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 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.
Read more here 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.
