Our editorial insight series, Club Free, meets people who don’t fit neatly into segmentation tick-boxes. Here Global Managing Director El Pigram gives some tactics for brands to meet them outside of these…  

Club Free Issue One, download it here. 

At Crowd, we believe that change presents opportunity.   

Our latest editorial insights series, Club Free, is about groups seeking a new way of thinking about their individual liberty. It’s not freedom that’s unchecked or selfish: we talked to people who are providing each other with the support, empathy and community to exercise their freedom effectively.   

In chapter two: The Financial Outsiders, we heard from a community-minded group living and giving outside of elitist money systems. 

Subverting Status.  
As chasing down those traditional milestones of (ultra) wealth become less ‘shiny’, how do we think about new articulations of (and ways to cater to) age old social identity needs like ’status’, ‘reward’ and ‘discernment’? It’s not that this audience aren’t seeking all the good stuff that once came with splashing cash – self-gratification, community validation, recognition – but instead they’re more choiceful in how they fulfil these desires, with the act of giving (rather than receiving) hitting that sweet spot. 

Values over value. 
You can’t put a price on happiness. Cliche, and a bit (to use a Gen Z word) ‘cringe’ – but for many this rings true more today than ever before. Rather than play by the rules of a game that’s rigged against them, young people are forging their own way of earning (figurative) wealth – by doubling down and focusing on their values, rather than their earning potential. It’s not that they don’t value work, they just don’t see work as a fair value exchange. Which poses an interesting question to us as marketers, strategists, employers – how do you define, create and communicate real ‘value’ to an audience who interprets it in a fundamentally different way? 

(More) Radical Honesty.
Radical honesty has been a thing for a while. Honest brands that ‘say it how it is’ connect with an iconically millennial sensibility (I’m looking at you, Ryanair, KFC & Pot Noodle ). Emerging audiences are however encouraging us to move a step further, from saying the unsaid – to doing the unexpected; supporting people and communities in ways that genuinely benefit them. What our Financial Outsiders are calling for isn’t about CSR, it’s about putting an end to gatekeeping that upholds the (un)balance between the haves & have nots through creating spaces and cultivating (branded) communities that facilitate the greatest kind of wealth distribution – knowledge. 

Learning about The Financial Outsiders is part of our commitment to look at (and be inspired by) groups of people who don’t fit neatly into tick-boxes, well trodden segmentations or traditional pathways.      

We hope you find these stories interesting. And please do feel (yes) free to reach out to the Crowd DNA team to explore how this type of thinking could apply to your brand challenges.   

Club Free Issue One, download it here. 

We don’t just ‘do quant’, we culturally charge it. Our Numbers Director, Ed Bird on how to fuse the best of quant rigour with cultural strategy… 

When you think about cultural research and strategy, I bet you think about ethnography, observations, trend forecasting, and semiotics – methods that bring you as close to people’s lives as possible. And quite possibly, quant is the last method you think of. 

But, since 2017, we’ve been asking ourselves the question: “How do you understand and unpack real human stories that dictate culture when speaking to thousands rather than tens of people?”.  

Thinking about how to culturally-charge data allows our global Crowd Numbers team to steadily fly high, tackling some of the biggest challenges from the biggest brands around the world. We’d like to tell you more about how we do it and what this approach can bring to your brand challenges. 

How We Culturally-charge Data  

Our quantitative work is blended. We feel the very best quant works in tandem with our other research methods. We can unpick complex topics about people and culture through a variety of specialists. This helps us produce clear, human storytelling, and back it all by understanding people at scale. 

Our blended approach doesn’t just stop in house. As part of STRAT7 we partner with our sister agency Bonamy Finch when we need to enhance our analytics and data science capabilities. And we use STRAT7 Audiences, the group’s global centre of excellence for data collection.

Read more about STRAT7 Audiences here.

We’re ad-hoc: Why would we use a fixed template when culture (and your objectives) aren’t static? So, at Crowd Numbers we start from scratch. We approach each brief with creativity and an open mind: questioning everything and experimenting with traditional methods to tailor these to your very specific goals. 

