CULTURE shapes who we are, how we think, the decisions we make, the values we hold, the networks we form and the brands we consume. The way we think, behave and make sense of our emotions is shaped by the latent rules culture endows us with.
The Importance of Culture to Business and Innovation
In order to succeed in highly competitive markets of intelligent consumers, organisations need to place consumer culture at the heart of their marketing, branding and innovation strategies.
Businesses often believe their consumers’ or organisational culture is something that can be easily identified, worked with and changed. However, this is a common misconception. Understanding consumer culture is not easy because it consists of many different interconnected threads that form a complex web and often impacts peoples’ lives in an unconscious way.
Successful brands are part of the consumers’ cultural ecosystem. They form trusted relationships and can then work to redefine what that culture is.
Cultural Analysis for Business
We are experts in understanding and decoding consumer culture and making it central to your business strategies. We are able to provide you with multiple vantage points to understand your brand and pinpoint new areas for innovation. Taking this approach creates disruptive market solutions by gaining a sophisticated understanding of how your consumer thinks and behaves. Central to our thinking is anthropology which sets out to understand how everyday culture shapes the way people behave, think, consume and form social networks.
Our approach is based on Cultural Analysis for Business (CAB) that focuses on how everyday consumer and organisational culture defines social norms guides human behaviour in relation to actions, values, beliefs, likes, dislikes, relationships, and consumption patterns. These behavioural and social factors exist within a cultural ecosystem and it is by understanding this ecosystem that we uncover new and innovative opportunities.
By using CAB our clients see that their brands, products, and services do not sit idly outside culture. The meaning and value their consumers place on them is heavily shaped by the social norms their culture has formed. Therefore, for companies and brands to successfully reach out to their consumers, they need to understand the consumers’ cultural DNA.
Our CAB approach means that we produce a set of actionable insights for innovation that are directly relevant to our clients’ brands and their consumers’ cultures.
Actionable insights are developed through cultural trends analysis and qualitative research (ethnography, groups, in-depth interviews). We cluster insights into a number of cultural codes that provide our clients with an in-depth understanding relating to:-
1/ Key cultural drivers that shape consumer thinking about a specific market category and associated brands
2/ Macro mapping of how a market category has meaning within consumer culture.
Cultural codes include behaviours, needs and emotions. But, importantly, they also include a more in-depth understanding of any category by overlaying anthropological meaning.
We help our clients decide which codes to –
/ Follow
/ Reject
/ Develop
/ Disrupt
To ensure the actionable insights have maximum impact we use our innovative model called Solution Thinking that supports our clients and their teams to develop incremental and radical innovations relating to any specific insight.
Value for Business
Our Cultural Analysis for Business approach enables clients to develop innovations and strategies that link the values of their business and brands with their consumers’ lives.
Specific values relate to –
/ Branding, Marketing and Communications Strategy
/ New Product Development
/ Consumer Empathy
/ New Innovations
/ Innovative Organisational Culture
/ Future Trends
/ Competitor Reviews
