EMPOWERING CULTURALLY XFORMATIVE BRANDS: OVERVIEW
Greetings and thanks for checking this out.
With so much showcase of digital transformation across the business-brand landscape in our emerging century, we’ve watched many big and small brands find their way in this effort, some masterfully succeeding in defining new best practice standards which will soon enough become unremarkable.
I believe our now and next subsequent 5-10+ years will be a lot about cultural transformation -companies exploring it, uniquely defining it, and activating it in their own way.
MARSHALL McLUHAN frequently punned on the word message, changing it to mass age, mess age, and massage. The book, he co-authored with Quentin Fiore, for unpacking his coined iconic phrase was actually entitled The Medium is the Massage.
To be clear, digital transformation will continue, advance, and impact everything, especially the capacities of AI, machine learning and its invisible exponential rate of adoption across all industries. Unwaveringly exploited in its role as the main medium, and therefore greatly the message itself, I believe it will remain a cultural driver; however, even in considering wholly-uniquely personified chat bots, AI authored art, the yet fully-fleshed impacts of the metaverse and more, history shows that wherever there’s a zig, a zag is not far behind.
Exciting times indeed :]
WHAT IS A CULTURALLY TRANSFORMATIVE BRAND?
Beyond my awareness of Marshall McLuhan’s contextualization of cultural studies as applied to business, pop culture and media, I first came upon the notion of looking at brands from a broader perspective through Doug Holt’s books: How Brands Become Icons, 2004 and Cultural Strategy [brand innovation], 2010. Together they speak to understanding brand building through the advancement of identity myths that foster new ideologies not just better mousetrap design due to society’s cyclical demand for new culture -basically upending orthodoxy, not mimicking it.
And the notion is easily stretched to branding as a form of cultural activism.
STANDARD BRAND XFORMATION over the course of 150yrs. What will standard look like in 150 more?
Like all terminology in any industry, especially the branding-marketing one, definitions matter for clarity sake. I would define, in the loosest terms, a culturally transformative brand as one who’s purpose is about achieving positive impact beyond its own economic success.
The impact these brands have can be internal: Patagonia offering on-site child care or external: Patagonia’s myriad environmental commitments that benefit us all.
Their holistic, transformational efforts, results in an identity myth affording Patagonia customers/heroes a sense of self-transcendence, by combining the Explorer/freedom, Sage/wisdom and Caregiver/service archetypes in such an authentic way. Patagonia secures the brand-impact trifecta: commercial, communal and cultural success, not to mention its employee’s and customer’s loyalty is commonplace.
Patagonia Identity Myth alchemizes the: CareGiver, Explorer and Sage.
There’s still a lot to parse/chew here, and further delineation doesn’t necessarily include a companies’ robust adoption of an ESG agenda unless it’s actually authentically deployed with transformational impact. All to further refine that a culturally transformative brand possesses a component of worldview innovation and here’s a few noteworthy examples, including some I’ve been instrumental in.
VITAL INHERENT ELEMENTS + BENEFITS
Culturally transformative brands are crafted with a transformational experience in mind for all stakeholders -grounded in inspiring adventure, action, learning, change, or impact at a customer-employee, org-community or societal level.
Component aspects include:
Collective Authorship: crafted by internal stakeholders aided with the insights of external ones -generated out of the tension between an outside in vs inside out approach to produce the most exciting and sustainably dynamic results over time.
Stakeholder Embodiment: operationalizes insights in an authentic way regarding stakeholders’ adoption motivation.
Business Case: developed spreadsheet proof that an abundance agenda may not actually be that expensive considering: tax benefits, employee retention-engagement, increasing loyal customer base, change-agent investors, more.
Triple Treat: boldly addresses-frames aspirations that matter beyond economic ones, through a cognitive-values lens, whether socially or ecologically aimed.
Tension Infused: understands that inherent tension is key in storytelling and in life experience, whether it’s a customer’s, employee’s or a society’s pain point.
Journey Focused: champions the journey/adventure for all stakeholders as ultimately what it’s all about -understands that humans best thrive within an experiential make a difference framework.
Naturally Regenerative: pessimistic communities may attract attention, but it’s the optimistic ones that grow and prosper.
Designed Different: as strategic design can be applied to everything from a logo to an org’s structure to a new future, there’s continuity in the insight execution throughout all dimensions-touchpoints.
