Getting to grips with the C-word
KENDALL: I might need you to take my cultural temperature
GREG: Uh-huh. Got it. -
KENDALL: Okay?
GREG: As in? Uh, wh... what does that, uh, mean?
Some time later…
KENDALL: Okay. So... But I think the headline needs to be "fuck the weather, we're changing the cultural climate”
Some time later…
SHIV: I have a plan... but I could easily get crushed between these two fucking men, and I need to game things out, and I need to do that with someone who can give me a read legally and culturally - and politically and socially, and, you know, it's a lot.
One episode into Season 3 of Succession and the word ‘culture’ has been heard three times. But what these people are referring to exactly, we do not know. The word is tossed out like some kind of careless gesture, a wave in the vague direction of an undefined ‘out there’. And there’s a lot of that same vague waving in marketing and communications circles:
“Brands like Disney+, TikTok and PlayStation have proved time and again that they have what it takes to shape culture and change the world.”
“Brands should be future focused, actively participating in the positive progression of culture and society.”
“Brands have started to shape culture.”
“Rather than measuring success through an economic lens, the impact of branding can be considered first and foremost as cultural.”
“There’s an opportunity for what we call ‘culture brands’: brands that take a stance, aiming to challenge and shape culture, rather than simply reflect it.”
“Culture brands create a rallying call and use social power to drive cultural and social change. This is the new role for brands, a role that’s important and gaining momentum.”
“The cultural conversation”
“I love commanding culture.”
What it is, where it is to be found, how we are to recognise it, its shape and dynamics… all this remains a mystery. And while we’re confident that we can be a part of it and even change it (whatever ‘it’) is, it’s a mystery we seem happy to keep as such. This absence of specificity calls to mind the words of the sixteenth century philosophy and statesman Francis Bacon: “There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.” If words are tools for thinking then perhaps if we had a clearer view on what it is we are talking about, we could have a clearer view of our place and role within it, better direct our energies, and more accurately chart and measure our impact and progress.
In the quest for clarification, diving into the world of academia is, I discovered, to find oneself in a sea of competing (and contested) definitions:
“Culture is the man-made part of the environment”
Herskovits (1948)“The total shared, learned behaviour of a society or a subgroup.”
Meade (1953)“An historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols.”
Geertz (1973)“Widely distributed, lasting mental and public representations inhabiting a given social group.”
Sperber (1996)“Information capable of affecting individuals' behaviour that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission.”
Richerson and Boyd (2005)
Digging beneath these headlines doesn’t yield much that feels useful to our less lofty, more practical purposes as communicators and marketers. Culture one is told, in various ways, is taboos, norms, behaviours, language, artefacts, symbols, values, rituals, knowledge. It encompasses, we are told, religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language, marriage, music, what we believe is right or wrong, how we sit at the table, how we greet visitors, how we behave with loved ones, “and a million other things”. ‘Culture’ then, would seem to be… Everything. Unless we’re happy to believe that brands are part of Everything and can change Everything we need to do better than this.
The shape of culture
A long time ago in an ad agency far, far away I had the opportunity and privilege of working with Professor Grant McCracken. As co-conspirators our forays into the bars of the mid-West and delving into such wonders of human nature as “the art of destroying the social self” truly opened the mediocre mind of a junior planner. And it is to McCracken that I always turn when trying to find the bridge between the academic and the applied. And also writing that is not strangled by the posturing, metastasized ugliness so beloved of academic communities.
In his book Chief Culture Officer, McCracken (who I will cite unapologetically and liberally) distinguishes between what he terms “fast” and “slow” culture. Fast culture, writes McCracken, is “vivid, visible, obvious, and, yes, fashionable”. By contrast, slow culture “is everything beneath the surface, less well charted, much less visible”.
Grant’s distinction between the fast and visible and the slow and invisible begins to put that hitherto vaguely glimpsed, ill-defined ‘out there’ that we call “Culture” into sharper focus. There is a structure to it - comprising of an invisible, intangible substructure, and a visible and concrete superstructure (yes, the theft and repurposing of Marx’s language here is deliberate).
The cultural substructure
The invisible substructure of culture underpins our experience of the phenomenal world. It gives us as Judith Williamson, Professor of Cultural History at the School of Communication and Design at the UK’s University for the Creative Arts, puts it, “a grid of the terms available to think in at any given time” - a socially-derived shared and commonly agreed upon body of knowledge, beliefs, assumptions, values and judgements that gives the world structure and meaning. It is as the Austrian philosopher and social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz has written, “that province of reality which the wide-awake and normal adult simply takes for granted in the attitude of common sense”. And as such it structures our what Schutz called our ‘Life World’ in two ways.
As a lens this substructure shapes our experience of our world and through which the entirety of our lived reality and all its phenomena are seen, segmenting it up into discrete, intelligible and commonly understood and agreed on parcels of meaning - what McCracken refers to as cultural categories. so, masculine, feminine, work, leisure, good, bad, right, wrong, sacred, profane, young, old, weak, powerful, cleanliness, dirtiness, edible, inedible… and so on..
Not only does it give us a lens through which we apprehend the world, suffuse it with meaning, and organise it in our minds, but it also acts as a blueprint of human activity, determining in Schultz’s words, “the coordinates of social action and productive activity, specifying behaviours and objects that issue from both”. As the media theorist and sociologist, Dick Hebdige wrote in his seminal book Subculture: The Meaning of Style: “We tend to live inside these maps as surely as we live in the ‘real’ world: they ‘think’ us as much as we ‘think’ them”.
