Introducing Club Free – our new series to share the stories of people who in many ways represent freedom coming back on track…

Club Free Issue One, download it here.

A bold claim, but we’re going with it. We’re taking Freedom back – celebrating manifestations of it that are about community and shared responsibility rather than purely self-interest.

This editorial insights series will share the many positive and motivating stories emerging from people getting to live their lives just how they want to live them (and therefore more brands needing to move on from squeezing people into old fashioned little boxes).

Chapter One, The Poly-Normals & Chapter Two, The Financial Outsiders

First up in Club Free, issue one, The Poly-Normals and The Financial Outsiders. The former: a set of people changing sexual relationships for the better, for all; the latter: an equally community-minded group living and giving outside of elitist money systems. Brought together: clear signals of just how far and wide our Club Free adventures can take us.

We hope you find these stories interesting and inspiring. 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.

Though this is issue one, we in fact trialled some freedom material in a rather good webinar last summer – you can download our Reframing Ageing APAC and Un-Dependents reports here and 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.

In a chaotic cultural landscape, Crowd’s Rachel Rapp and Amy Nicholson present three mindsets that create opportunity in uncertainty…

The last few years have been turbulent across the globe. From climate paralysis and political fatigue, to the cost-of-living crisis and the impact of AI, chaos has become the new normal. Finding what’s good in permacrisis – Collins’s Dictionary word of the year, 2022 – can feel overwhelming.

Luckily, at Crowd DNA, we’re partial to a bit of chaos. As our fundamental human needs shift in response to uncertainty, how we interact with brands also changes, and we think that creates opportunity. Using trends analysis, semiotics and conversations with our KIN network, we’ve identified three mindsets that brands can adopt to make sense of the mayhem. These are: hand holding, distracting, or embracing uncertainty. 

You can get a taste of how to execute against each mindset below. It’s our introduction to how brands can show up for consumers in these incalculable times. There are certainly more mindsets out there to be defined – but we hope these begin to inspire you to think about what’s right for your brand. 

Three Mindsets To Meet Shifting Human Behaviour In Uncertain Times

1. Hand Holding 

Hand holding plays into our human needs for comfort and security. The trick is to offer reassurance and stability by grounding your brand’s touch points with scenes of everyday reality, universal experiences and simple language. While we typically see hand holding in fintech, banking and insurance (industries that are looking to support consumers during the cost-of-living crisis), we’re now seeing brands from other categories presenting themselves as reassuring and stable, too.

Hand Holding: How To…

_Dial up references to familiar rituals. We see this mindset in the Food Love Stories campaign from UK supermarket chain Tesco, emphasising everyday realities – eg a family barbecue. Meanwhile, at London Fashion Week, Burberry took over a London cafe to serve up comfort food (a surprising collision of egg and chips and designer fashion). Both brands are speaking to the need for security through relatability. 

_Incorporate community values and the idea of coming together. The Levi’s 2023 campaign was about people gathering at a funeral in their trusty 501 jeans, with themes of togetherness, support, and to give a sense of belonging.

_Offer a casual, friendly tone of voice. Ganni’s use of informal emoticons suggests a relatable, peer-to-peer relationship with consumers, while Ikea’s language of togetherness creates a sense of camaraderie that cultivates trust and connection.

2. Distraction 

There’s often a craving for distraction from the uncertainty, and brands can offer this with momentary escape. Playing with time – harking back to simpler eras, using nostalgia, or transporting us toward a brighter future – are key tropes within this mindset. After all, an escape from the present is the ultimate distraction from uncertain times. 

Distraction: How To…

_Emphasise intentionally retro aesthetics and allude to nostalgia. The latest design for toaster pastries, Pop-Tarts, is a nostalgia trip back to their iconic 1960s packaging, allowing consumers to be distracted from uncertain times with comforting memories of the past.

_Tap into the surreal. The wellbeing supplement brand, Dirtea, evokes dreamscape imagery that defies reality with a product that actually levitates and positions itself as a portal to a utopian world that distracts from the uncertain present by letting consumers escape.

_Reference futurism through digitised worlds. Coca Cola has catapulted us to the year 3000 with their new release that allows a taste of the future, created using AI, all while using 2023’s Colour of the Year: Digital Lavender. This emphasis on futurist realities invites us to disengage from the present moment.

3. Embracing

This is where brands are really getting stuck into the mess by either doubling down on difficult topics, or making light of uncertainty with relatable humour. Here, we see brands lean into the chaos, by being on the consumer’s side as they find light in the darkness. And, in the more extreme examples, challenging the status quo by forcing the audience to confront an uncomfortable and uncertain future. 

