Why AI fails at cultural strategy in marketing (and how to fix it)
Sometime ago, I wrote a short practical piece about how to research cultural signals without going generic. But before getting into that, it’s worth asking ourselves: what do we even mean by cultural signals? What are they used for? And how do we add value in this vaguely termed field of “cultural strategy” without becoming a Keynote factory?
Those were some of the questions that I brought to our latest panel, featuring Amy Daroukakis, Bia Assevero and Sean Choi. You can watch the full recording below, or read a few highlights after the jump.
Alright kids, here’s what my elder millennial brain picked up that feels worth passing along, practising, and normalising within all businesses.
There’s no single definition of cultural strategy
It really depends on the discipline you practise, and what said piece of “cultural strategy” will be used for. Sometimes it’s for a brand positioning exercise, others for campaign development, others as part of futures scenarios. Some common threads are around relevance, resonance, and – as we’ll get into later on – a deep sense of respect.
We all contain cross-cultural multitudes
We still assume so many things about each other based on where “they’re from”. But the reality is, you may have been born in the US and I may have been born in Portugal, and there’s still so much more to us than meets the surface. Especially as we migrate countries more often, or uncover deeper layers of what makes us “us” over the course of life.
Common misconceptions around cultural strategy
Trends. Keynotes. DEI initiatives. Something about Gen Z. “What the internet is saying about” anything. All of which, by itself, misses the point. But it’s useful to ask at the start of any “cultural strategy” project what different people read when they see that term. It probably will save a huge amount of headaches, for most if not all of us, later on.
There is no single “speed of culture”
Organisations are too layered with different levels of decision-making protocols to move at the pace of cultural developments. Therefore, the smartest thing to ask upfront is the speed at which a business is okay moving. And adapting the areas of culture we focus on accordingly.
Understand internal cultures before going outward
Our views of how business gets done, how decisions get made, or how power works and is transferred within an existing team or function, are subconsciously affected by a lot of Western, Anglo-Saxon ways. The mirror shatters quite drastically once you start understanding that the way business gets done in Dubai, Egypt, or “Middle America” may be very different from yours. For every take on how our job is to take charge of a situation, there’s an equally valid counter that our job isn’t to be better a charge of anything, but to help clients reach their goals.
Behind a cultural expression there’s a deep narrative
We tend to assume culture is something fast that happens at the speed of TikTok trends, but in reality this is just a very tactical form of cultural expression. What’s more important, and durable, is the underlying narrative that feeds that expression. Don’t obsess with the latest developments in prediction markets. Obsess more with what is the underlying narrative of disempowerment that made them possible.
A simple hack to identify cultural narratives
Ask someone about the local version of popular expressions. For example, if you’re in an English-speaking country, like the UK, you may speak about “having your cake and eating it too”, but in French the equivalent expression is around “wanting the butter and the money for the butter”. One possible interpretation: the UK is more guided by a Protestant-influenced principle of prudence around consumption, whereas France looks at it more through the lens of fairness in trade.
Where AI falls short in cultural strategy work
While AI is tremendous for all sorts of desk research, we need to consider the inputs it draws from: largely English speaking content, documented on the internet. Which is not quite the same as the full corpus of what hundreds, thousands or millions of people experience all over the world and never write it down, or maybe haven’t even expressed it per se, until you ask them about it. It’s a sampling bias problem by default. So look for wider, weirder, more human samples if you want to get to more unexpected cultural signals before others do.
Cultural strategy is a practice of radical respect
Whenever we talk about culture, be it through the lens of being more relevant or resonant, we’re talking about radical respect towards whoever we’re interacting with. This happens at an audience segment level, but also at a client and organisational level. The more we start from the perspective of “how do things get done around here, and why”, the better our chances of understanding how to affect that culture through the (hopefully positive) change we want to make.
Join our strategy collective
This was an exclusive panel for Salmon Crew members. If you want to come to the next one, you should join our private strategy collective. It’s where 80% of the work I do today goes, because the most effective way to swim in this economy is if we do it together. Hope to see you there.
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Written by Rob Estreitinho, a comms and social strategy consultant and the founder of Salmon Labs. You might also enjoy getting my newsletter. 6,000 readers at a 60% open rate, read by agency and in-house strategy leaders from all five continents. Subscribe below.