This substructure of culture consists of not just categories of meaning but comes with opinions, ideas, and judgements about those values. As McCracken puts it:
“If cultural categorises are the result of culture’s segmentation of the world into discrete parcels, cultural principles are the organising ideas by which the segmentation is performed… Thus the clothing that distinguishes between men and women or between high and low classes also reveals something of the nature of the differences that are supposed to exist between these categories”
What McCracken calls ‘principles’, author of How Brands Become Icons and Cultural Strategy Professor Douglas Holt calls ‘ideologies’, arguing that “an ideology is a point of view on one of these important cultural constructs that has become widely shared and taken for granted.” Thus for example, men are supposed to be x/y/z, while women are supposed to be x/y/z, beauty looks like x/y/z, and so on.
The French philosopher Foucault was a little more forthright on the matter:
“Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true”.
It’s a reminder that ‘regimes of truth’ are power structures which like any regime, circumscribe what is normal, legitimate, acceptable - and conversely what is abnormal, illegitimate, and unacceptable. And so it is that the possibility of friction, dissatisfaction, resistance, and conflict is baked into culture’s substructure. On which, more later.
The mechanics of cultural evolution
None of this is static. Let’s take something as big idea of individuality in the West - the notion that we are all different, and gifted with the freedom (and indeed right) to explore and express our own ideas, our own opinions, and our own uniqueness. Now it is almost impossible for us postmodern Westerners to imagine, but for much of European history (up until the Middle Ages or the 1700s, depending on the school of thought one subscribes to), there was but one prevailing reality, and this reality applied to every man, woman and child. The idea of individualism as we know it today simply did not exist. A person’s role in the world was largely not theirs to choose. Helped by religion that urged humility before a powerful God, their identify was located and lived as part of a group. The accidents of blood gender, and geography were fate, shaping and fixing the reality a person was to perceive and experience.
So while notions of individuality, ‘self-actualisation’, and identity are today often bandied around as if they’ve been eternal immutable truths about the human condition (I’m looking at you, Abraham Maslow) the truth of the matter is that for much of human history, people’s ‘identities’ (in so far as they had one) and roles were actually predefined. Individuals did not need to worry who they were, or who they wanted to be. People were simply not encumbered with the project and freedom of self-definition, and of exercising their own thoughts and feelings on the matter. Identity, reality and roles were all supplied by the world in which they found themselves.
In his examination of the causes of cultural change in modern world history, the historian Professor Peter Stearns recounts how the past really was another country and they really did do things differently there. Most Europeans for example, simply named their children either for Christian saints or family ancestors. Birthdays - the idea of individuals deserving attention - were not were not yet celebrated by ordinary people (the first birthday party celebrated in North America was in 1772). Diary keeping - the idea that individual experiences and records were valid and important was not a habit. Happiness was not yet seen as a perfectly legitimate, even desirable goal. While of course clever or lucky individuals did advance themselves, the idea of social mobility and the notion that opportunity was a good thing, to be explicitly encouraged, did not exist. And the protection of the individual from state authority and the whole Western concept of individuals having rights had yet to emerge.
But at some point from the Middle Ages to the early modern centuries (when exactly the shift began is contested), Western culture did change as Stearns puts it “rather dramatically, and unusually”, arguing that multiple factors were at were at work. In embracing the idea of reason and experimentation, he argues, the European scientific revolution the ran through into the 1700s, stimulated the belief that individuals did not enter the world immutable but were capable of new learning. The educators in the eighteenth century Enlightenment in turn advanced the idea that children were born as blank slates and were thus capable of improvement if they were properly educated. This in turn encouraged the idea that society would advance by opening wider doors to individual achievement. And compounding all this was socio-economic change and rapid rapid population growth. Writes Stearns:
“Old markers of social status became less reliable: with population growth, for example, many young adults could no longer be as confident that their parents would have enough property for them to share in inheritance. More and more families saw an unexpected number of children surviving into adulthood, which inevitably put pressure on family ties and larger beliefs alike. Cultural change, in this setting, was particularly appealing to younger people, who could see the applicability of the new ideas about human nature and who were particularly affected by social disruptions. So… a generational effect would further the transformation over time.”
Stearns concludes:
“The clearest explanations for the rise of individualism combines larger cultural factors with shifts in economic and social structure”
The themes of the influence of socio-economic factors and intergenerational value change find support in work of the political scientist and director of the World Values Survey Ronald Inglehart. Dating back to 1981, the World Value Survey consists of nationally representative surveys conducted in almost 100 countries (accounting for almost 90 percent of the world’s population) using a common questionnaire. As such it claims to be “the largest non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed, currently including interviews with almost 400,000 respondents”.
Inglehart’s basic thesis is that economic development is at the root of cultural change. As people have to worry less and less about basic safety and survival needs he argues, their concerns turn to higher order ‘post materialist’ needs. Thus, he argues, industrialisation brings urbanisation, occupational specialisation and rising levels of formal education in any society that undertakes it. This in turn diversifies human interaction, shifting the emphasis from “command -obedience relations” towards bargaining relations, and as existential security rises, it diminishes the influence of religion, traditional values, and rigid rules and tilts societies towards secular, self-directed or self-discovered values, towards personal autonomy, and self-expression. And with this shift comes tolerance of outgroups, tolerance of diversity, rising demands for participation in decision-making in economic and political life, and a shift away from deference to all forms of authority. In other words, modernisation is the primary driver of changing beliefs and values.