Embracing: How To…

_Get people laughing by playing with the bizarre. Heinz has released its first global ad campaign in 150 years celebrating ‘irrational love’ for the brand, like the idea of putting ketchup on ice-cream, or Heinz tattoos. Elsewhere, product comparison website, Compare The Market uses a witty tone of voice to parody the temperamental British weather. Both are finding humour in the unpredictable.

_Lean into the confrontational and uncomfortable. Balenciaga’s Mud S/S 2023 showcased a dirty, post-apocalyptic world, while Isamaya Beauty has recently presented an extreme otherworldly makeup style. These encourage us to rethink our current way of living by physically immersing us in the darker side of uncertainty.

_Reframe the narrative around uncertainty. The travel planner service, Journee Trips, plays with the language of excitement and mystery to maximise the idea of discovery and adventure; celebrating not knowing your destination until you reach the airport.

Which uncertainty mindset best fits your brand? Or do you tap into another mindset altogether during these turbulent times? To find out more about the opportunities within chaos, please get in touch.

Thurs October 5 at 1pm & 5pm BST / 12pm & 5pm EST. RSVP by clicking the first session here and the second session here.

Everything’s A Mess... a webinar on how brands can navigate uncertainty 

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As you may have noticed, it’s been a turbulent few years. Shocks of uncertainty feel like they’re coming more seismically and frequently than ever (though, spoiler alert: things have always been uncertain) leaving us, and brands, and consumers in a constant state of flux. 

But it isn’t all doom and gloom. There is good to come from uncertainty, and in chaos lies opportunity. So, how can you find a way through? 

What should brands do or not do? Are you a hand holder, facilitator of escapism, or relatable realist – and what’s right for your brand?

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Join Rachel Rapp, futures director, and Amy Nicholson, associate director, futures, on Thurs October 5 to get stuck into the mess.

RSVP by clicking 1pm BST / 8am EST here and 5pm / 12pm EST here.

An opportunity in sport apparel for women is being missed. Crowd DNA editor Jennifer Robinson looks at how to win with the older woman who seeks out active fitness…

Our latest report Reframing Ageing: APAC shows what is changing for the older person, and what they want from products and campaigns. We see this as the ‘reframing, reassessing and reclaiming’ of what ageing feels like. 

Download Reframing Ageing: APAC here.

There’s lots to get to know about ageing reframed, but one cohort being overlooked is the 50-plus active woman. We don’t find her on the activewear shop floor. There’s no major menopausal woman range – a natural addition to sport brands that have developed maternity, teen or plus-sized ranges. In campaigns for active women, the athletic older woman isn’t featured: Nike’s ‘Year of the Woman’ launched in Spring without her. She isn’t placed in inclusive ranges, either: not in the adidas new Collective Power or recent Athleta ranges – all of which has otherwise a great record for diversity.

Apparel brands have made great strides in inclusivity, and older active women can be a bigger part of this. So what’s next? Here is how to win with the 50-plus active woman, and to really show that activewear can fit all stages of life. 

Your Body Is Never The Same

There’s an athletic body in there as a woman gets into her fifties, it has just been transformed by menopause. Earlier this year, Nike launched leak proof period shorts: which is great for helping teenage girls feel comfortable doing sport. But similar technical changes to sports wear could be made for menopausal women: who may experience menstrual ‘flooding’; sweating; weight gain around the middle. Who wants a higher neckline for breast support. Or material that ameliorates against chaffing. There are innovative designs that are helping the menopausal body in sport, for example the US clothing brand, Become, that has developed Anti-Flush Technology™, which absorbs heat from the surface of the skin when it gets hot, then releases warmth back onto the body during the chill that follows.

Celebrating Last Place 

A few years ago, Nike launched CruzrOne – a sneaker for the slower runner. It arrived with compelling marketing (even more than usual…). The product, we saw in the advert, originated for company co-founder, Phil Knight – “a slow runner – and that’s me,” he said. What he didn’t say was that he’s over 80 years old. This is a product designed to appeal to older people but marketed focused on actual needs not assumed age – it’s for “all those cruisers” out there – could be 80+ or 20. It’s a product for the active stage you’re at right now – very, very slow running – not your age. It doesn’t make the customer feel their age when buying. Sounds great, right?

What Is Her Experience?

In our report Reframing Ageing we looked at how life doesn’t stop at 50. And nor does exercise – though how you experience it does change. One successful UK active apparel brand, Deakin and Blue, really leans into this with their uplifting Swinspiration pages, which reframes sporting achievements from physical wins to a candid, honest look at life as an active older woman – often now about wellbeing as much as sporting goals. We see this in their web page section with contributions from customers: Body Stories sparks poignant responses by asking provocative questions, such as: “You’re standing on a beach in your swimwear on a nice hot day. How do you feel about yourself and your body at that moment?”

