groups, TikTok groups or Reddit forums.

Analyse the memes, look at the comments, read the ideas. You won't get any of this from an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude (they do not know how to read culture), and your analytics tools don't know how to measure culture. So it's observation time. Or what in digital anthropology is called netnographic research.

What you're looking for is a term out of sociology called "collective effervescence" or when a community is peaking emotionally. In other words, what's got them all excited about something. Those are the signals for creative and campaign opportunities. Just be careful not to get caught up in a years old moment of effervescence! 

These cultural moments and shifts are important moments in a cultural community, be it a broader societal community or an online community. Capture them at the right moment and you are helping to form a cultural moment. It's a brand insight that can lead to a truly successful campaign.

So I guess that means practicing cultural marketing daily, not just quarterly.

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