Key to Ingelhart’s analysis is the assertion that people’s basic values are largely fixed when they reach adulthood, and that they change relatively little thereafter. For Inglehart, the way culture changes and evolves is through the phenomenon of what he termed ‘intergenerational replacement’ - the dynamic in which younger birth cohorts who grow up in different conditions from those that shaped earlier generations gradually replace the older adult population. And indeed this is precisely what Inglehart’s data would appear to demonstrate - a gradual shift from materialist to post-materialist values as younger birth cohorts replace the older cohorts. So for Ingelhart change takes place along “multi-decade timelines between the emergence of root causes and the time when cultural change becomes manifest in a society”.
Here for example, is the result of Inglehart's cohort analysis based on 300,000+ interviews. Each cohort’s position at a given time has been calculated by subtracting the percentage of Materialists from the percentage of Postmaterialists. We can see that there is no life-cycle effect - the lines do not shift downward as each cohort ages. There are clear period effects but they have no lasting impact - during period of economic downturn, each cohort moves down (ie. becomes more Materialistic) and with recovery moves up again become more Postmaterialistic. However, the differences between the cohorts remains stable. What is of note (and is central to Inglehart’s theory) is that three oldest cohorts leave the sample to be replaced by three younger, less Materialistic cohorts, born in 1956-65, 1966-75, and 1976-85. As a result, we see a net shift towards Postmaterialist values among the adult population from 1970 to 2009:
It is worth noting that Raül Tormos (2020) takes issue with Inglehart’s assertion that people do not change their values over the course of their lives (i.e. that intracohort value change does not happen). Using the same data sets as Inglehart, Tormos claims to demonstrate that while each generation does indeed remain influenced by the experiences of the impressionable years, “adult socialisation linked to life cycle processes or the historical period exerts a substantial impact on current political orientation”.
Examining the data on attitudes towards homosexuality, for example, Tormos points to the clear increase in tolerance within age cohorts over time, concluding his exhaustive analysis that “the deep change in tolerance of homosexuality experienced by most countries in the developed world between 1981 and 2013 comes from an actualisation of attitudes, and not just from generational effects”.
Tormos concludes his analysis of the data:
“Cohort replacement happens to explain only a portion of the shift produced in post materialist values over time. The largest share comes from intra-cohort changes, this is, members of all generations adapting they values rot contextual socioeconomic transformations. changes at the context level which have the power to shape generations during the impressionable years, continue to shape people beyond that life stage. The values of adults are not invulnerable to changes in their environment. Materialist/postmaterialist values change to adapt to new contextual conditions, as reflected but their coevolution with the socioeconomic environment. When the external conditions follow at trend, post materialist values associated to those external conditions also change according to that trend, and they do it in a concurrent way not just through cohort replacement”.
All that said, while Inglehart and Tormos disagree about the rate of change, both their analyses point convincingly to the fact that changes in people’s socioeconomic conditions are a key driver of changes in their belief systems. So perhaps Marx had it right all along. As his friend Engels said in his eulogy:
“Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact—hitherto concealed by the overgrowth of ideology—that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people have been evolved, and in light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as hitherto been the case.”
So much for the substructure of culture.
The cultural superstructure
The superstructure that sits on top is this intangible reservoir of meaning substantiated - made real, visible, concrete, lived, and experienced - through as McCracken puts it, “human practice”. Or as Don Slater, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economic, writes, it is “human subjectivity made manifest”.
Perhaps some of the most visible and public manifestations of culture’s substructure are the statues we choose to erect. They are values and ideology made concrete (or more accurately bronze, or marble). Small wonder then, that as awareness of and attitudes towards a nation’s colonising, extractive, racist, slave-owning past evolve, they’ve become such contested, radioactive battlefields on both sides of the Atlantic.
In pre-modern societies where the materials and means of production and distribution were more limited, culture was manifested through language, symbols, ritual, folk art, and religion. In modern, post-traditional society these sources of cultural expression have been overtaken (if not fully supplanted) by the outputs of mass media and commerce. It’s worth quoting McCracken at length on this:
“The system of design and production that creates consumer goods isn’t an entirely cultural enterprise. The consumer goods on which the consumer lavishes time, attention, and income are charged with cultural meaning. Consumers use this meaning to entirely cultural purposes. They use the meaning of consumer goods to express cultural categories and principles, cultivate ideals, create and sustain lifestyles, construct notions of the self, and create (and survive) social change… culture is profoundly connected to and dependent on consumption. Without consumer goods, modern developed societies would lose key instruments fort the reproduction, representation, and manipulation of their culture…. The meaning of consumer goods and the meaning creation accomplished by consumer processes are important parts of the scaffolding of our present realities. Without consumer goods, certain acts of self-definition and collective definition in this culture would be impossible”.
This last point is important. Consumer goods are not just used to navigate and create a personal reality, but are used to give meaning to shared group experiences and identities - what we often refer to as ‘communities’. And in turn, subcultures (located both in the digital and IRL domains) steal, appropriate, remix, and subvert normality’s codes to stake out their own ‘sign communities’, in Hebdige’s words.
It will be a disappointment to those labouring under the delusion that insight can fall precisely and fully-formed from the lips of respondents, but we are unlikely to hear much of this articulated in the focus group and handed to us on a plate. The fact is that as observers and students of culture we must, as Hebdige wrote, “live an uneasy cerebral relation to the bric-à-brac of life - the mundane forms and rituals whose function it is to make us feel at home, to reassure us, to fill the gap between desire and fulfilment”. So of course we (I include myself here) are going to sound like a bunch of achingly pretentious pseuds, over-intellectualising and over-theorising the everyday, taken-for granted world everybody else inhabits so naturally. It is what it is.
