How Digital Marketing and Cultural Branding can drive innovation and position a brand

By Adriano Ueda

It is quite clear that due to new and constant high-speed tools and innovations in communications field in the past years, such as mobile and social media, consumers, in general, have been more informed, influential and, "empowered", with a vast amount of information available, right? Therefore, a considerable change in the market has been noticeable as well as how we have been working with Marketing. So, besides the technology transitions - that have contributed to change how consumers live and buy and, hence, how marketers should manage their businesses brands, from a broader and deep understanding of customers' wishes and needs - it is interesting to look into human behavior transformation as well. 

Cultural branding and crowdculture

Douglas Holt, in his article "Branding in the age of social media," discusses the concept of "cultural branding", which came from the popularization of crowdculture. From the beginning, cultural innovations came out from the margins of society to be eventually disseminated by companies, media and, mainly, by social media. While people were isolated before, now those with similar interests can develop collaboratively ideas, new products, and services related to any topic.

Ross Clark, in the article "The rise of crowdculture - the generation scared to do anything alone", says about the end of individualism. For him, part of the population wants to be connected to a crowd and share public spaces in order to adhere to collective values. This massive growth of shared experiences is evident among young people. However, it does not mean that consumers gave up receiving personalized services. The point is creativity and innovation can be the result of a large number of people connections in the same place, like Silicon Valley in California. While major global cities aim to attract, through "soft power", a critical mass of brains, represented by the best talents and business worldwide, small towns have become culturally less favorable. In the meantime, social medias have been a "hub" or central point that connect people and ideas of this new "crowd."

In the same direction, Eric Ries, says that entrepreneurs have formed in-person and local groups in order to discuss and implement ideas of "lean startup", which approach consists to generate continually innovation based on management and development of previous products. In fact, there are already organized communities that follow this practice in hundreds of cities around the world.

From a business perspective

Finally, moving to a business context, Chipotle, renowned fast food chain in the United States, that serves Mexican food, can be a case. Once noticed an increase of the population maturity on issues such as health, environment, and social initiatives, its marketers could analyze the influence and the opportunities for their brands. Through social media monitoring and listening, the company identified a cultural movement in society against food networks that sold unhealthy foods in USA. As a result, the chain positioned itself as an advocate of healthy food industry, a fact that became one of the US brands most commented positively on the web, between 2011 and 2013.

Chipotle Digital Marketing strategy was fundamental to increase the perception of its brand on internet. Some key actions were: 

• Monitoring on social media in order to identify an cultural opportunity;
• Contents: as part of the promotion of an ideology, the organization produced and published two comedic films that criticized the fast food industry in US.

Sources

• Kevin Lane Keller, The New Branding Imperatives; Marketing Science Institute, 201
• Eric Ries, The Lean Startup, 2010
• Douglas Holt, Harvard Business Review: Branding in the age of social media, 2016 (link)
• Ross Clark, The Spectator: The rise of crowd culture – a generation scared to do anything alone, 2014 (link)