We don’t do filler: Forget about long PowerPoints filled with charts, we collaborate with our editorial team and of course our qual research team to produce reports that inspire, not overwhelm. 

We’re human: Our aim is to replicate real world thinking and interactions, but at scale. Just look at our questionnaires that strike the balance between the rigour of academic quant research with the flow of real conversations.

People & Context 
When brands need powerful narratives to lead conversations, culturally charged data can help clients to confidently lead the way on how culture is evolving, and showcase brand knowledge in certain categories, sectors, or topics. 

Case study: Paramount x On Screen Representation 
Take our work with Paramount in both 2021 and 2023. They wanted our help to unpack attitudes to on-screen representation to push this important conversation forward. We devised a 15-market survey that unpacked real human understanding of both societal views and deeper personal emotional impacts. But we went further, speaking to experts globally to produce a market leading narrative for our very public facing findings. Read more here.  

Brand & Comms  
We don’t just use data to size, prioritise and validate (though we do that too), but we love to use it to demonstrate how brands can tactically and strategically lean into culture. 

Case Study: Amazon Ads x Culture 
Our partnership with Amazon has yielded some fantastic projects, none more so than unpacking the relationship between advertising and our evolving culture. Big questions, need big solutions so we brought in trends, qual, and semiotics wrapping it all up in a global survey that captured our evolving relationships with advertising and the role Amazon can play. This storytelling was launched at Cannes Lion in 2024. Read more here.  

Product & Experience 
Culture is messy, but we can find your space and help you execute a role in culture. We provide executional guidance across consumer journeys and touchpoints but always through the lens of culture – something quant testing often misses. 

Case Study: Ballantines x True Music DEI
We did this with Ballantine’s. Following our work Resetting The Dancefloor, it was all about helping them with the next step in progressing DEI within live music and clubbing spaces. So, we tested ideas and hypotheses and through culturally charged data, we found meaningful ways the brand could make a difference. Not just based on metrics, but on human understanding. Read more here.

We’re very proud to have developed global quantitative capabilities with a focus on both storytelling and the analytical challenges. We love what we do, and we think you would too. If you’d like to know more, drop us a line at hello@crowddna.com and we’d be happy to discuss. 

Crowd Shortcuts – a quick chat about something that’s caught our attention. This week, Crowd’s Olivia Anderson on how literature is taking luxury by storm… 

Tell me more. Picture the scene: you’re bored of performatively reading Sylvia Plath at Jolene cafe. You want to take your carefully cultivated Reader Aesthetic to the next level, but you aren’t sure how. Enter luxury fashion houses. 

Word on the street is ‘book girl summer’ … It’s so much more than that. Literature is becoming a lifestyle, and one that is distinctly aspirational. Valentino really got the ball rolling with their SS24 collection using Hanya Yanagihara’s acclaimed novel A Little Life as a conduit to explore new meanings and expressions of masculinity. And Thom Browne’s NYFW show in February of this year drew inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe, because goths are important too. 

So it’s the luxury version of dressing up for World Book Day? It goes a little deeper than that. Miu Miu’s Summer Reads initiative sees the brand gifting copies of seminal novels – all written by women – to visitors at pop-up locations around the world. Maison Valentino even sponsored the Man Booker Prize this year. Chanel’s 7L bookstore in Paris is now host to an arts programme designed to cultivate creativity and foster appreciation of the arts. While Aesop is getting in on the action too with its Women’s Libraries, using A Tale of Two Cities as the theme of its Women’s Day activations in China and dedicating its stores to novels written by or foregrounding women. Brands are using literature as a vehicle for something deeper than dress-up.  

It’s all very Dead Poets Society. It’s not just for the Dark Academics amongst us – Audi recently released Handbook Novels, where they partnered with up-and-coming authors in Spain to write novellas featuring key words from the cars’ instruction manuals in a bid to get people to actually read their instruction manuals. 

