C A L V I N I N N E S
What Is Culture Marketing?And Why Most Brands Are Getting It Wrong
The term ‘Culture Marketing’ seems to be in every brief, every agency proposition, strategy deck, and tender document at the moment. Brands have culture leads, culture consultants, and cultural insight teams. Conferences have culture tracks. Every other LinkedIn post is about brands “showing up in culture” or “earning cultural relevance.” According to research from Kantar, brands with high cultural relevance grow six times more than brands at low levels. Which means, if the word is everywhere but the results aren’t following, something is going very wrong in the translation from theory to practice. There are a lot of people saying they’re doing culture marketing… but who actually is? I’ve spent 25 years working at the intersection of creativity, culture, and strategy. I’ve watched this unfold from the inside of briefs, boardrooms, and as a comic book nerd, film geek, gamer, sneaker head and skater, from inside the fan communities that brands are trying to reach. My honest assessment is this: most brands don’t have a culture marketing strategy at all. They have a culture marketing aspiration, with a series of activities they’ve convinced themselves counts as the same thing. Let’s take a look at the gap between those two things.
What Culture Marketing Actually Is
Here is the definition I work from, built from two and a half decades of practice rather than just pulled from a textbook: Culture marketing is the discipline of building brand strategy around genuine cultural intelligence. A deep, earned understanding of the communities, codes, identities, and shared meanings that shape how people understand themselves and the world around them. It is not about reaching people. It is about belonging with them. That distinction, reaching versus belonging, really is everything. Reach is a tired and outdated metric used to track media. Belonging is a cultural one. You can buy reach, but you can’t buy belonging. Belongiong has to be earned, through genuine understanding and genuine contribution, and it has to be done over time. The brands that have achieved real cultural status, Nike in sneaker culture, LEGO in grown up or kidult fan communities, Red Bull in action sports, Supreme in streetwear… they didn’t reach those positions through a single campaign or through a linear content strategy. They earned their status by becoming genuinely embedded in the fabric of communities that would have immediately detected and rejected anything that felt like the brands were just pretending, or looking for a quick win. These brands committed, and the trust compunded over time. That’s the bar… and most brands, if we’re honest, aren’t even close to meeting it.
Why Culture Marketing Is So Hard to Do Well
The honest answer is that culture marketing requires a kind of intelligence, and a level of insights, that organisations aren’t naturally set up to deliver, especially on a regular basis. Most traditional marketing operates through systems that have been designed for scale. Research methodologies, audience segmentation, campaign planning, performance measurement, social listening, all of these tools are built to process culture into something that is more manageable, quantifiable, and repeatable. They’re very good at looking back, and at telling you what a group of people does. They’re usually really bad at telling you what a community actually means to the people in it. That’s a real problem, because cultural intelligence is almost entirely about meaning. Fan communities, subcultures, creative movements and identity groups, are not audiences. They are more like societies. They have their own histories, founding myths, complex hierarchies and gatekeepers. There are unwritten codes, and a collective sense of who belongs to that society, and who doesn’t. Understanding them is an immersive undertaking that requires genuine curiosity, a genuine investment of time, and ideally this is done from within the community, not just looking in from the outside. This is why the most credible cultural marketing tends to come from brands where someone in the organisation actually lives in the culture, and is personally invested. The Jordan brand works because the people building it understand sneaker culture from the inside. Red Bull works because the people behind it have genuine relationships in action sports, music, and gaming communities. The cultural intelligence isn’t outsourced to someone, it’s embedded, and those involved have skin in the game. Most brands don’t have that at all. They’re not even close. So they reach for the nearest available substitute, which is almost always a surface-level reading of what’s popular. Which brings us very nicely to the central mistake.
The Difference Between Culture and Trend
Considering that this is probably the single most important distinction in this entire field, it’s crazy that it’s almost universally ignored. Culture and trend are not the same thing. Trend is what can be seen on the surface, while culture is what’s happening underneath it. A trend is an observable behaviour or aesthetic that is currently spreading through a population. It is measurable, trackable, and importantly, it’s finite. Trends have lifecycles. They peak, they plateau, then they fade away. Culture is the thing that trends an grow from… it’s the fertilizer beneath trends that enables them to grow. It’s the values, identities, shared histories, and community bonds that give trends their meaning and determine which ones stand out and which ones last. Culture moves on a far longer timescale of years and decades, not weeks and months. When a brand chases a trend and calls it culture marketing, they are making a mistke from the first step, and it quite often has real consequences. Trend-based activations produce short-term association with a moment, wheras genuine cultural engagement produces long-term association with an identity. That is infinitely more durable commercially. Even worse, trends that are rooted in specific cultural communities are much harder to acess with authenticity. They’re not just there for casual adoption by brands that haven’t done the work to understand them properly. The communities those trends come from will notice the appropriation, they will identify it as such, and they will respond. And that response? It can be pretty fierce. The brand that borrows the visual language of a subculture without understanding its values, or its history, or its internal codes is not doing culture marketing. It’s doing something that is essentially cultural tourism (at best) or even worse, cultural theft. Both, for obvious resons, tend to end badly.
