In today’s dynamic market, brands must not only capture attention but also endure and resonate deeply with cultural trends and values. This concept is known as Cultural Endurance, a powerful idea imagined by Smarts, signifying a brand’s ability to stay relevant and influential over time.
Smarts approached us with the ambition of helping brands to understand their impact in culture – their alignment to people’s values, and cultural resonance, over time. We helped turn their concept into reality by developing a robust model using our data to truly measure Cultural Endurance. In this blog, we’ll explore what it means for a brand to be culturally endurant, highlight brands excelling in this area, and delve into how Freemavens measures Cultural Endurance using our innovative tool.
In this blog, we’ll explore what it means for a brand to be culturally endurant, highlight brands excelling in this area, and delve into how Freemavens measures Cultural Endurance using our innovative tool.
What is Cultural Endurance?
Cultural Endurance is the capacity of a brand to consistently resonate with what matters to people in culture. It’s about being meaningful, distinctive, and impactful over time. Brands that achieve Cultural Endurance are not only noticed and chosen but also inspire ongoing consumer interest and advocacy.
Why Cultural Endurance matters
In an era marked by short-termism, many brands focus on quick wins rather than building lasting cultural relevance. However, truly enduring brands understand the importance of aligning with deep cultural truths, resonating through thoughtful strategy, and maintaining clear cultural impact. These brands become a part of the cultural fabric, creating lasting connections with their audiences.
Brands getting it right
Many brands are ‘getting it right,’ but we had the privilege of gaining first-hand insights from two amazing brands that explained how they maintain cultural endurance.
Vogue is an exemplary culturally endurant brand, consistently maintaining its place in modern culture. Vogue’s ability to evolve while staying true to its core identity has kept it at the forefront of fashion and lifestyle for decades.
On the other hand, Gauchoworld is building its empire within modern culture by collecting its base through authenticity and staying true to itself. Gauchoworld’s commitment to genuine cultural expression resonates deeply with its audience, ensuring a strong and growing presence.
Does the world need another way of measuring brand impact and relevance?
Freemavens wanted to ensure that existing methods were not fit for purpose before building something to support this new proposition from Smarts. Auditing the marketplace and three decades of academic research showed that equity methods were not moving at the speed of consumers.
The primary challenge being how do you find and test the language and artifacts at scale. Prompted surveys had limited language to assess consumer relevance and did not allow us to effectively time travel backwards to see cultural movements arising.
So, we set out to find a new way forward building a novel method combining a mix of market and brand artifacts with reactions from consumers to find a new diagnostic at the interface of culture.
Measuring Cultural Endurance
We have developed an innovative tool, the Cultural Endurance Measure, which evaluates brands across five pivotal metrics:
- Cultural Alignment: How well a brand’s values align with those of its consumers.
- Cultural Presence: The visibility and presence of a brand in cultural spaces.
- Cultural Interest: The level of curiosity and interest a brand generates.
- Cultural Buzz: The amount of conversation and excitement a brand creates.
- Cultural Advocacy: The degree to which consumers are willing to advocate for the brand.
The five key metrics explained
Our metrics explore what can be discovered (Alignment and Presence), and what matters to people (Interest, Buzz and Advocacy).
We gathered millions of datapoints developing this IP and found that we could unearth interesting facets of discovery. Some deep dives reveal how a range of different brands performed across these measures when we assessed the Activewear clothing category hinting not only on cultural divides – but opportunities to tune strategies and action.
Cultural Alignment: This metric assesses if a brand’s values match those of its target audience. For instance, Patagonia’s commitment to environmental sustainability aligns well with the values of its eco-conscious customers.
Cultural Presence: Evaluates how frequently and prominently a brand appears in relevant cultural contexts. The North Face, with its strong association with outdoor adventure, maintains high cultural presence in related spaces.
Cultural Interest: Measures the level of consumer curiosity. Under Armour, through innovative products and celebrity endorsements, generates significant interest among fitness enthusiasts.
Cultural Buzz: Captures the volume and intensity of discussions about the brand. A brand like Nike, with its high-profile marketing campaigns, often creates substantial buzz.
Cultural Advocacy: Looks at how willing customers are to support and recommend the brand. Brands that foster strong communities and loyalty programs tend to score high here.
In contrast to a single monolithic score, the five metrics provide a clearer horizon of the places to win as well as being fair and critical of cultural disconnects. So you can go from diagnostic to doing in a more informed and inpsired way.
Our approach
Our approach leverages digital data to measure these metrics comprehensively. We analyse digital imprints, signals, and artifacts created by both brands and consumers to derive a holistic understanding of a brand’s cultural resonance. This involves examining how people talk about the brand, the sentiment behind these discussions, and how these elements evolve over time.
By understanding these metrics, brands can pinpoint areas of strength and opportunities for improvement. For example, if a brand scores high in Cultural Alignment but low in Cultural Buzz, it may need to enhance its marketing strategies to generate more excitement and conversation.
Cultural Endurance is essential for brands aiming to achieve long-term success and relevance. By measuring and understanding the key metrics of Cultural Alignment, Presence, Interest, Buzz, and Advocacy, brands can craft strategies that ensure they remain significant and impactful in an ever-evolving cultural landscape.
The exploration and development of IP continues
As we explore high and low interest sectors and expand our language model, we are finding rich portfolio of signals that will better inform the link between culture, performance, and evolving consumer values.
Freemavens are building restlessly upon this novel IP and Smarts are striding forward to be champions of cultural endurance for brands.
If you want to learn more about how to measure and improve your brand’s Cultural Endurance, get in touch with us today via contact@freemavens.com.