Surfing and rising above the churn
That colour, that meme, that spectacle, that actor, that TikTok craze, that must have toy, that look, that curse, that compliment, that video, those sneakers, that dance move, that recipe, that show, that movie, that scene, that drink, those accessories, that book, that cause, that sample, that brand… A relentless, febrile, dynamism, invention and reinvention characterises the cultural superstructure. “Fast culture”, writes McCracken, “is the great churn of our culture at any given time. Some of the fads will cool into fashion, some of the fashions will cool into trends, and some of the trends will actually stay on to become culture. But most fad, fashion and trend just keeps going, out of our world, eventually out of memory”.
A note of caution here. Appetite, energy, curiosity, and impatience ensure that youth culture is a hotbed of innovation and experimentation on the part of both its creators and consumers. However, we’d be well-advised not to treat ‘culture’ as being synonymous with and thus limited to youth culture. Or assume that by dint of proximity, youth confers a wholesale expertise on the topic of culture. The BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing (whose 2021 final garnered a peak audience of 12 million viewers and a 57.8% share in the overnight ratings) is as much a cultural phenomenon as Lil Nas X, and warrants just as much attention and understanding. The fact is that we need to care about the middle of culture, not just what is cooking at its edges. As Alex Hesz has argued (and I repeatedly quote), it’s where scale happens:
“The middle is where fame happens. Proper, your-mum-knows-about-it, fame. The kind of fame where when you walk outside the office and ask people about it and they know what you’re talking about. So much of what the advertising industry does now, if we’re being honest, fails that most basic test. Simply put, the numbers just don’t back up the extent of our obsession with the outer edges. For every limited batch craft beer, there’s a lot of lager still drunk. For every gluten free loaf, we still get through a whole load of oven chips. This isn’t about traditional purchases versus new ones, either. For every new digital platform we coo over, Facebook remains, in effect, the whole internet for approaching half of all UK internet users, while Twitter is a tiny minority pursuit.”
The collective lack of precision in our language is frustrating, but I suspect that when we speak of our outputs becoming “part of culture” what we are really talking about (most of the time) is having an effect at the level of this superstructure.
Indeed when it comes to communications this is arguably, precisely what seeking ‘fame’ is about. It’s about having a sense of currency and being part of what’s happening now, it’s being what people are talking about right now, and importantly, it’s about being a shared, communal topic of conversation. “Fame”, writes Paul Feldwick, “is basically a simple matter of scale - of reaching enough people, of being appealing enough to interest and attract them even though this may be in the most trivial of ways, of being distinctive enough to be memorable, and as a result of all this to become talked about, shared, argued over, as part of a shared language or culture”.
Thanks to the work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the work of Byron Sharp, its most high-profile luminary, we’ve come to newly appreciate the importance of reach for brand growth. But in his timeless essay ‘Posh Spice and Persil’, Jeremy Bullmore points to the need to go beyond just ‘targeted reach’ for fame to be achieved:
“It is one of the peculiarities of fame – whether for people or products – that real fame appears to be spectacularly untargeted. By that I mean, that the most famous people in the world are known to an infinitely greater number of people than their particular talent or profession would seem either to demand or to deserve… Real fame implies being known to millions of people who have never bought your records and never will. Stephen Hawking is known to millions of people who will never understand a word he writes; and to 10 times as many who will never even try to. To the consternation of media planners and buyers in advertising agencies, the same is true for brands. A brand, if it is to enjoy genuine celebrity, must be known to a circle of people that far exceeds what we in the business so chillingly call its target group.”
This isn’t a silly ad agency indulgence. Drawing upon their upon their analysis of the IPADataBank Les Binet and Peter Field note that “fame campaigns outperform across the range of standard business mid-term metrics, but perhaps most notably, in terms of pricing effects”:
It’s easier said than done of course. Certainly easier than pronouncing that “it’s all about reach, mental availability, and distinctive assets”. Moreover, while it’s one thing to be noticed and interesting, it’s quite another to stay noticeable and interesting. Remember the follow up commercial to Cadbury’s “Gorilla”? Exactly. As Binet and Field put it:
“Fame campaigns are usually surprising in some way… As time passes, it becomes ever more difficult, within the tight confines of a traditional campaign structure, to maintain surprise, and the fame effect tends to dwindle…. few brands seem able to maintain such a stream of innovative expressions”.
But being highly visible and commanding an unfair share of collective attention and commentary in the endless sea of churn and froth is a very different undertaking and a very effect from shaping the underlying substructure of culture. But more on that later.
So where does this get us?
Thinking in pace layers
I have JP Castlin to thank for opening my eyes to this, but thinking in terms of culture having different layers (sub and super) with different velocities (fast and slow) finds echoes in the concept of ‘pace layering’, a term first coined by Stewart Brand in The Clock of Long Now: Time and Responsibility (1999).
Best known as editor of the pointer culture magazine Whole Earth Catalog, Brand’s concept of pace layering found its inspiration in architect Frank Duffy’s notion of a building consisting of several layers of longevity. Buildings, argued Duffy, consisted of Shell (lasts maybe 50 years), Services (swapped out every 15 years or so), Scenery (interior walls, etc. move every 5 to 7 years), and Set (furniture, moving sometimes monthly).
In his 1994 book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, Brand expanded Duffy’s four layers to six: Site, Structure, Skin, Services, Space Plan, and Stuff. Five years later in his book The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, he moved Duffy’s thinking on further to argue that complex adaptive systems such as ecosystems (or organizations and markets) consist of a number of layers with different change rates and scales of size.