The Trap of Performance
Perhaps the most important insight I’ve developed over 25 years of working in this space is this. The brands that fail at culture marketing almost always fail for the same reason. They’re performing culture rather than actually understanding it. Performance culture marketing is the act of adopting the signals of a cultural community, the aesthetic, the language, the references, the influencer or creator in that space, without having done the work to genuinely understand what those signals mean to the people who are deeply invested in that thing. It’s usually really easy to spot too. Cultural communities, and fan communities especially, have developed, through years of experience with brands doing exactly this, a pretty impressive and finely tuned sensitivity to the difference between genuine alignment and someone who is trying to fake relevance. They can identify inauthenticity fast, because they feel it rather than looking for a way to measure it. And the response whenver that kind of inauthenticity is spotted, isn’t usually disengagement… it’s much worse. It’s active and often quite forceful rejection. It’s very public, it’s usually well organised, and perhaps most importanly of all… it’s lasting. When the people who are angly, upset or feel rejected have the loudest voices, cultural missteps do not fade. They’re documented, shared, and indexed. A brand that does culture marketing badly today, can carry the cost of that misstep for a long time, and it can be really hard to come back from. There’s a prety simple reason that this keeps happening, and it’s almost always structural. Brands are under pressure to produce output, in the form of content, activations, and campaigns, and often at speeds that make genuine cultural intelligence completely impossible to develop. Not just difficult, impossible. The ridiculous deadline, the brief for something that feels “culturally relevant”, these force teams toward surface-level trend reading and rapid execution of ideas that are not based on true insights or that have not been given the time they need. Culture doesn’t reward speed. It rewards depth.
What Genuine Cultural Relevance Requires
Cultural intelligence can sound like a really vague expression. A kind of fugazi. In practice, it acrtually means some very concrete, and important things. It means knowing the history. Every significant cultural community has a story, how it formed, what it fought for, what it lost, what it built. A brand trying to engage a fan community without knowing that story is operating blind. The history isn’t just some background information. It’s the foundation of the community’s identity. It means knowing the gatekeepers. Every cultural community has people whose opinions carry disproportionate weight compared to others. People whose approval or disapproval shapes how the broader community perceives an outsider’s entry. Knowing who those people are, understanding what they value, and engaging with them as peers rather than just seeing them as targets to engage with, is often the difference between a successful cultural engagement and a very public failure. It means knowing the codes. Every culture has unwritten rules, and code and signals. Things that signal membership, things that signal disrespect, things that are simply not done. These codes are learned through genuine engagement over time. Violating them, even when it’s done unintentionally, carries a cost that no amount of subsequent apologising ever fully repairs. It means contributing before extracting. This is perhaps the most commercially counterintuitive principle in all of culture marketing, and it is also the most important. Cultural communities do not owe brands access. That access is earned through contribution, and through giving something of genuine value to the community before asking anything in return. Brands that show up only when they want something are seen and treated accordingly. Remember, in order to receive love, you first have to give love. It means playing a long game. Cultural credibility compounds over time. The brand that has been genuinely present in a community for three years has the kind of access that no budget can replicate. The brand that has been absent for three years and arrived with a campaign and a pocket full of cash to throw at it, has very little. Culture marketing requires patience, and that’s usually the most difficult thing for brands and agencies to accept, and act on.
The Fandom Dimension
The most commercially significant form of culture marketing right now (and where the gap between aspiration and actual execution is widest) is fandom marketing. Fan communities are, in many ways, the purest and most intense expression of everything culture marketing is really about. They’re communities with extraordinarily strong shared values, rich histories, complex social structures, and an acute, sophisticated sensitivity to inauthenticity. They represent both the highest potential rewards of genuine cultural engagement and the most severe consequences of performing it, without understanding it. Understanding fandom is possibly the most urgent (and least well understood) form of cultural intelligence for a significant number of organisations right now. The psychology of fan identity, the sociology of fan communities, the specific codes and dynamics that govern how brands earn or lose credibility within them. The brands that are getting this right are doing so because they have people, inside the agency or brand or in trusted advisory roles, who genuinely understand these communities from the inside. That understanding is what I bring. It is also what I believe every serious brand needs to build, one way or another, if culture marketing is going to mean anything more than a vague term that’s included in a brief or in an agency bio.
The Honest Conclusion
Culture marketing isn’t a strategy you can buy. It is not a campaign type, a content format, or a partnership structure. It’s a discipline… and like all genuine disciplines, it requires sustained investment, real expertise, and a willingness to be changed by what you learn (otherwise, what’s the point?) The brands that are genuinely doing real cultural marketing right now are the ones that understood this early. They’re the ones who have built their operations accordingly. They hired people who live in the cultures they want to engage with. They invested in relationships, and they contributed to the communities before they tried to take from them. And, importantly, they stayed patient when the returns weren’t immediately measurable. The brands and the agencies that are losing (and there are plenty) are the ones that read the Kantar data, decided that culture marketing was important, pulled together a creative director, a strategist and a project manager to form their new ‘Culture Marketing Division’ and then tried to produce at speed, with old tools and old ways of working. The six times growth premium is real. So is the gap between the brands that are earning it and the brands that are trying to buy it.
Where to Go Next
The deepest application of culture marketing principles for most brands right now sits in fan and pop culture communities. The companion articles to this one explore what fandom marketing is and how it works, and the psychology that drives fan behaviour. If you want to bring genuine cultural intelligence into your organisation, through consulting, a workshop, or a keynote that shifts how your team thinks… get in touch. My book Fandom Power: Marketing in the Age of Nerd Culture goes deep into the culture marketing principles covered here, applied to the fan communities that are reshaping consumer behaviour. Available now on Amazon.