Support Can Be Sexy

Sports bras give extra support, and are still available in the sexier styles. Where is the equivalent across other apparel? Australian swimwear brand Baiia has a product innovation in activewear with the world’s first four piece bikini, a flattering alternative to a full body cover-up (and modelled by older models, acknowledging their experience:  “As women, our bodies are often changing and adapting to the rhythm of life’s varied stages”). The UK brand, Fijjit, offers the stylish All-In-One workout outfit with an extra high waistband and a halter neck mesh bib to keep everything in place. While the US brand Any Age promises stylish kit that compliments and supports the mature body: “Spillage. Sagging. Support. We heard you.”

Apparel retailers have been leading the way on so many great products that help female body positivity. It’s a good time to develop that with the 50-plus women’s sport market, and reframe their ageing experience in activewear. It should be a big win.

How ‘zero-waste’ became the new immersive dining experience – Crowd’s Phoebe Trimingham looks at our appetite for sustainable haute cuisine…

City Limits Volume Nine – download it here.

In our latest issue of City Limits – our regular exploration of changing urban experience – we look at solutions to world problems in the food business – from climate labels on menus to floating farms. One of our spotlights on sustainability is the rise of the zero-waste restaurant as not only a call to action, but an immersive experience for the diner.

Cities around the world are full of immersive dining experiences. From eating dinner in a makeshift aircraft, to sipping cocktails in the cupboard of a pawn-shop; going out for a meal is no longer just about the food. For those looking beyond standard dining experiences, meals are accompanied by a spectacle. So much so that experience fatigue has set in. 

So where do you turn when all the ‘experiences’ have been had? When you’re served yet another once-in-a-lifetime theatre show while trying to eat your soup? You turn back to the real hero: the food. Forward-thinking restaurants in global cities are shunning the temptation for distracting entertainment, and letting the food become the experience again. 

Enter the zero-waste restaurants: establishments attempting to do away with food waste entirely. Here, the food becomes the focus as diners buy into the admirable attempt at fully sustainable dining. While the issue of waste is certainly not a recent obsession for the restaurant industry – lots of places have been experimenting with sustainability for decades – what’s new is the front and centering of the efforts, and the glamorisation that goes with it.

Silo in London, for example, is designed ‘back to front’ with the bin in mind (irony being they don’t actually have a bin, they don’t need one). All food is used in its entirety – think cured mushroom stems and yeast treacle. Any leftovers are composted and sent back to their hyperlocal suppliers. Like Silo, Helsinki’s Nolla (‘zero’ in Finnish) sends compost back into the system, but guests are welcome to take home a scoopful too – a different kind of doggy bag. It’s philosophy of ‘refuse, reduce, reuse, and only as a last resource, recycle’ is consistent, from a reusable coffee container and a composter (above) to not accepting food that comes in single use plastic.

Meanwhile, Mume in Taipei has a dedicated sourcing manager (rare in a small, Asian restaurant) with the mission to champion underrated Taiwanese ingredients and zero-waste cooking practices.

These places strive to avoid food leftovers, but also any scrap of rubbish. Rhodora in Brooklyn – a fully sustainable wine bar also ‘waging a war against waste’ – shreds wine boxes into compost material and donates corks to an organisation that turns them into shoes. Everything is transported on bikes. Back at Silo, plates are made from plastic bags, wall lights from crushed bottles, and ceiling fixtures from dried seaweed. This all-in approach to the zero-waste concept is what makes these restaurants a fully immersive dining experience – no gimmick-y entertainment required.  

But these restaurants aren’t cheap: they’re all mid to high-end. This is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, sustainability is definitely something to be coveted, but why is the experience of it not more accessible? Secondly, could the price points actually work in sustainability’s favour? Making zero-waste dining a sexy, high-end experience brands the concept as an aspirational lifestyle. Like the Tesla car model, fancy zero-waste restaurants could, in turn, make the thought of intensive recycling more desirable – eggshell compost and all.  

Saying that, it is a bit odd to glamorise something that should be an everyday activity. If people are playing at sustainability when they dine out, are they less likely to practise it at home? The very act of going out for a meal that has been beautifully prepared for you distances it – managing food waste becomes something to passively experience and admire, rather than actively do. 

Either way, city diners are hungry for new, immersive experiences – and zero-waste restaurants are a welcome addition to the menu.

Cities don’t need to feel devoid of empathy. Crowd’s Olivia Anderson explores how safe and inclusive urban spaces begin with building for women…

Urban mobility specialist Mónica Araya was recharging her electric car in a remote part of Norway when she had a thought: she wouldn’t have felt safe there without her husband. But while much thinking about the female experience of cities is rooted in functional-spatial concerns around safety, she acknowledged it can be taken so much further. 