So to Daniel Kahneman teaching us about how humans think both fast and slow, Les Binet and Peter Field distinguishing between the nature of short- and long-term advertising effects, and Mark Ritson on the need for developing two-speed marketing strategies, we can add McCracken’s distinction between the layers and pacing of culture. Certainly it gives us a much-needed conceptual upgrade from the imprecision and conflation that constitutes so much of our talk of culture.
Now the thing about the superstructure is that in its variety, energy and inventiveness it can be enormously good enormously fun - both for us to observe and for everybody else to participate in. Certainly as Judith Williamson, the realm of the superstructure “offers more fun than trying to deal with the frustrations channeled into it but created, predominantly, by the economic realities which are still a major constriction on most people’s lives. And also more fun than trying to envisage new ways on which some of the needs and desires appropriated by consumer goods can be met”. Seeing the pace layers of culture, however, understanding its sub- and superstructure, and recognising the superstructure as being meaning made manifest does much to correct any conception of ‘culture’ as being no more or less than simply the fun, transient world of fashions, trends, entertainment, and the conversations that surround them.
The distinction between the two layers encourages us to expand our field of vision, for as Stewart Brand has put it, while “Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power”. And the connection between the two layers reminds us that for all its froth and flux, the things we choose, buy, and consume are not entirely autonomous, ideology-free phenomena, wholly unattached to and uninformed by the deeper, less visible eddies that run beneath our lives.
A better lens
The C-word comes with both dangers and advantages. The danger with the casual, unthinking use of the C-word is that it can all too easily encourage us to edit out of the existence and lives of real people in all its quotidian detail, replacing it with a vague, abstract, and impersonal Out There. We speak of ‘culture’, forgetting that it is an entirely human-made, human-transmitted, and human-lived phenomenon. Waving in the direction of some faceless, vaguely-defined abstraction does us no good. We are already too disconnected from those we are meant to serve.
Research conducted by Reach Solutions and published as ‘The Aspiration Window’ makes clear quite how much of a gulf exists between this monoculture and the lives and values of the modern mainstream. The study looked at the differences between the advertising and marketing industry, and the modern mainstream (defined as the middle 50% in terms of household income (£20k-£55k). And the findings are telling:
When asked to estimate the values of the mainstream, marketing and advertising professionals get it profoundly wrong. They underestimate self-direction, universalism and benevolence, and they overestimate the mainstream’s focus on hedonism, achievement and power.
Both the mainstream and advertising and marketing professionals rate extrinsic motivations - so things like money, image, status - as less important than intrinsic motivations - things such as love, relatedness, empowerment, growth. However, people in marketing and advertising put significantly more emphasis on these - an index of 130 versus 100 for the mainstream.
Moreover, advertising and marketing people wildly overestimate the importance of extrinsic aspirations to the mainstream. Where the mainstream give extrinsic aspirations a cumulative importance rating of 3.8 (out of 10), people in marketing and advertising predict that the mainstream would give aspirations relating to fame, money and image a rating of 7.4.
70% of the advertising and marketing sample grew up in a household where the chief income earner was social grade AB. This is compared to just 29% of the modern mainstream. As the study puts it:
"The privileged composition of the marketing and advertising profession is further reinforced when we look at how people from AB backgrounds over index across all strata of our industry. The point here is that lack of social mobility and access to our profession consolidates the privileged outlook of marketing and advertising. This isn’t about what you do for a living now, it’ about what your parents did for a living and quite possibly what their parents did for a living too.”
And yet marketing and advertising professionals are seemingly unaware of their privilege - and that we view the world differently. For example, the average salary in advertising is £47,50018, and the average marketing salary ranges from £42,000 to £63,000 depending on the sector. The average personal income in the UK is just over £23,000. When asked to position themselves on the ‘rich/poor staircase’ with 0 being poorest and 10 being richest, those in the mainstream sample rated themselves an average of 4.8 and those in advertising and marketing at 5.5. So while advertisers and marketers see themselves as a bit better off than other people, they are still firmly of the belief (and under illusion) that they are positioned in the middle along with everyone else.
Clearly then, waving vaguely in the direction of some ill-defined, abstract thing called ‘culture’ does absolutely nothing to correct this impairment of vision. And yet for all that, when exercised with precision and thoughtfulness, the cultural lens gives us a vital, and more complete view of the consumer. For as Holt argues, it liberates us from the purely psychological view of the consumer still favoured by most of marketing, and encourages us to see brands as cultural constructs not purely psychological ones. We are after all, social beings (“herd animals” as Mark Earls puts it) not the purely self-determining individuals we believe we are. As Earls writes:
"Far from being conscious, 'rational', individual agents, as classic economic theory (and too many research models!) would have it, human beings appear to be largely instinctive… mutually stimulating and interdependent creatures (whatever their brains and culture tell them). We do what we do partly because of the rules we were programmed with at birth and rules we have passively learned, and perhaps most of all because of our interaction with others although we like to think that each of us acts on our own.”
Understanding the cultural dimension is therefore, critical to understanding people and consumers, not some merely some fancy nice-to-have fancy research methodology. For as Helen Edwards has put it, “Making a study of consumers without reference to culture is like making a study of fish without reference to the sea. It can be done, but it misses the bigger point: the swirling currents and warm streams that buffet and nourish contemporary lives.”
So much for how culture and people ‘work’. What about us, the brand builders and communicators? What is our place and role in all of this?
Mining, surfacing, and stealing
The entrepreneur, CEO, and writer Margaret Heffernan (honestly, read everything and anything she writes) reminds us that “We all inhabit multiple interconnected ecosystems. The small ones we control, larger ones we might influence; and many that influence us, but over which we have no or little control.” The key of course, is understanding what lies within our reach and control. And exercising the serenity to accept what does not.
