Free Cultural Insight on our Instagram

As we are sure you know by now, we are all about making sense of the human experience and bringing it to the heart of decision making to help our clients innovate, communicate and grow. One of our centres of excellence is in cultural insight & strategy and we find that, when we partner with people on this type of work, it can be game-changing for them and their overall strategies.

There’s a lot that can come from a cultural insight & strategy and exploring those near-future trends that are shaping culture, so we wanted to find a way to help all of our clients see the value of it. As such, we have launched our new Instagram channel that allows you to take what we are seeing and think about it in the context of your brand challenge.

We also thought we would share a little bit here on what Cultural Strategy is and show what value it can add to your strategic planning.

So let’s start with a quick definition:

Cultural Strategy helps us understand the social, emotional, psychological & commercial shifts that affect customers’ lives and what is important to them.

It can complement all the work you do for your brand, as it can contextualise, inspire and help future-proof the communications, innovations & experiences you are designing. It helps keep you and your stakeholders looking outwards and tuning into those shifting dynamics of your audiences’ desires.

So what do we mean by culture?

Culture is everywhere.

It’s the fabric of our lives: how we spend our time, our money, our energy, what we care about, how we express ourselves and how we communicate. As such, Cultural Strategy uses culture as data

This means we cast our net wide. We look at culture from high to low, leading edge to mainstream, near to far – and then apply that in the context of your business and it’s challenge.

We feel that brands can’t afford to ignore culture.

You know this but it bears repeating: brands don’t exist in a vacuum. The best brands are nimble, responsive and connected. They draw their meaning and energy from culture as it shifts, so without understanding culture, there is a danger that a brand can face irrelevance and ignorance.

By looking to emergent culture, your brand can get some early signs of what is about to become mainstream, giving you the chance to think ahead, stay relevant, and sometimes even shift culture in your direction.

Where could Cultural Strategy play a role for you?

Cultural Strategy can play a role across the planning cycle and help you get to a better strategic position – whether it’s brand strategy, communications development, audience unlocking, innovation, or customer experience planning.

It can be such a valuable addition to your insight & strategy toolkit and one of the reasons we find clients loving it is that it is agile & adaptable, meaning it can bring value for many different business challenges.

It also adds depth, a future focus and, probably most importantly, it is refreshing, fun and provocative. After all, isn’t that why we all like doing what we do? It pushes thinking and challenges people’s opinions, driving us all to create breakthrough ideas and strategies. What’s not to love?

So if you want to find out more about what it can do for your business, drop us a line for a quick chat…and give the Insta a follow while you’re at it.