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In fact, it is looming so large in the world of marketing that the following question has become an elephant in marketing boardrooms: what is your cultural strategy?
Let us contextualise this question: we know digital experiences have enabled consumers to almost completely firewall brands out of their socio-cultural reality. From banner blindness to ad-blocking software, consumers can choose to ignore brands.
Content marketing for marketers was going to be the big answer, right? Wrong. On YouTube or Instagram when ranking channels by the number of subscribers 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 over a billion views while brands’ content struggles to go over 10,000 views.
The hard truth is that very few people want brand content in their feeds. 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.
So, what can be done about it? It starts with developing a clear idea of the three components of a brand’s cultural strategy:
This is in marketing an urgent question as there ever was: where is your cultural strategy?