Rise up, English teachers. Pretty much. In the same way that luxury brands like Burberry and LVMH started producing PPE and hand sanitiser during COVID, we’re seeing this reverence of literature bubble up at a time when creativity is under threat, when “truth” is no longer an absolute, when the maelstrom of the online world makes it hard to distinguish signals from noise. It makes sense that brands are turning back to what feels time-honoured, certain and lasting – what culture writer Nadja Sayej calls “the timeless wisdom that can be sought if we put down our phones”. And fashion and literature are natural bedfellows – it’s all about cultural commentary and storytelling, be it pen and paper or needle and thread. 

Wicked smart. The message is clear: literature is a still point in a turning world, and one that is being called on now more than ever. Close enough to describe our realities, far enough removed to allow us to examine them through the trusted lens of cultural artefacts that have stood the test of time. 

TL;DR: literature is hot vital. Brands looking to cultivate credibility and foster ideas should lean on literature – particularly the certainty that the classics offer – as a north star and a source of inspiration in a world freighted with opposing cultural forces. 

Can sport provoke positive change? In our recent Future Of Sport survey we looked at how it is playing out with the major forces – from sustainability to fandom – and where sport is changing the rules, for good… 

Sport is at its best when it is inspiring us, and we found plenty to be inspired by in our Future Of Sport Survey. We wanted to find out how sports has the power to challenge attitudes around the major forces of Inclusion, Equity & Diversity, Sustainability, Performance & Success, Game Play and Fandom. We used these cultural shifts as a roadmap to what sports might look like for tomorrow’s players and fans.  

For the full survey on The Future Of Sport, contact hello@crowdDNA.com 

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In this survey, we got to interesting provocations around:  

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For the full survey on The Future Of Sport, contact hello@crowdDNA.com 

Our editorial insight series, Club Free, meets people who don’t fit neatly into segmentation tick-boxes. Here Global Managing Director El Pigram gives some tactics for brands to meet them outside of these… 

Club Free Issue One, download it here.

At Crowd, we believe that change presents opportunity.  

Our latest editorial insights series, Club Free, is about groups seeking a new way of thinking about their individual liberty. It’s not freedom that’s unchecked or selfish: we talked to people who are providing each other with the support, empathy and community to exercise their freedom effectively.  

In chapter one: The Poly-Normals, we heard from married couples, young daters, content creators and community spokespeople in the US and UK who by choosing to engage in multiple romantic relationships make room for more creativity, more sharing and more openness. 

1. Purposeful Pleasure.  

At the core of polyamory is a celebration of meaningful release; the idea that ‘letting go’ (of stereotype or expectation) doesn’t need to be a reckless act that compromises our values or the things we hold important.  

How can we create moments or new messages that lean into conscious, deliberate joy without the underbelly of guilt, shame or judgement that often comes hand in hand with prioritising our own enjoyment. 

2. Breaking the stalemate. 

Increased understanding of intersectionality, greater social recognition of non-binary identities and a growing community of people reimagining sex and relationships. These movements don’t exist in isolation – and all point to a need for less dualistic thinking. Culture is messy, people are messy and adopting a ‘this or that’ view on how people go about life is increasingly inaccurate (and unproductive).  

How can we reframe how we understand our audience, and how we craft our strategies to connect with people in ways that are less monolithic? 

3. Unzipping our assumptions 

Of course, not all relationships down the track will look like this. But it does suggest that there’s a growing schism between old and new ways of thinking. How can we help to challenge how we think about (and cater to) family and community? 

Learning about The Poly-Normals is part of our commitment to look at (and be inspired by) groups of people who don’t fit neatly into tick-boxes, well trodden segmentations or traditional pathways.     

We hope you find these stories interesting. And please do feel (yes) free to reach out to the Crowd DNA team to explore how this type of thinking could apply to your brand challenges.  

Club Free Issue One, download it here.

Stephanie Winkler, Head Of Agency (APAC), spoke on how brands can hold deeper meaning in people’s lives at the Spikes Asia creativity event

This week, we were lucky enough to open Spikes Asia in Singapore. But why is a cultural research consultancy opening Asia’s biggest festival of creativity? Because brands live in culture. They have no say in it, they just do. And all brands can be culturally aware, culturally competent, and above all culturally relevant. 