VITAL CONSTRUCTION FRAMEWORKS
Sounds good so how even to begin? In my experience, a combination of methodologies aid well and depending upon the baseline zeitgeist of the people involved plus your focus, there are many tools-exercises within each of these approaches to gain meaningful insights and subsequent results:
21C BEST PRACTICE BRAND STRATEGY
Brand Strategy is part science, poetry and a lot problem-solving from a philosophical point of view. As a sort of meta-navigational device it subsumes complexity, in the form of myriad-360 inputs and elegantly, holistically resolves the conflicting slurry stewpot of insights, limitations, and desires into a unifying framework designed to withstand change and regenerate cyclical, multi-dimensional success, both short and longterm.
Done well, it alchemizes qual-quant current data, unseen cultural forces, ancient universal truths, cutting-edge innovation and pure imagination into a sophisticated social design construct intended to not only align stakeholders around values, belief systems and market white space, but to also assure economic results.
Maybe some would put the latter before the former.
I think if you don’t come earnestly to this vital framework as a relationship building opportunity your dollars and your innovation capacity, don’t stretch as far -not to mention your talent attraction capacity. Pull strategies are here and I believe singularity will likely define the next 5+ years.
All to say that best practice brand strategy today should be pursuing a double or triple win: commerce, community, and broader culturally-oriented wins through the power of a big idea.
BASIC BRAND STRATEGY FRAMEWORKS to get started with for exploring, refining and aligning consensus around stakeholders.
In my view, the big three ingredients of brand strategy can be synthesized to: purpose, positioning, and personality.
No doubt there’s myriad networked concepts within each of these, like promise, persona, unique selling proposition, more -but to avoid becoming overwhelmed I believe these are the fundamentals reflective of the need for more of a social design framework that navigates longer term results in a rapid change marketplace.
02 CULTURAL MAPPING
Cultural Mapping is ultimately an approach that helps to observe, document, and extract insights from trends and ethnographic research, while simultaneously being aware that the findings are part of a higher order, geographic and metaphysical, cultural context.
Within its pedagogy is the notion that culture, that is any culture anywhere, is a story system that we the people, collectively, are living within while also perennially telling stories about this system, as well as about everything else in our lives. The function of our story system living is to perpetually enliven our daily lives and long term prospectus with meaning inextricably tied to our identity and need for belonging within both our perceived micro and macrocosmic whole.
Cultural Mapping, specifically the patented methodology developed by Tim Stock from Scenario DNA of which I gained my certification in October 2021, not only collects-validates the tangible evidence-artifacts of these stories but highlights just how front-loaded with cognitive bias, pre-formed context and past precedence these objects-rationalizations are infused with.
“…the challenges facing brands today require a social-science absorption and approach to analyzing culture...applying actions in sync with our perpetual collective movement between aspiration-dominance and dissipation-dissent.”
For now, some brands are tapping into ‘how to’ achieve cultural contagion, the successor to virality, and doing so by way of a more temporal, marketing, less brand-embodied means. Marcus Collins teaches us well about this curious, compelling tactic. However, thus far and for the most part, the industry doesn’t yet realize we’re all engaged within a natural cycle of, quite literally, the hero’s journey at a societal scale -nor what this curious condition means, affords, and constrains regarding the profession.
THE HEROS JOURNEY can describe our quest for transformation as both individuals and as a collective society. From a societal/cultural perspective, this perennial cycle builds on Raymond William’s RDE (Residual, Dominant, Emergent) framework, vacillating between strong vs weak signals regarding the baseline norm.
Additionally, Joseph Campbell’s said hero’s journey also informs each of us individually regarding our own bespoke perpetual transformation process. This fundamental unseen driver, whether subliminally running in our background or explicitly activating our public persona is also something brands should continue to be aware of. Currently, the most notable expert-advocate tapping into this phenomenon, with a declarative positioning goal of making your customer-potential customer the hero of your brand, is Donald Miller’s StoryBrand methodology.
If the cultural mapping method, hints toward a perspective of the branding process that’s far more anthropological than standard, it for sure is. It’s grounded in a Big History point of view of human existence, not just recorded history since about 4,000 years ago. This is an important distinction regarding our reptilian brain. So if Cultural Mapping helps us unearth deep-seated triggers, biases, incontinent worldviews we were saddled with from birth, what about a method that helps free us from all that? A future-orientation, as that’s what strategy is supposed to address?
03 STRATEGIC FORESIGHT
Which brings me to Strategic Foresight, a more future-focused emerging methodology for activating brands as agents of change.
“Brand Strategy, at its core, is about predicting the future and then making that future a reality -thus creating outsize benefits 3, 5, 10yrs out.”
Although there are brands that enjoy the success of an incredibly long, multi-decade legacy, 5-10 years out is a good run for brand strategy, and with the value-add of foresight I believe you can double or triple that.
