Brand managers continue to use very traditional models to make sense of what the marketing world has become: the 5Ps, sometimes the 6, 7 or 8Ps. It may well be time to add a jarring “C” to this phonetic checklist: culture.
It is looming so large in the world of marketing that the question “What is your cultural strategy?” has become an elephant in marketing boardrooms.
To contextualise this question: we know digital experiences have enabled consumers to almost completely firewall brands out of their sociocultural reality. From banner blindness to adblocking software, consumers can choose to ignore brands.
Content marketing for marketers was going to be the big answer, right? Wrong.
When ranking channels by the number of subscribers on YouTube or Instagram, you find that corporate brands barely appear — only three have cracked the YouTube top 500. A video of a panda in a zoo racks up more than a billion views while brands’ content struggles to go over 10,000 views.
The reality is that very few people want brand content in their feed. Most view it as clutter — as brand spam. Consumers have little interest in the content that brands churn out. When Facebook realised this, it began charging companies to get “sponsored” content into the feeds of people who were supposed to be their fans.
