What's in the DNA of a YouTube superstar? What's the tipping point from speaking to your mum and mates to having roughly the population of Belgium following your every move? And who are the names lurking behind the cross-over likes of Zoella and PewDiePie?

We’ve been exploring all of this and more for a number of clients recently, pinpointing the developing trends driving the notion of the ‘niche superstar’. The strategic thinking of course stays under wraps, but here’s a vid that casts some clear light on this exciting, ever changing, very social world…

Crowd DNA’s trends knowledge leader, Rebecca Coleman, explores the value created by brands through looking beyond the day to day and connecting with the cultural shifts that consumers really care about…

What’s your brand’s purpose? Great brands have a point of view and mission that stretches beyond the confines of their primary function. Think Coca-Cola and their mission to spread happiness or Dove’s Real Beauty campaign. Google, with its commitment to helping start ups is another great example of a brand with a purpose that stretches further than its primary function or promise. What cultural shifts are happening right now that consumers really care about? What value are you adding to people’s lives?

If a brand has a purpose that stretches beyond its category and functionality, it’s much easier to tap into trends and keep up with consumers as their lifestyles evolve. Take P&G brand Always as an example: it has consistently looked to offer effective feminine hygiene products, but more importantly it has stayed true to its mission of instilling girls with confidence through education at every lifestage.

Knowing its audience and purpose has made it straightforward for Always to align itself with contemporary feminist culture. Although this is a macro trend affecting wide swathes of society, Always has made all its #LikeaGirl communications feel personal by harnessing a universal sentiment. They’ve also accompanied the campaign with meaningful and impactful initiatives that stretch from one-on-one advice for young girls to partnering with UNESCO to promote gender equality across the globe. Showing this depth of commitment enhances feelings of trust and the sense that Always really believes in its long-term mission to boost female confidence.

This fusion of individual and collective value is increasingly pertinent in today’s world of corporate social responsibility over-saturation. CSR on its own has become pretty meaningless to well-informed, media-savvy consumers who – dissatisfied with pure lip service – demand to know how and why a brand is making a difference to their world. In a 2014 survey of 8,000 consumers in 16 markets PR agency Edelman found that consumers see customer relationship management as more important than CSR. Another study from the World Federation Of Advertisers (WFA) uncovered a swing from environmentalism and global issues to supporting communities and ethical business practices as important brand purposes. This indicates a shift from concerns about big, global issues to a focus on tangible everyday topics that pack a more personal punch.

This seems obvious in some ways. It reflects a number of wider consumer trends, such as a growing lack of trust in large corporations and traditional authority figures, as well as an increasing expectation to be part of a brand’s story through conversation, co-creation and collaboration. On top of that you have new definitions of value driven by the sharing economy and the recession. This means that purchases now need to count for more than simply their functional worth. Consumers are looking for brands that look after their needs and desires, as well as those of the world.

Whatever your category, it’s important not to get trapped in a revolving door of convention. For FMCG brands like Always, there’ll always be someone who offers a similar product for a cheaper price. However, by aligning itself with a larger cultural movement it manages to stand-out in a crowded marketplace.

How do you summarise a generation in 90 seconds? In the name of producing powerful, thought provoking stimulus material for events, workshops and suchlike, that's the challenge we set ourselves...

We wanted to pull apart the differences between Generations X, Y and Z in a clear and simple fashion; in a manner which acts as a springboard for lively conversation, sharp strategic thinking and, ultimately, genuine action. Ok, yes, we’ve had to generalise in places. And generational experiences are of course bound to vary based on personal circumstances (location, upbringing, personal interests etc). But nonetheless we’re very pleased with what we’ve cooked up. We hope you like too.

Generation X (born: 1966-1976)

Generation Y (born: 1977-1994)

Generation Z (born: 1995-)

Helping brands to explore and fully realise their cultural relevance is a core theme in what we do. Crowd DNA consultant Alice Ellen explores the roots of such thinking; the work of Pierre Bourdieu in particular.

Academic theories and concepts often fall by the wayside when entering the world of consumer insight. Many books and articles are decades old and densely written in dry academic prose; definitely not something you can have a quick flick through on the commute to work. However, taking a little time to digest these theories can prove extremely beneficial in helping us understand our participants, by building upon and borrowing from relevant information.

Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction is one such text that contains some interesting and important ideas, including a framework that can still be used today, given a little tweaking. Cultural capital, in particular, is a useful concept to decode the world around us.

In a nutshell, Bourdieu identified cultural capital as one form of capital that your status might be derived from, together with economic, human and social capital. Cultural capital can be displayed through embodied expressions like tattoos and piercings, or by depicting our status through the material objects that we own.

Examples might include:

So what does this mean in terms of consumerism and branding? Delving into how people display their cultural capital can be an extremely useful way of pulling out the differences between various social groupings, especially when thinking about demographics and recruitment; it can help us move away from the sometimes reductionist approach of grouping consumers based on income and qualifications alone. Cultural capital is therefore a valuable concept and analytical process – one we can use to capture the nuances between social groupings and in mapping what different groups value.

A good example of how Bourdieu’s theories have been built upon for use in an up-to-date, culturally relevant context is Sarah Thornton’s work on youth cultures in the 1990s. Here she draws on the idea of cultural capital and extends it into the world of subcultures to explain how different social groups express their identity. Thornton describes “subcultural capital” as the way members of a subculture depict their status and differentiate themselves from other social groups, by obtaining cultural knowledge and expressing taste and style through commodities. Therefore, it is important to understand that different tribes in society express their cultural or subcultural capital through shared passions, as a way of measuring their cultural worth in the world.