The distinction between culture’s pace layers of slow substructure and fast superstructure gives us a sharper perspective on our location and our role as marketers and communicators in culture - our work is located at the intersection of culture’s sub- and superstructure. More specifically, we surface, embody, and make visible the culturally constituted world. We mine (whether through intuition and gut-feeling, or through analysis and intention) meaning and make it concrete. And in this way we can provide the culturally-infused paraphernalia and material with which we navigate the world and from which personal and group identity is constructed and signalled. This is the base level of our relationship with culture.
Where it gets really interesting is where is there is friction - where revolution and counter-revolution are fermenting. For as a Holt reminds us, cultural values/categories and ideologies/principles do not exist in splendid isolation from the quotidian reality of people’s everyday lived reality.
Changes in that reality he argues - particularly the large-scale deep-reaching change of socio-economic drift, change, evolution, or cataclysm can necessitate new ideologies/points of view. To illustrate his thesis, Holt recounts (based on first-hand accounts and sources) the long and winding road (the full account with all many missteps along the way is worth reading in its entirety ) that eventually led to Leo Burnett authoring ‘the Marlboro man’.
As Holt tells it, the America of the 1950s and 60s witnessed the emergence of a new masculine ideology with the rapid rise of the ‘industrial-bureaucratic society’ and the expansion of the the middle-class. Holt argues that, instead of the traditional idea of masculinity - self-reliant, inner-directed, and physical - this ideology championed “the other-directed man poised to succeed at his sedentary desk job in a big organisation within the safe of the city and enjoying a comfortable and modern domestic life in the suburbs”. But it threatened to undermine the old ideology of what masculinity represented.
The Marlboro man channelled that discomfort and championed a reactionary working-class frontier masculinity that many men worried was disappearing. Writes Holt:
“Marlboro challenged the new masculine ideal… the brand proposed that Americans win the clock back to a masculinity that is earned through autonomous, physical work one different and dangerous terrain, a kind of masculinity that challenges men’s perseverance and can-do spirit”.
The crucial thing here is that no new cultural meaning sui generis was invented. The idea of rugged masculinity while under threat, was already known. So too was the idea of America’s pioneer past and the ranch culture of the American West when risky encounters in nature, hunting, working the land, and raising livestock was the way of life. So too was the knowledge that cowboys (the livestock-rearing kind not the gunslinging kind seen in movies) were most comfortable in the rugged outdoors not in cities.
The skill lay not in changing culture but in understanding in Holt’s words, the “historically specific anxieties created by social change” and in surfacing, channelling and making visible (and memorable) the contradictions and resultant yearnings of the age.
The story of Marlboro is one of a culturally reactionary agenda. The story of Burberry by contrast, is (or would seem to be, to this outsider) one of a culturally progressive agenda. While under the creative directorship of Christopher Bailey and subsequently Riccardo Tisci the Burberry brand has embraced the melding of low and high fashion, its edgier streetwear still sits alongside the familiar trench coats (standard issue for officers during World War I), the hundred year old ‘Burberry check’ is still an unmistakable part of its identity, and the house’s backstory of English classism still lingers.
The origin story of Burberry is quintessentially English. Yet many urban, non-white youth understandably feel excluded from the historic (Anglo-Saxon, colonising) conception of Englishness. Now identifying insight in work one had absolutely no hand is a foolish, dangerous sport, and for that reason I tend to avoid it at all cost. But I will put my neck out for once and point to this piece of work for Burberry that aired earlier last year.
What this work seems to put its finger on - whether through conscious insight or intuitive understanding - is that this alienation extends to that version of Englishness that treats the English countryside as a repository of the 'true' national spirit - the true keeper of Anglo-Saxon culture, timeless and unchanging. And so in rolling fields of wheat that would make Teresa May quiver and tremble with feverish excitement, a group of young people looking very different from your average National Trust or W.I. member (no slight or slur is intended) exult in their freedom, dressed in a label that couldn’t be more English. The signal (and challenge to the rear-guard myth defenders) would seem to be clear - this Englishness is yours too.
Again, no new cultural meaning sui generis is being invented. It only works because it is working with cultural material that is already known to us. Again, the skill lies not in invention but in understanding and challenging the contradictions and frictions of the age. And making them visible - and beautiful. Then again maybe the director simply wanted to use a cool film technique and shooting outside in a field more was more Covid restrictions-compliant than shooting indoors.
Both Malboro and Burberry illustrate that old truth that creativity thrives on friction. As planning god and former chairman of BBH Jim Carroll has written:
“I would often advise young Planners embarking on a Pitch first to identify the cultural change that was impacting their sector – because where there is change, you’ll also find energy, interest and attention. If you can locate the brand at the vanguard of this change, characterising it as pioneer, as a vehicle to the future, then you’ll be set fair.”
But at his point a note of caution needs to be struck. And of personal self-doubt, too. In his wonderful book Why Does the Pedlar Sing? What Creativity Really Means In Advertising, Paul Feldwick warns us against assuming that just because we can post-rationalise the abstract meanings behind cultural phenomenon we can start from abstract meanings and create something tangible:
“When Geri Halliwell improvised her skimpy Union Jack dress for the [1997] Brit Awards, she added one more memorable item to the Spice Girl’s stock. In the context of Thatcher’s Britain it set up complex resonance of right-wing politics, women asserting power (‘girl power’), sexual dominance (as well as availability, and a carnival spirit of send fin the whole thing up. Did Halliwell consciously think in these kinds of abstract concepts? I don’t imagine she did. It’s much more likely she was prompted by ‘gut feel’, or perhaps more accurately, an instinct for showmanship, for creating a gesture she had a hunch would be ambiguous, intriguing, visually striking and above all controversial (… the other members of the team tried hard to kill the dress, terrified they’d be identified as some kind of extreme right-wingers). When sociologists and semiologists and agency strategists try to analyse this sort of thing they are not entirely wrong: they are in their way paying tribute to the complex fascinations that such gestures set up in public. But they are not recreating in any sense the complex emergent and intuitive processes by which such gestures come into being”.