By focusing on the forces shaping the way that people think, feel and act, we can future proof brands in a way that is really powerful, and holds deeper meaning in people’s lives.

That word – people – is really important here

Brands come to us constantly, asking about how to connect with ‘consumers’ through culture. They look at it from the outside-in. They look at ‘culture’ as a product, to be ‘consumed’ passively by their audiences. But culture is created by people – and people are so much more than the sum of what they consume. People are messy. Culture is messy. And it’s getting messier by the day with Polarisation – from being pitted against each other, Atomisation – we’re living in echo chambers of one and Fragmentation, when no ‘single truth’ exists for anything any more, even in the causes we agree on.

It’s messier than ever, but we have tools to unpick it…

So how do you work with culture in a world where culture is messier than ever?  We opened the festival in Singapore by sharing four principles of working with culture. We use these in our work at Crowd DNA daily, to help create cultural advantage for the brands we work with – across Asia, and across the world.

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Decoding culture

We start with stories. We immerse deeply with people from all walks of life, and follow them about their everyday lives, pin-pointing the human tensions so we can ask how to help them with that.

Read more here in our thought piece about the tension with globalism in Asia and the role of bringing local voices to the world stage through Local Love.

Challenging culture

A common issue brands experience when working with culture is taking trends at face-value. By challenging them instead, we can unlock new ways for brands to play in cultural trends in a way that is more meaningful. We learned more about this when we explored the global megatrend of nostalgia with Snap APAC at the outset of 2024. It spotlighted a flip side to watch out for when it comes to nostalgia – ie, it threatens originality, pushes new ideas to the fringes and expands the creation of the ‘now’ in favour of focusing on the ‘then’.

Reframing culture

We zero in and question common assumptions, myths and insights. Last year we explored one that is permeating Asia: The myth (and the focus) on audiences getting younger and younger. We explored how that’s far from the whole story. There are audiences across APAC who are getting older, and we’re facing a poverty of insight about what is going on in the cultural lives of people outside of the ‘Gen Z’ bubble.

Creating culture

This is where we ultimately want to get to – as brands, creators, marketers, strategists. And ‘connection’ with consumers is key to building culture from the ground up. We can learn about this by seeing it in action with the ironed-down mechanics of ‘fandoms’ across Asia – where creating a reciprocal connection with fans is at the centre of the cultural strategy rather than leveraging it. 

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This is just the tip of the iceberg. To find out more about how brands can work with culture (and to unlock new avenues of commercial advantage for your brand) – just ask us. If you’d like a run through of the Spikes Deck, we can organise that with you too. 

Cultural insight and creativity may at first seem unrelated. But they’re more alike than you think. Thank you Spikes for seeing this, and having us on board to open the festival in Singapore in 2024.

Crowd Shortcuts – a quick chat about something that’s caught our attention. This week, the revaluation of bodily functions from waste to wonder…

What’s all this then? We’ve had #GutTok (over 800 million views) and posting a stool sample to a nutrition app for analysis. Now comes the next big branding of bodily functions: the drive to tap menstrual blood as a valuable health resource. 

Has ‘period positivity’ come this far? Yes. Content creator wild.witchy.woman (26.9 followers on TikTok) is among the advocates for actually drinking menses for optimum well-being… Meanwhile, healthcare start-ups are capitalising on this with research into the medical value of menstrual effluence (which contains blood, vaginal secretions, cervical mucus, and endometrial cells), and demonstrating its value to a consumer.

Tell us more… Theblood (www.theblood.io) offer a kit that will give insights into individual menstrual cycles from a sample, and can be studied for conditions such as endometriosis. Founders Isabelle Guenou and Miriam Santer believe: “Menstruation can be the answer to problems and pain”. Meanwhile, Qvin™  has designed the Q-Pad (qvin.com) for the supply of a sample of menstrual blood that can be then tested for critical health information like biomarkers for diabetes. 

So why is this ‘waste’ product being re-valued now? It’s time to take the female body seriously – all of it and especially the bits greeted with disgust. Healthcare services are being called out for failing to do so; from ‘medical gaslighting’ to blaming terminology (eg, ‘geriatric mother’; ‘hostile uterus’) and the so-called Gender Data Gap where treatments efficacy may only have been tested on male bodies. 

