Brands must establish trust in order to survive. How do you regain trust in your brand when it has been lost? There is no doubt a plethora of people at Boeing asking that question today. By now, billions of people around the world are aware of the crisis that Boeing, a leader in aerospace engineering […]
What Can You Do When Your Entire Industry Is In Jeopardy?
By now, most people are aware of the benefits promised by the transformation of transportation systems that’s already underway. Whether it’s the electrification of automobiles, subscription services, driverless cars, or mobility as a service (Lyft, Uber, etc.), the way we move around is becoming vastly different from how we moved around just a few short […]
What’s Fueling “The Bern?” The Secret Every Marketer Should Know…
As Cultural Strategists, we invest our time and attention understanding the context that drives human behavior: the macroforces, societal trends and ultimately the resulting cultural values shifts that have a tremendous impact on how we exist in the world. This context influences the choices we make: from big life decisions and lifestyle preferences to our […]
What’s the Real Point of Brand Purpose? A Perspective on Purpose Alignment and Activation.
Having spent the last 16 years working with a cornucopia of legacy brand and marketing organizations helping them connect with their customers and develop truly relevant innovations and communications, I’ve seen the business mindset evolve in so many positive ways. At some point in recent business history, there was a demonstrative shift in consumer brand […]
Lessons From Corporate America on Humanizing Poverty
Last year we completed what ended up being an intensely inspiring project… Our client identified a customer group that they realized they hadn’t been serving to their fullest potential because it is a “target” that they knew very little about. Not only were they profoundly aware of this knowledge gap, but also that their ethnocentric point of view […]
The Return of Vinyl: A Movement In Music and Presence
Music is a big part of our culture here at Culture. We come from backgrounds deeply entrenched in the music scene and families for whom music is not just a part of our lives but also part of our livelihoods. From an anthropological point of view, music is an essential fiber in the fabric of […]
Empowering a New Era of CSR: Customer Social Responsibility
Corporate Social Responsibility has been a mainstreaming trend in business for the past decade or more. The intentionality of corporations to make it a point to use their resources as a source of social good is a direct reflection of evolving cultural values. To quote Ryan Honeyman from the B Corp Handbook, “Business is, for […]
Reebok Chooses To “Be More Human”
Early in 2013, Reebok approached our team with the need to develop a deep, emotional understanding of the motivations of fitness customers and the context of fitness activity in 6 countries. Our team spent 6 weeks on a round-the-world journey to uncover the common beliefs, values and motivators for hard core fitness enthusiasts in order […]
What Ford’s and Chipotle’s Recent Actions Reveal About Their Values
Values matter. That’s the message that comes through loud and clear in recent moves by Ford and Chipotle. In Ford’s case, they took on Cadillac by spoofing their ‘Poolside’ ad with an #Upside ad that calls attention to the values that Ford espouses, while mocking Cadillac’s blatant materialist bent. Meanwhile, over at Chipotle, they are […]
Social Media and the Return to Accountability
The chart above displays a shift in how human beings experience transactions, plotted over a period of time since the Industrial Revolution. With the rise of one-way mass messaging it’s no surprise that personal interaction and one-to-one dialogue took a nose dive while a faceless (and relatively powerless) consumer was encouraged by corporate sales strategies. […]