Culture, Context, and Commerce — the Trinity for Brand Growth revisited in the Age of Web3.0

The past year was extraordinary in many ways. Personally, I have learned some new things, reframed already learned, and tried to unlearn some old stuff. Here’s my shot of what’s coming 2022+ and why I’m super optimistic about what lies ahead.

12 months ago, I wrote about how we jumped into a “remote first” world through Covid-19. To illustrate, I borrowed an analogy from the history of the automobile. The first 50 years of the automobile industry — from Carl Benz’s patent motor car in 1886 to the construction of the first Autobahn in 1936 — was about starting car companies and figuring out what cars should even look like and what they should be. The second 50 years, on the other hand, were about designing a world around the everywhere PC (personal car). Only then was it possible to move to the suburbs, work in the city and do your weekend shopping in the middle of nowhere.

In our industry, the first 50 years began with the invention of the PC in 1976. Through Covid-19, we jumped into the second half of the cycle a few years earlier. Accenture’s Julie Sweet calls it compressed transformation. The roads (cloud) are paved, and the cars (PCs/smartphones) are nearly perfect and ubiquitous. However, unlike the automotive era, the directional vector has turned 180 degrees. People are no longer driving to things, but things are coming as data to them to work, communicate and consume.

My conclusion culminated in the imperative: everything that can be done remotely will be done primarily remotely in the future.

How will the world be shaped in the remote first age? How can we help our clients succeed and grow — will it only be about the Metaverse and Web 3.0 in the future? Not quite, and my versioning of the Internet looks a little different.

Internet 1.0: Commerce (1994-)

On Internet 1.0, we create relevance for clients by making them transactional to their customers. We develop commerce platforms, integrate their products into marketplaces, and run appropriate marketing promotions and processes. We transform clients into direct-to-consumer businesses.

Internet 2.0: Context (2007-)

On Internet 2.0, we create relevance by contextualizing brands. We develop communication and content formats for owned and paid channels. Embracing the Internet 1.0, every digital touchpoint becomes an entry point for a transaction. We transform clients into direct-to-consumer brands.

Internet 3.0: Culture (2021-)

On Internet 3.0, we create relevance by seeking and reinforcing cultural resonance for brands. This has been the key insight for me over the past 12 months. In Transformational Products (Hardcover/Kindle) I was still justifying behavioral changes of people exclusively through the transformational aspects of digital products (such as 10 x better experiences). I now feel that this approach falls short, and we also need to consider psychological and sociological dimensions. In this sense, we must support our clients not only to be transactional in contextually enriched channels but also to innovate products that are highly fit into today’s culture. Embracing Internet 1.0 and 2.0, every digital product could become a culture-changing artifact. We transform clients into culture-shaping brands.

Three terms are essential here: culture, relevance, and resonance. With Clifford Geertz and Max Weber, we understand humans as living entangled in self-spun webs of meaning and these webs we call culture. Relevance reflects the meaning of a brand in human minds. With the words of Hans Domizlaff, relevance implies for brands “to secure a monopoly position in people’s psyches.” Following Hartmut Rosa, resonance ultimately characterizes the relationship of people and brands as a vibrating cultural system with significant feedback loops.

In this logic, innovative products that generate resonance become culture-shaping artifacts: culture cast in code. They must be designed to be as popular as possible to work immediately without intermediate stages or mental effort. The starting point for creating these products is always a deep understanding of people and their specific cultural context. This approach diametrically separates the design and build process from traditional software development, which starts with legacy systems and business processes and ends with users. In contrast, we start the other way around with the experience and context and develop from there back towards technology and processes.

Digital products — compared to physical products — are only successful if people use them regularly. Sustainability is build-in by design. Digital products create the most value by network effects the more frequently and the more people they are used to. They then resonate with the culture and give it direction. The transmission belt that connects people and brands is a cultural consensus on shared values.

If this consensus is missing, something in the system breaks. This can be observed in particular in the hype topics of the past year. Web 3.0 is driven by the idea of decentralization and often involves blockchain technologies, such as cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It’s about building assets (money, rights, code, contracts, etc.) in the form of tokens into the inner workings of almost everything we do digitally. This goes all the way to concepts of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). All this without the involvement of central institutions.

At the core, cultural battles are being fought here:

There is a deep distrust of one part of the society against central institutions (from Big Tech to government actions on Covid-19 and vaccinations). This anti-establishment attitude has its roots in both the libertarian and left-wing cultures.

In contrast, other parts of society supporting central and vital institutions rely on a democratically legitimized mandate to shape. Here, Web 3.0 is sometimes even judged as “a new anarcho-casino-capitalism world where every fourteen-year-old kid can launch a fly-by-night Ponzi scheme and pump it on social media all from the comfort and anonymity of their parent’s basement.”

Examples such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs show that these conflicts revolve around different cultural phenomena, too. In this case, pop culture resonates exceptionally with a digital and financial elite seeking new exclusive markers of distinction.

So times are crazy and confusing. But times of cultural upheaval also offer incredible opportunities. From the things just described, we can derive a super simple growth formula for our clients:

The growth of brands is propelled by

• innovative products at the intersection of code and culture,
• contextual amplification, and
• transactional ability.

Brands that focus on this trinity will have massive growth opportunities in the coming years.

In this spirit, I wish you curiosity, energy, and joy in 2022, and above all: stay safe!