It’s a long way from hiding tampons up sleeves… Absolutely. To have the option of giving a blood sample that is not only for research into overlooked health issues, but taken from a bodily process often treated with unease by medical professionals (or much worse) is empowering. As one of the participants in a Qvin™ study to assess if menstrual blood can be used to screen for cervical cancer put it: “For me, it’s just a win overall if this becomes a product because it will reduce my anxiety and will give me more control over what’s going on with the testing.”

And let’s not underestimate how this research is needed: Note, in a recent review of scientific papers, Leah Hazard finds that there are about four hundred studies on menstrual effluent compared with more than fifteen thousand for semen or sperm (Womb, published 2023).

Where else is this health empowerment happening? Plugging the data gap on hormones, individuals track their cycles – to then sync to exercise, diet, skincare, mood or productivity (and yes, bypass a visit to the docs altogether and download one of the many apps to get personalised insights). There’s more and more options like this for people to choose – and therefore control – the process of tracking their health themselves. 

TL;DR: While looking at periods with wonder may have happened because people feel let down by traditional medicine, it has forced new insights, research and empowered attitudes to health. So the opposite of waste – thankfully. 

Modern dating can feel toxic. Crowd’s Celine Longden-Naufal looks at how one dating app is reshaping this culture by embracing the semiotics of openness…

We know today’s daters are tired of the ‘self-imposed pressure for conventional labels’ (Tinder, 2023) and many seek the freedom to define their own relationships. They are wanting an invitation to self exploration and freedom to seek out a bit more of what they fancy.

And this more intentional approach to romantic life is reshaping dating culture – and of course, dating apps. It can even be a direct antidote to the downsides of dating app culture (ie the 35 percent who experience unwanted sexual images, or the 80 percent exposed to emotional burnout, Pew 2020; Singles Report 2023). 

While it’s something that Tinder and Hinge have recognised by adding open relationships to profile options, dating app Feeld is leading the way (not least by referring to daters as ‘humans’). Below is our semiotic analysis of the Feeld brand to show what this reshaped dating culture looks and sounds like…

Heightened Intimacy 

Visuals of gentle skin-to-skin embrace suggests touch is used as a means of intimate discovery, and a level of trust and support. Warm colour palettes and references to physical softness (foliage and nature, hazy images) creates an approachable space. Meanwhile, imagery of people smiling and mutually embracing each other evokes a feeling of closeness and deep connection. By coding Feeld as facilitating intimate depth that goes beyond carnal lust, dating culture can explore the possibilities of more meaningful relationships.

Authentic Connections

Introducing a new wave of daters who are ‘experimental’, Feeld signals a dating culture that’s abandoning tradition. While other mainstream apps use the term ‘preferences’, that can often make dating feel like you’re headhunting a mate, Feeld instead uses the term ‘desires’ . This reestablishes the priority of pleasure and joy in dating. We’re also seeing unposed visuals of diverse couples passionately and full heartedly engaging with each other in private spaces, as well as documentation of personal stories, evoking a feeling of trust and honesty not only between connections, but among a like minded community. In all, Feeld is a safe place to explore an inclusive and authentic approach to dating.

Encouraged Exploration

The app positions itself as always in a “dialogue” with its users. It uses open language with a comforting tone of voice when addressing ‘taboo topics’, similar to a teacher-like quality of benevolent guidance, enlightening daters about the spectrum of intimacy. We also see visuals that evoke a feeling of being welcomed –  boards that encourage users to “come on in” resemble signage we’d see outside of spaces of hospitality, ensuring that there’s a place at the table for everyone to explore and to truly “Find Your People”.

Through very careful and thoughtful use of imagery and words, Feeld reveals a whole-hearted commitment to showing how using dating apps can be a safe, inclusive and most importantly, joyful, experience. In this light, it’s doing even more than reshaping dating culture, it’s showing how we can reshape how we connect as humans.

If you’d like to learn more about how we use semiotics to reach real cultural insights, get in touch at: hello@crowdDNA.com