In 2023, we released How We Work With Culture, our guide to exploring culture from the street up and how we use this perspective to amplify impact for our clients.
This time we’re back to dig a little deeper into how we do it.
In this book, we first talk about why cultural strategy matters more than ever now, the second chapter looks at how we get clients the culturally charged commercial wins and finally, we introduce our killer team of cultural strategists from around the world.
We hope it gives our team and our clients a stronger sense of what we are about. Putting down on paper how we will continue to deliver Culturally Charged Commercial Advantage for the next 15 years…
Thursday March 20 at 9.30AM EST/ 1.30PM GMT. RSVP by clicking here.
The Future Of Cultural Strategy – a webinar on how to help brands make real opportunities out of our messy experiences…
To celebrate the launch of our second book, How We Work As Cultural Strategists, join us for a webinar on the best way to get cultural insights today.
What we do at Crowd is guided by the single, simple belief that all brands and people live – and are influenced by – culture.Culture is everywhere around us – it’s the unwritten rules and rituals that make our world(s) tick. It’s the starting point for how people behave and trickles all the way down to how people see, feel, engage with and advocate for brands.
But culture is getting messier.
Society is getting messier by the day. People are getting messier by the minute. And the consumer experience is messier by the second.
At Crowd DNA we have adapted our tools to unpick these messy experiences.
_Culture isn’t static, so neither are we. Learn how blending specialisms is the best way to get cultural insights.
_Discover how brands can act on culture, not simply report (or worse, take from culture).
_ Learn how to make real commercial opportunities out of our messy experience.
From our second book, How We Work As Cultural Strategists (left)
Join our Global Managing Director, El Pigram and Joey Zeelen, Managing Director EMEA to find out how to act on cultural change.
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.
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 morehere 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.
Read morehere in our work with 72&Sunny we found three codes of ageing to tap into and ‘reframe’ the conversation.
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.
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.
Joey Zeelen, Crowd DNA’s Head of Agency (EMEA), gives a crash course in how to go from a brand fling to brand love at Qual360 global conference…
One of our most recent – and most impactful – projects was built for booking.com, who wanted help to get closer to the intense excitement their customers feel about holidays and trips. Simply put, folks don’t swipe right on travel brands, they’re swiping right on travel itself. And booking.com wanted to use that energy to fire up the brand even more. So we set out to discover how to authentically capture love for travel – and foster brand love in that journey.
At the Qual360 global conference 2024, Linda Koelemij, booking.com Manager Qualitative Research & Insights, and myself will talk about how we took the brand back to its origin of loving travel. Here are three of the key destination points we arrived at on this project…
Not how they book, but why they book
We wanted to achieve an organisational and marcomms shift, and make employees and agency partners think differently and more diversely about holidays and trips. Rather than the purpose of travel being a function; to visit a city or to go to the beach – we looked at why people book. What role does a trip fulfil in their wider cultural/ or personal context? Through personal travel diaries, virtual visits, and IRL dream trip sessions, we learned that booking travel is about fundamental emotional jobs. Participants told us about wanting to connect with their loved one – to experience joy, freedom, belonging, happiness, indulgence, and the list goes on and on. This is why they travel. This is the goal they want to achieve. This is their job to be done. And it’s definitely not functional.
Our journey to finding brand love for booking.com
It all starts with stories…
We really enjoyed hearing stories like the German couple having loud s*x as they took a holiday without their young children. The amazing research stories revealed human truths… truths that were endearing, emotional and just very real and fun: Perfect food for creative partners to riff from and create more diverse and authentic campaigns. And these groups of truths led us to fundamental jobs to be done – learnings that were critical for marcomms, the marketing funnel and creative diversity but also for product teams to design new features around.
From a fling to brand love
Ultimately all the human truths revealed ten fundamental jobs to be done. And it was through knowing about these – the quick escape from everyday life, the great annual reset, the pivotal life-changing trip – that we could strategise from fling to brand love. It’s this perspective on customers and travel that is now helping booking.com get closer to their wealth of customers and why they do the things they do. Helping with journeys, channels, marcomms and general audience understanding. It’s a great destination to have arrived at. We love booking.com and can’t wait for our next research date…
If you’d like to learn more about how cultural insights can help a brand ignite more brand love, get in touch: hello@crowdDNA.com
Crowd DNA’s Dr Jennifer Simon celebrates all the good news about AI at the MRS Semiotics and Cultural Insights Conference
Commercial Semiotics, like other industries, is experiencing trends toward automation – with similar hopes and trepidations. So when I was asked to speak at the MRS Semiotics and Cultural Insights Conference 2024, I wanted to focus on how we determine the optimal balance between human and AI involvement – the good signs, as it were.
The three following themes here were my introduction at the event to how semiotics and AI can begin to unlock new dimensions in research, creativity, and – most crucially – customer understanding:
Leveraging AI: Enhancing our rigour and breadth of our Storytelling and Analysis
While commercial semiotics is an established and rigorous methodology, AI supported semiotics can provide added robustness to our approach. By increasing the amount of source material we analyse, it gives us hundreds of visual and textual evidence across categories – to further validate, enhance and innovate aspects of our storytelling and analysis for even richer insights.
Demystifying AI: Bridging the Knowledge Gap and Establishing a Common Understanding
In the market research industry in general, as with semiotics, there needs to be education on what AI is exactly to demystify it, as we don’t have a common understanding of it. We at Crowd DNA and the wider Strat7 Group have developed an AI working group where we provide cross agency show and tells and internal webinars to sensitise team members to what generative AI is, its capabilities and limitations.