Regarding the concept of prediction, I prefer the word ‘mapping’, a term aligned with futures thinking and the strategic foresight process. Earning my practitioner certification in this methodology in November 2020 from The Futures School, I believe this approach to brand-branding will soon enough be standard protocol for all business, brand and org-cultural strategists.
In a nutshell, foresight is ‘yes, and’ to best practice brand strategy and planning work, offering a 6th gear for achieving deeper-farther-longer term definition, even in an increasingly dynamic world.
Each half of the foresight nutshell represents an opposing force. One half illuminates the push ON the future, code for the primarily inherent stakeholder cognitive biases and relentless, tactical preoccupation to achieve quarterly reporting projections via marketing; while the other half opens people up to the pull OF the future, code for unleashing their full breadth imaginations, free to fly blue sky high, having successfully flushed out the subconscious veiled threats to authentic innovation, posed by their bias, prejudice, and assumptions.
STRATEGIC FORESIGHT FRAMEWORKS help refine, contextualize, & extend brand strategy on the front end, and can be integrated as a new operating modality for promoting heightened org engagement, cross-discipline collaboration & individual professional development.
Nested between these two forces of this approach is a *VUCA world: outside in process initiated with horizon scanning-trend analysis across *STEEP, followed by sense making and pattern detection to glean white space insights. This effort is designed to better capitalize on a positioning that can deliver desired results even farther out, that might even include the creation of new markets, categories and other extension opportunities. It simply makes it a higher stakes quest by affording a more immersive envisioning stage, from increased intell analysis-forecasting, for supporting a new desired future that a brand can own for a long time to come.
Strategic Foresight is also a powerful alignment tool, simply by helping drive internal consensus around a future point of view. Is it mostly about competitive edge, growth forecasting, innovation? is it 3 or 15 years out? The answers to just these very basic questions alone inform any strategy to great degree, plus even better enroll people into the process.
Strategic Foresight ultimately uses the future to be strategic in the present.
JENNY HOLZER/NEO CONCEPTUAL ARTIST ‘Use what is dominant in a culture to change it quickly.’
CONCLUSION
It’s clearly evident within our emerging 21st century, we have everything we need -almost too much- to achieve authentic prosperity for our local, virtual, and global society -as well as our shared-home, planet Earth.
Not only do we enjoy unprecedented and advanced technologies across sectors, plus big data repositories-virtual networks comprised of all the fact-fiction ever gleaned by the human mind at our fingertips, but also a swelling population with the will to activate it toward getting us on a regenerative track.
Yet since we’re nowhere near achieving them we must ask ourselves why?
“We each as individuals, and subsequently as a collective society, need New Stories [showcasing new ways to think-see-do-value-measure] and brands-orgs are best poised to enliven, cultivate plus activate these new modalities within our everyday experience.”
In a sea of competition, positioning on value, convenience, innovation, or identity has been the norm, and it’s not hard to miss the shortsightedness, from cold-calculated greenwashing to fleeting celebrity influencing.
Culture is complex and resists analysis, just like anything that matters does.
I want to support clients that envision their role more as provocateur or greater good catalyst. The ones committed to brand or org building from the inside out, starting with a values scaffold, that transformative culture can grow out of and thus transform our greater culture at large.
Achieving this is a lot about meeting people where they are in imagining the possibilities. Whether founders, leaders, employees, consumers or activists, unearthing ways to increase their involvement in the transformation process is the fundamental start of a thriving culture and better future. And in the process they too will be transformed. And so it goes.
*VUCA is an acronym for: volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous and represents a framework for understanding the constant, unpredictable and sometimes turbulent change that’s now the business norm in certain sectors. It originated in the early 1990s, as the US Army War College's response to the collapse of the USSR. With the demise of the Eastern Bloc as the one enemy, and the end of the Cold War, the goal was to find and implement new ways of seeing-responding under these conditions of the unknown foe.
*STEEP is an acronym for: social, technological, environmental, economic, political. It’s an analysis tool used to scan the horizon across these different dimensions, encouraging highly differentiated information resources, to identify both full on trends plus emerging weak signals of values shift. In an increasingly complex world, it guides mapping 360 external factors that might impact an organization as opposed just focusing on the industry it resides in.
I am a Brand and Creative distinguished by my certification as a practitioner of strategic foresight and my integration of cultural mapping as 6th gear strategy planning and evaluating modalities. My experience shows that, along with 21st century best practice brand building, these tools together serve as practical frameworks for discovering the critical dynamics nascent to our collective change, plus reveal otherwise unconsidered opportunities and bigger potentials, imperative to defining strategies in our increasingly complex world.