Cultural resonance looks a lot easier, and lot more conscious, deliberate, and inevitable when seen through the lens of hindsight. After all, just because we can dismantle a bicycle and deduce how it works does not mean we know how to actually build a bicycle (something for the academics and copy-testers to ponder on too, perhaps).
Furthermore, cultural resonance is not the universal explanatory factor. Of course the creative genius of Levi’s 1985 commercial ‘Launderette’ channeled the still-potent mythology of post-war American rebelliousness that the likes of Brando and Dean epitomised. But its cultural resonance amongst the youth of Thatcher’s Britain shouldn’t obscure that the other reason for its success, was as Feldwick has argued, its aesthetics - and that old-fashioned notion, craft:
“What we have in the ‘Launderette’ commercial then is not a great example of clever briefing, or of telling product truths, or of radical disruption. What we do have is a beautifully crafted piece of film which cleverly unites several threads of popular culture - a mythic fifties America, a beautiful celebrity, a cool classic track, the format of an MTV pop video, and a subtle and witty eroticism. Within forty seconds it creates place, character, and incident. The success of this film lies much more in its tangible, evocative details, than in any abstract idea that can be supposed to lie behind it or shape it.”
In Why Does The Pedlar Sing? Feldwick points us to the wisdom of the American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist Susan Sontag who in her 1964 essay ‘Against Interpretation’ wrote:
“What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art-and, by analogy, our own experience-more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means”.
Getting the direction of travel right
But what of our influence at an individual brand level on slow culture, the substructure?
Set against the forces of modernisation that both Inglehart and Tormos identify as the key drivers behind cultural change and evolution, the inadequacy of a single brand’s marketing as a lever for effecting deep and lasting change - at scale - to culture’s underlying substructure should be apparent. Insisting on trying to move (for some ill-defined end) the tectonic plates of culture’s substructure and the unquestioned, taken for granted mental frameworks and ideologies of entire populations with the lever of a single brand (unaccompanied and unaided by the forces of economics, or demographics, or social change, or technology, or innovation, or population movements, or natural or human-initiated cataclysm), feels like an exercise in extreme optimism. Indeed some of the rhetoric comes dangerously close to disappearing down the gravity well of hubris.
Making the counter-argument (as I am sure it will be made) that x, y, or z brand impacted the deeper substructure of culture demands what any effectiveness case does - namely going beyond seductive anecdote and the consideration and elimination of all the other factors that might have contributed. Inconvenient and painstaking work though that may be.
For those with the appetite for such an undertaking, the historian Professor Peter Sterns provides a useful analytical framework and process:
“Clarify the timing of the change, and also the scope involved - a whole society, an organisation, a particular social group.
Carefully delineate the prevailing patterns before the change. Neglecting this baseline is one of the most frequent omissions in culture change analysis, yet it is essential; in defining the change itself. If the pre-change patterns are unclear (including their probable complexities), then change will almost certainly be misconstrued
Characterise the change itself - a decline of magic, a new commitment to nationalism, the spread of a new religion, or simply a new level of tolerance for a previously-scorned group. This lies at the heart of the descriptive aspect of cult change analysis - including explicit contrast with the beeline patterns
Asses the causes of the change - recognising that usually several factors will be involved and that pinning the elements down precisely is often impossible. Causation can be tricky, often generating probable rather than definitive conclusions. But its analysis contributes greatly to a grasp of what the change os all about. Tis is also the category that allows assessment off formal leadership[ initiatives in spurring culture change, compared to other factors
Deal with resistance and with partial continuities that combine elements of the new and the old. The scholarly term fro combination is syncretism…
Explore the major consequences of culture change , often beyond the culture realm itself, and the overall significant of the transformation. This may requires consideration of other factors, besides culture change itself, in assessing overall impacts”
By way of a side-note, Stearn’s recommendation that the continuities be considered, not just the discontinuities reminds us - lovers of a good clear and simple Before-and-After story - that change is not ipso facto wholesale, and that the past is rarely obliterated in its entirety by the steamrollers of evolution. The Christian festival of Easter commemorating the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, for example, is intertwined with earlier pagan traditions. The date of Easter is not fixed, but instead is governed by the phases of the moon. The bunnies are a leftover from the Saxon festival of Eostre, the goddess of spring or light, who gave her name to Easter, and whose symbol was a rabbit or hare. Exchange of eggs is an ancient custom, celebrated by many cultures. Hot cross buns have an ancient lineage and were eaten by amongst others, the Saxons, who ate buns marked with crosses in honour of Eostre. As Stearns puts it:
“Along with real impact comes durable complexity, in the many instances of persistence just beneath the surface, where change was not exactly what it seemed… Big culture change, while by definition generating a range of results, does not always push through to all the logical conclusions: concessions to established realities encourage compromise in key areas.. In may cases, groups accept a major shift in culture while insisting on a certain amount off selectivity: real change combines with local modifications”
But returning to the impact of brands, there will of course, be brands that make available and promote innovations and technologies that keep us healthier, or safer, that allow us to live more comfortably, that let us be more productive, that give us back time, that allow us to communicate more easily, or that free us from the constraints of geography. And that in so doing help create the conditions for evolving values and beliefs.
