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5 steps to building a cultural brand

Written by: Harvey Hartman

Article Overview: Successful cultural icons like The Grateful Dead and contemporary brands such as Starbucks and Patagonia exemplify the cultural connection between the brand and the consumer world.

5 steps to building a cultural brand

Successful cultural icons like The Grateful Dead and contemporary brands such as Starbucks and Patagonia exemplify the cultural connection between the brand and the consumer world.

Today's successful brands have learned they are not merely selling products, they are creating lifestyle worlds around their products and brands. The more you know about the world in which your product plays, the more successful your brand will be.

Here are 5 key components to creating lifestyle worlds and building cultural brands in the food and beverage category:

1) Create Brand Experiences:

Share or at least empathize with the lifestyle interests of your consumers without turning consumers off. Brand evangelists create a community in which consumers can participate on their own terms. The most successful are those who patiently generate interest in the everyday rituals and key symbols of their brand message and who bring new people into its ritual spaces where they can slowly attach their own meanings to those key symbols.


Build ambiance in the brand experience to facilitate discovery, surprise and delights - even for grab-and-go shoppers. Rituals and interactions, in-store or virtual, should facilitate consumers' ability to build up their knowledge of culturally salient product worlds (i.e., specialty cheeses, wine, olive oils, seafood, meats for the grill, etc.)
2) Build Community:
Stores and virtual communities need to be harnessed as interactive gathering spaces for consumers with similar lifestyles and consumption habits. Don't just sell olive oil off the shelf, create a Mediterranean atmosphere to embed your brand in a true lifestyle world.


In-store rituals give your brand access to the informal, trust-based social networks that evangelize your brand far better than shelf-talkers, advertisements and brochures. Infuse sensory components and human interaction and exchange to engage the consumer in the store-flow routine.


Ensure your brand resonates with the shared values and taste preferences driving everyday consumption of your products. Do this by closely observing and interacting with social networks of your consumers (whether through ongoing consumer insight research, in-store ritual or online events).
3) Sell to Cultural Occasions, Not to the Individual Consumer:
Insert yourself into the social rituals of everyday life by being relevant to your consumer, not through intrusion or guerilla tactics.
In food culture, these rituals include: the family dinner, the weekend family breakfast, the office lunch, group exercise, TV watching, cocktail parties, backyard barbecues, housewarmings, etc.

4) Learn the Language:
Talk and think about consumers the way consumers see and talk about themselves.
Brand packaging and messaging as well as in-store communications need to use the colloquial language of consumers, not industry or technical jargon. Language should be playful, fun and evocative not dry, formal and terse.

5) Create the Culture of Food:
Companies need to stand at the leading edge of shifts in food culture. Trends in consumption aren't driven by changes in consumers' objective needs. They are about ever-shifting, arbitrary distinctions of taste. Understand the values that structure those distinctions, and you have the key to long-term success.
For example, healthy eating isn't about good nutrition, whose definition is always changing. It's really about consuming symbols of self-improvement and about feeling like a good person, a good mother, etc. Long-term growth will be found in resonating with this underlying cultural value, not just to the ever shifting buzz words that express "healthy eating" (i.e. organic, low-carb, fat-free, etc.)


Tap into the nostalgia for the slow, cooked-from scratch family meal.


The line between "snack" and "meal" has blurred. Empathize with the pragmatic difficulties of eating "balanced" meals in modern life. Design products and messaging that tap into this dilemma.


Consumers talk more idealistically than they actually eat. One example is talk of "moderation." Very few consumers practice sustained, moderation across eating occasions. Everyone, including so-called "healthy eaters," indulges on a regular basis, often to sustain their own sense of well-being and that of household members they love. So, don't be afraid to develop a brand or retail environment that caters simultaneously to notions of "health" and to notions of "indulgence." They don't cancel each other out in consumers' minds.

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