Brand Anthropology: How Brands and Consumers Find Common Ground

Brands are constantly striving to provide the relevancy and authenticity that audiences desire. With every video, social post, or website interaction, brands are trying to say, “We understand you because we’re like you”. Yet, authenticity often eludes brands as they approach it from their own point of view and bias.

The solution? Embedding within culture to craft audience-first experiences. At Experiences For Mankind, we help brands do just this using Brand Anthropology.

Understanding brands in cultural contexts

Brands are central to modern culture. They stand as cultural symbols that reflect how companies and consumers understand and interpret the world around them. As such, brands are largely influenced by two types of culture. The first includes broad cultural categories like music, art, holidays, and sports — anything that plays a part in shaping identities, values, and beliefs. This also includes any cultural spaces adjacent to the brand or marketspace. For instance, competitor approaches to AI in the technology space would indicate emerging cultural ideas that other tech brands should pay attention to. This adjacent culture influences how brands tell their stories and how consumers understand and perceive them.

However, culture is more than just what influences people on a broad scale. It also appears in the small moments of expectation and interaction where a brands’ products and services intersect consumer lives. This includes things like how people talk about a brand on social media, how they use the brand’s products, and what expectations they have around the way a brand communicates with them. In these contexts, consumers make meaning of the brand in ways that shape their ideas, attitudes, and behaviors towards it. By examining the intersection of brand-, culture-, and consumer-meanings, brands can unearth innovation and storytelling opportunities. The authenticity they desire is rooted in this cultural commonality.

What is brand anthropology?

Our Brand Anthropology approach investigates the various cultures that influence audiences and their behavior to uncover hidden cultural meanings. Through this process, we supply clear, actionable insights for our clients to achieve key results. To unearth these commonalities, we pay attention to three main areas:

• Brand culture
  The brand’s vision, mission, and values, as well as the world around the brand help situate it in its desired context, reveal its point-of-view, and surface relevant cultural areas to consider.
• Adjacent culture
  Broader cultural influences such as regional differences, generational differences, or current events help us understand what forces shape audience perceptions and impact their interactions with the brand.
• Audience culture
  Specific audience values, behaviors, and beliefs around the brand reveal how their own experiences with the brand impact their understanding of it.

On-the-ground methods

As we investigate these areas, we use our ethnographic toolkit to know the ins and outs of a brand and their audiences. The co-creative techniques we leverage make both parties active participants in the outcome. Our methods include:

• Fieldwork
  Going out in the world lets us learn firsthand from brands and consumers. Activities like participant observation, interviews, and focus groups are rich venues to capture nuances and read between the lines.
• Digital ethnography
  This encompasses anything online. Whether it’s with social listening, surveys, or diary studies, we delve into the behavior and cultural understandings of audiences to see how they make sense of the world.
• Rapid assessment
  Even if time is short, we have a variety of tools to garner a sense of a topic quickly and broadly. This may include asynchronous video interviews, limited fieldwork, and secondary research.

Going deeper to unearth shared meaning

When we take a holistic approach to see how audiences connect with brands, we find shared stories. These are the shared beliefs, views, and habits that brands and audiences constantly negotiate and co-create. By exploring these overlapping meanings, we unearth hidden possibilities. We call these “commonalities”.

Commonalities open fresh opportunities on stale personas. They pave the way for mutual understanding between brands and their audiences — spaces where common ground already exists, and new connections can flourish. By spotlighting what was previously unnoticed or unspoken, we help our clients build stronger, more meaningful relationships with their consumers.

Authenticity into action

By applying these cultural insights to various marketing strategies, we’re able to frame new perspectives to otherwise stale or irrelevant material. Within these strategies, commonalities can:

Customer Experience Strategy

• Forge deeper connections with new or existing audiences by understanding their values.
• Enhance retail, user, or customer experiences by aligning them with the expectations and preferences of the target audience.

Brand Strategy

• Craft compelling narratives that tap into prominent cultural themes, fostering a sense of belonging and emotional connection.
• Tailor messaging to better resonate with audiences by incorporating cultural insights and language that reflects their values and beliefs.

Marketing Strategy

• Design marketing campaigns that feel genuine to audience experience and create meaningful interactions with them.

Co-creating relevancy

Commonalities turn invisible cultural nuances into visible audience connections with your brand so that you tell a story that resonates culturally, creates belonging, and inspires action. By deeply understanding your brand and audiences, Brand Anthropology makes it possible to bring new consumers into a brand culture while strengthening bonds with existing ones.

At Experiences For Mankind, we focus keenly on the diverse and ever-evolving contexts that surround brands and consumers. Using Brand Anthropology, we strive to understand these parties holistically, and discover and nurture collaborative spaces where our clients can learn from and build meaning with audiences. It is a co-creative process we regularly tap into to help brand across industries deliver on the relevancy their customers want.

You can learn more about our strategy and creative agency, Experiences For Mankind, on our website or get in touch with our Partners to chat. We’re always looking for brilliant clients and teammates.