For example, the beginning the twentieth century witnessed a household revolution as a flood of consumer durables - central heating, dryers, electric irons, frozen foods, refrigerators, sewing machines, washing machines, vacuum cleaners and other appliances - entered the home, and people’s lives.
The economists Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Sheshadri, and Mehmet Yorukoglu put that revolution in context:
“Try to imagine the tyranny of household chores at the turn of the last century. In 1890 only 24% of houses had running water, none had central heating. So, the average household lugged around the home 7 tons of coal and 9000 gallons of water per year. The simple task of laundry was a major operation in those days. While mechanical washing machines were available as early as 1869, this invention really took off only with the development of the electric motor. Ninety-eight per cent of households used a 12 cent scrubboard to wash their clothes in 1900. Water had to be ported to the stove, where it was heated by burning wood or coal. The clothes were then cleaned via a washboard or mechanical washing machine. They had to be rinsed out after this. The water needed to be wrung out, either by hand or by using a mechanical wringer. After this, the clothes were hung out to dry on a clothes line. Then, the oppressive task of ironing began, using heavy flatirons that had to be heated continuously on the stove.”.
Greenwood, Sheshadri, and Yorukoglu cite a study conducted by the Rural Electrification Authority that followed the behaviours of 12 farm wives during 1945–1946. They compared the time spent doing laundry by hand to that spent using electrical equipment. The women also wore a pedometer.:
“One subject, Mrs. Verett, was reported on in detail. Without electrification, she did the laundry in the manner described above. After electrification Mrs. Verett had an electric washer, dryer and iron. A water system was also installed with a water heater. They estimated that it took her about 4 h to do a 38 lb load of laundry by hand, and then about 4·5 h to iron it using old-fashioned irons. By comparison it took 41 min to do a load of the laundry using electrical appliances and 1·75 h to iron it. The woman walked 3181 feet to do the laundry by hand, and only 332 feet with electrical equipment. She walked 3122 feet when ironing the old way, and 333 the new way.”
Their quantitative modelling attributes much of the rise in female labour-force participation since 1890 to the adoption of time and labour saving appliances in the home. They conclude:
“Popular wisdom states that the increase in female labour-force participation was due to a narrowing of the gender gap or a change in social norms, spawned by the women’s liberation movement. This may well be true, but without the labour-saving household capital ushered in by the Second Industrial Revolution it would not have been feasible for women to spend more time outside of the home, notwithstanding any shift in societal attitudes. While sociology may have provided fuel for the movement, the spark that ignited it came from economics.”
So, economics again.
But it’s rarely a single brand that is doing this work alone (it’s easier of course is you are effectively a monopoly). Humans by their nature copy behaviours that are conducive to survival and prosperity, and in turn markets and categories are adaptive systems that learn, change and alter their behaviours. Good, better, and best practice gets copied and adapted, giving rise to multi-brand categories of consumer goods. And (remembering that consumers shop from a repertoire of brands) it is categories which by very nature of their scale that can shape and influence our lives, sometimes sifting down good ideas or practice as Brand puts it, to shape the deeper levels of culture’s substructure.
This is certainly not to argue that our efforts at an individual level are without substance and impact. It’s just that we too often get the direction of travel the wrong way round. The examples of both Malboro and Burberry serve to clarify our relationship with and role in cultural change. We are not Joseph Stalin’s “engineers of the human soul”, but miners in the business of surfacing.
At the level of communications, in surfacing and make concrete emergent values and ideologies we can provide inspiration, comfort, solidarity, and motivation to those at the sharp end of cultural change.
And we can provide a lighting rod and public platform for public discourse around the frictions and contradictions of our age. We can be rabble rousers.
But our contribution is more profound than just providing symbolic material. For in giving voice and concrete form to the shifting tides of culture, we can provide people with ways of accessing, living, and integrating new and emergent conceptual values into their daily lives, turning conceptual meaning into tangible, everyday behaviours. In other words we make culture real. We give it form and substance. We turn meaning into actual human practice, to borrow McCracken’s words.
We transform the desire to navigate modernity and tradition into a hijab swimsuit.
We transform rising life expectancy and the mainstreaming of older age into pro-ageing products.
We transform disillusion with legacy institutions, the inheritance of rage born of the 2008 financial crisis and the roadblocking of social and financial advancement for a generation into memecoins.
Getting the direction of cultural traffic right (which means reversing it in many minds) opens up a far more real, far more practical, far more feasible, and ultimately far more valuable approach (for both brand owners and consumers) for us to take. Namely that we concretise, productise and yes, financialise culture.
We channel its beliefs, yearnings, ideals, frictions, dreamings, myths, contradictions, and frustrations into the everyday, phenomenal world. This for me feels like the real opportunity - thinking about what emergent values are trapped like ghosts in the substructure of intangible culture that we can we give concrete form to, liberate, and transform into actual, lived human practice.
Do marketers and communicators really ‘change the world’?
I used to have my doubts as to whether a credible, bullshit-free answer that didn’t turn a blind eye to commercial imperatives was even remotely possible. But I think now that we can answer this question - and do so with honesty and humility. We help (the word choice here is deliberate) change the world by taking human subjectivity and, as Don Slater puts it, remaking the world in its own lights. Through a process that can be complex, emergent, accidental, improvisational, luck-blessed, gut-feeling informed, and messy as often as it is conscious, deliberate, planned, analytical, and considered.
Then again perhaps we could simply climb down from the thin air heights of abstract rhetoric and find ourselves amongst specificity and complexity again. Just a thought.
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Sources
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