This is why cultural capital, and more broadly speaking, culture in general is so important for a brand to both understand its target audience and relevance within the world. For, brands, as we know, don’t exist in a vacuum. Brands that understand this, instinctively focus on how to cultivate cultural capital first, playing an intrinsic role in consumers’ lives, and thus not just planning at a market level but really honing in on cultural strategy to gain a competitive edge and boost brand value.

Here's a brief video intro to the topic of global ethnographic work that we pulled together. The featured footage is from a project for Viacom, but most of the principles discussed apply across our ethnographic work as a whole...

To find out more about how we conduct this type of work, do drop us a line

Gay Talese's 1966 Esquire feature, 'Frank Sinatra Has A Cold', is one of the greatest studies of celebrity ever. With insight and innovation in mind, Crowd DNA managing director Andy Crysell explains that it also demonstrates the power of observation over interview...

‘Frank Sinatra Has A Cold’ ranks as a defining piece in so-called new journalism; a painstakingly detailed, powerful and fascinating under-the-skin read. It was, however, a state of affairs forced on Talese through Sinatra – recoiling at soon being 50; experiencing a number of career pressures; indeed suffering from a cold – refusing to talk to him. Celeb gawking aside, it serves equally as a prime example of the benefits of observation over interview (or, in ‘…Has A Cold”s case, in observation alongside only questioning those on the periphery of the scene, rather than the target ‘audience’).

Ethnographic-style reporting, next to visual documentation, brings a richness and a discursiveness to stories that regimented interviews don’t always allow for. Vitally, the broader cultural context becomes clearer and, often, less anticipated and potentially more advantageous ground gets to be covered – something that it can be a struggle to achieve when there’s a lengthy set of highly granular questions to crunch through in a discussion guide.

We’re not prescribing project method designs that are devoid of interviews in all work (sometimes highly granular questions really do need answering through very direct interviewing) – rather to highlight that, when well considered, there can be rigour and process in observation, too. And returning more particularly to the example of ‘Frank Sinatra Has A Cold’, while skilled ethnographers practice observation as a matter of course, exploring the journalist skill-set as well opens the doors to bringing better reporting techniques and a storytelling mentality to ethnography.

It’s this blending of social science and journalism – ethnography with a more potent sense of interpretation – that’s particularly pertinent to how we work at Crowd DNA. Better thinking, being agile, ensuring impact – we like to think that we cover off all three of our guiding principles via this type of primary method.

Gay Talese’s story for Esquire begins as per below. Click the link thereafter to read the full piece

Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra’s four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.

Frank Sinatra Has A Cold

We often end the week hosting a 'show and tell' session, with Crowd folk in London and Amsterdam united via Skype and learning something new (over a beer, obviously), either from a project we've just wrapped up or another interesting source. But then some weeks we just eat poppadoms...

More specifically, some bright spark suggested a poppadom eating competition. Participants had three poppadoms and a variety of condiments – yeah, we know, hardly a marathon stretch but time was a bit tight. The aim was to eat them as quickly as possible and, with a time of one min 33 secs, Michael Chan was declared the victor, proving the ‘stacking’ technique as being the most effective. Bravo Michael.

Here’s some of the more flattering photos from the event.

 

What happens when you put 50+ young people from across the UK in the same room as politicians, activists, charities and figureheads from Channel 4? Policy announcements, excitement and lots of strong opinions - that’s what, as Crowd DNA associate director, Liz Cheesbrough, reports…

Over the last eight years of running UK Tribes, we’ve seen youth attitudes and aspirations shift dramatically. We’ve clung on during the recession, born the brunt of university fees, got down to grime and high to EDM, got to grips with FOMO, FOBO, YOLO… And to top it all off, had first-hand experience of Tinder’s #rightswipe causing RSI.

Since the dawn of the teenager, media and political perception of 16-24s has too often focused on these shiny, exciting and novel elements of growing up – and often used them to forecast generational downfalls. But with political apathy assumed normal for 16-24s, genuine youth priorities rarely make the political agenda – so Channel 4’s Policy And Participation Event turned the tables to find out what really matters to young people in the UK today.

The event saw our Tribes get right in the middle of the action – discussing political involvement with Krishnan Guru-Murthy, considering new youth policy from Nicky Morgan MP and debating with major campaigners and politicians from across the major parties. And the biggest priorities raised on the day painted a very different picture to the stereotypes we usually see…

Young people aren’t un-political – but they have lost faith in the political system and feel cheated by parties that don’t share their values. Labour and the Greens are coming out top for 16-24s as the coalition has burnt their bridges, and they believe the voting age should be lowered to 16, turbo-charged by youth in the Scotland Referendum.

Policy isn’t addressing the issues that matter to them – instead it feeds the assumptions of ‘middle class warriors’ in Westminster. Education and work are the top priorities for this generation, but policy follows media portrayals in focusing on drugs, alcohol and online bullying.

The people that represent them aren’t relevant – but campaigners and online political engagement are leading the way. Asked to get out of their suits and in to the shoes of young people, campaigners called for popular politics that fits in to their digital lifestyle and authentically engages them.

Above all, the key finding was politics shouldn’t be for some – it should be for all. Political education is a vital tool if young people are going to have a stake in society and a way to change the world and their lives for better – as FGM campaigner Leyla Hussein shared: “In school you should learn about finance, relationships and politics – algebra doesn’t get you anywhere in real life challenges”

For the full PDF, click here.