A partnership. Our Human Expertise and Technological innovation
Semiotics can be enhanced with AI, but human creativity and insights is still very critical – especially when advising clients on business decisions and providing strategic and credible recommendations and outputs.
Undoubtedly, AI is beginning to reshape how we work as Semioticians. And at Crowd DNA, it is part of our offering and we aspire to use it to give better, more scope to our outputs (whether that means strategists have time freed up for more creative tasks, or clients use it to analyse vast amounts of data efficiently). We know there’s lots of areas of integration between semiotics and AI that are just beginning to be explored…
The MRS Semiotics and Cultural Insights Conference 2024 is on 1st February 2024. For more information go to https://www.mrs.org.uk/.
If you’d like to learn more about how we use semiotics to reach real cultural insights, or more about our AI solutions – powered by strat7.ai – please get in touch: hello@crowdDNA.com
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
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?
At Crowd DNA we’re all about embracing the messiness of culture. It’s where we think brands can really thrive, and we relish our role as specialists in navigating unknowns. In this webinar we’ll:
_Discover how uncertainty can be a motivator for both consumers and brands
_Explore the human needs that are heightened in response to instability
_Use our trends and semiotics expertise to provide guidance on how brands can speak to these needs, across visuals, language and more
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.
Cultural strategy executive Jasmine Lo reflects on her time spent during Crowd's Culture Club internship programme…
The start of a new year is always a good time to process experiences and jot down any learnings for the year ahead. Last summer, I joined Crowd’s Culture Club programme as a cultural strategy intern. The experience was a whirlwind in the best way possible. With time to reflect on it since becoming a permanent member of the team, I thought I’d write a bit of a note to self and share some things I’ve taken with me from the journey.
1. Trust in the process of figuring it out
It is rarely a straight line to landing the right role and company. It certainly took me a while before I found Crowd. I don’t think I’ve ever completed an internship that felt as fulfilling as Culture Club. Being thrown straight in as a newbie is terrifying, but it’s the most effective way to learn, and Crowd has you shape-shifting and figuring it out from the get go.
2. There are so many ways in
It is always eye-opening to learn all the ways folks at Crowd made their way to the company. A non-linear career of funky job pivots or travelling across countries through the years is something we are united by. With such an array of experiences across industries and cultures, it’s no wonder Crowd does things a little differently.
3. Confusion became my best pal, so, I will let it ground me
I have never been so pleased to have no idea what was going on than here at Crowd. Culture Club armed me with the openness to keep asking myself and others questions along the way. Every day was (and still is) totally different and it forces you to ask questions. Before joining Crowd, I had rarely seen research done with such creativity and empathy. The process itself is a source of endless inspiration.
Jasmine (right) at the Crowd winter party
Welcoming in 2023...
4. Solidarity and support come in so many forms at Crowd
Who knows where little conversations here and there can lead to. One of the best pieces of advice I got when I first joined was: “it’s not about doing the most in order to prove yourself – that’s not what we’re about at Crowd – it’s about tuning in and being really present and talking to others”. As a newbie, that was invaluable to me. There is always someone at Crowd I feel able to reach out to and that’s really special and important to hold onto.
5. My cross-cultural chaos matters
This is cultural strategy after all. The more cultural nuance the better. I need to trust in the things I do know because they help me navigate a lot of what cultural strategy is. Our individual intuition to navigate conversations is everything.
I’ve now joined the strategic insights team permanently, but I will always look back on my early months at Crowd with fondness. Culture Club is a prime example of what an internship should feel like – you should be able to walk away and into whatever role is next for you confident in the possibilities ahead.
Curious about the Culture Club internship programme? Read all about it here.
Roughly 14 years and five months in the making, finally we've got round to writing our book. How We Work With Culture tells our story - the important stuff and the weird bits and pieces. But why bother? CEO and founder Andy Crysell explains...
First up, an admission. Probably should’ve written this a long time ago. Not now, almost 15 years into the Crowd DNA story.
So why now? Well, better late than never. Also because, as we grow, as we become more global, communicating what we stand for becomes ever more important to get right. We can’t just hope that this will all drift through the ether, like we perhaps could when Crowd DNA was a handful of people sitting around the same table. Now we’re not even sitting in the same timezone.
Prior to creating How We Work With Culture, what’s in here had never all been put down on paper in the one place. It had been talked about in instalments. Shared in various presentations, workshops and company get-togethers. It had existed in the heads of various people (much of it in mine). It often ended up hidden away in the mysterious depths of our Google Drive.
What do we hope to achieve with this? To give our team, particularly new arrivals, a stronger sense of what we’re about. The confidence to dive into the wonderful messiness of working with culture. And if there are people outside of the business who are also interested in what we’re about, that’s great, too.
We hope it will demonstrate that, despite all of the aforementioned messiness, Crowd DNA has craft to it – something we can call… a way. We want to be seen as a unique proposition, and to define and inspire a next generation of cultural strategists. We think How We Work With Culture has a big role to play here, too.
But then in some ways it’s just nice to have the opportunity to tell our story. All of the things we chat about. The stuff we try to make sense of, and somewhat obsess over. The big strategic things, but then also all of the weird bits and pieces that make up our narrative. All of it, in its own way, is important.
With thanks to the entire Crowd DNA team, whose creativity and energy never fails to amaze. Special applause for Chloe Swayne for all of the fabulous design work (and perseverance) that went into creating How We Work With Culture. And to our group managing director, Dr Matilda Andersson, for her contributions here, but more so, for her commitment to Crowd DNA itself.