While streetlights and street-facing windows can mitigate the problem of women’s safety, they aren’t completely solving it. We can consider what happens when you take values traditionally associated with femininity – kindness, sensitivity, co-operation – and use them to shape a city. How embedding a different value system could be the catalyst for impactful cultural shifts. And how to plan a city through the prism of the female experience can make space for values like inclusivity and empathy.

For example, cities can take into account a more modular mode of living with decentralised hubs and flexible, multi-functional spaces that make it easier for women to access all parts of the city. In 2020, mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo led on this with her hyper-local vision for the 15-minute city: urban planning so that people live, work and have access to all the services they need — whether that’s shops, schools, theatres or medical care — within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. 

The drive to prioritise accessibility in urban design can also be seen in the creation of inclusive spaces; Geneva uses female figures in road signs, and Vienna features LGBT couples in traffic lights. These simple acts legitimise the presence of women, and other marginalised groups. And here we see how attitudinal shifts can often follow these concrete planning initiatives – in this case, tolerance.

Meanwhile, ensuring diverse representation in urban planning at the different stages of development is a way to also avoid oversights that make cities inaccessible for women; for example, planners in Barcelona identified that the public restrooms couldn’t accommodate prams. In Amsterdam, there was a public outcry around the lack of sanitary facilities for women. Conversely, Edmonton in Canada supplies free period products in every public restroom. This kind of provision has the power to drive inclusion. 

Most persuasive for a collaborative city is knowing that if you get gender right, it can build empathy and emotional intelligence into the DNA of a city – making space for those to whom cities have historically been inhospitable. Improvements like more rest areas for people with disabilities, or better lighting, and facilitating access to all the things a city has to offer signifies that the city is for everyone. 

The social implications of empathic infrastructure have the potential to be far-reaching and to effect a more equitable urban environment. After all, our spaces define us as much as we define them. 

To read more about spotlighting safety measures for women our City Limits: Solutions here.

It’s easy to forget the importance of empathy in the face of new technology but, as Crowd DNA director Paul White explains, for cultural insights, it will always be the star of the show...

In the world of research and insight, it’s easy to be tempted by new methods, new delivery systems and new technologies. And while staying current is really important, delivering great results always comes back to the core skill of qualitative work: empathy. 

Nursing scholar, Theresa Wiseman, breaks empathy down into four key attributes:  

 1. Seeing the world the way others see it

2. Beginning from a non-judgemental space

3. Understanding another person’s feelings

4. Communicating your understanding of that person’s feelings back to them.

A perfect place to start, but we like to think there’s a fifth step to this process in cultural insight work, and that is: Communicating people’s feelings honestly and objectively to the client that commissioned the research.

So, if empathy is the cornerstone of our industry, why is it so easy to forget? Short answer: we unknowingly participate in systems that push it out of the conversation. Consider the chat you might have with a food stall trader compared to a targeted ad telling you the latest lunch deals. Both are marketing the same thing, but feel very different. We can’t change the current model of communication, but it has pushed us further away from IRL interaction. Short-termism then compounds this with quarterly targets and the need to make quick wins. So we all stay on the treadmill, often unable to take a long enough view to address larger human needs and do something truly empathetic.

This perspective is intensified by a tendency to focus on the newest, slickest methods – because, honestly, suggesting we’ll talk to some people and build recommendations on what they said (yet again) doesn’t sound as exciting as whatever the latest method might be. In our opinion, as long as your methodology is answering the problem you’re trying to solve, you’re on the right track. No need to get starstruck by the latest eye-tracking, VR gadgets or neuroimaging if it takes you away from the initial problem – a problem which is almost always a human one anyway.   

Next, if we know empathy is in short supply, how do we build it in? It starts by remembering our own humanity. At Crowd, we treat our colleagues and clients like humans and create space for people to bring themselves into their work and interactions with participants. By being present and using active listening, we are able to develop deeper connections and quickly bypass the researcher/respondent relationship. There is always insight to be found by truly listening, seeking to understand and not being scared to ask why. 

Don’t be afraid to advocate for human beings. All of us (even global heads of marketing and CEOs) happen to be people – and looking for commonalities between yourself and your customers is key. When we make business decisions in boardrooms (or Zoom calls) with little view of the outside world, the people at the end of the process can be easily forgotten. Instead, bring real people into the room in any way possible. This could be audience immersion work, insightful videos to build empathy or literally inviting your living, breathing customers into your process. 

We must stop reducing people to their ability to consume products. It’s a false shortcut that does no one any good. People are consumers some of the time – but they’re people all of the time. They have lives, worries, families, goals and dreams. It’s only by being more empathetic as professionals and companies that we are able to realise this, and harness the power of cultural insight to add true value to people’s lives.