Trending ≠ Culture (Does Your CMO Know the Difference?)
I was curious this morning as to how many digital brand reputations and analyses reports I'd done for clients over the past decade or so. 42 it turns out. Isn't that supposed to be the answer for everything anyway? Then, later, I was reading about a major global CPG brand that's setting up these social media listening and engagement studios in major markets. With the idea to meet "cultural moments" on social media. That was a bit of a chuckle for me.
It's incredibly high-risk. It can and has worked for some brands, Nestlé being an example. I toured there social media "command centre" several years ago. It was quite impressive. But they understood something very well; that they weren't doing anything truly "cultural", that they were just engaging in cultural surface phenomena.
When brands are monitoring social media feeds, they are more like linguists w=hoe only study slang. True cultural syntax and context is utterly missed.
The risk is injecting yourself into a cultural moment and using the wrong cultural code. A prime example is Pepsi's fiasco with the Kendall Jenner ad. Pepsi saw the protest aesthetics trending, but completely missed the deeper cultural contexts of structural power and violence, legitimacy and sacrifices that make protests meaningful. A 5% stock dip and millions of dollars in brand equity lost. Ouchie.
All social relations, as anthropologist David Graeber has posited, operate on reciprocity economies. So when a brand tries to participate in cultural moments without first earning the right, it creates a form of "meaning debt." The audiences first reaction is "what have you done to deserve a say in this conversation?"
Participating in this way is purely transactional, a grab masquerading as a relationship. And remember, consumers don't want a relationship with a brand, they want to relate. The key is to not violate this reciprocity compact. Brands that understand this, who see where and how to play in the surface shifts of culture, are the ones who do well. And some have.
Most brands react to culture, mostly through advertising, but I think they need to shift to participating in cultural infrastructure. Patagonia has been hugely successful in this way. They don't just comment on environmental issues, they're embedded in the culture through buying land to protect it, restoring habitats. And remaining profitable. That's being in cultural infrastructure. When they speak, they've earned the right.
It doesn't mean that a brand has to go all in like Patagonia. But a brand does have to consider if it's willing to just play on the surface of cultural moments and not try to make any claims or if it's going to invest in the cultural infrastructure of its audience. Of being deep in a cultural space rather than shallow across many moments hoping to up the "likes" of the day.
When you stop chasing viral moments, you become culturally significant. Significance compounds. Virality decays. The map is not the territory. Social media trends are the map. Lived cultural structures are the territory. Navigate accordingly.
