Culture shift

We have long been used to the idea of studying consumers. It’s a given. Marketers accept that the way to success is through insight into their lives and needs.

So we ask them how they feel about the brand in focus groups, probe their innermost desires in in-depth interviews, and even camp out in their homes – video silently running – to capture the earthy hues of ethnographic veracity for our target-audience pen portraits.

It wasn’t always so. Back in the middle of the last century, brand-owners lived and breathed the product, and worked outward from that perspective. Consumers were people to sell to, the dutiful recipients of the bounty that manufacturers had become ever-more practised at providing. Detroit made huge cars because it could, and was inclined to, not through any evidence that a living room on wheels was what people really wanted.

It took an academic mind to observe this solipsistic tendency and conclude that it was not the most effective way to come at things. Theodore Levitt, in his landmark 1960 paper, “Marketing Myopia” laid down the foundations of our discipline with his tenet that, “marketing must work backwards from the consumer.” It caused a mighty stir: what is natural to us now was revelatory at the time.

This century is not without its own eye-openers. In 2005 a new bunch of academics trawled through the literature and concluded that the two-way dynamic between consumer and brand is, itself, too limiting. They showed how the lens could be widened further to encompass the broader culture in which modern lives are played out.

Their body of work is known as CCT – Consumer Culture Theory – and its adherents include some of the most celebrated names in the behavioural and consumption sub-disciplines.

Douglas Holt was an early apostle, with his formula for dramatising brand narratives by taking sides in prevailing cultural tensions.

Albert Muniz and Thomas O’Guinn identified the presence of “brand communities”, arguing that they created value both for the brand-owner and consumers.

Nina Diamond and John Sherry analysed the phenomenal success of the American Girl brand, concluding that it was down to high levels of emotional engagement created through a socio-cultural approach to branding.

This theory’s most persistent champion is Grant McCracken. His deconstruction of breakthrough repositioning successes, such as Dove’s “Real beauty”, shows why they could not have emerged from consumer understanding alone, but required the alchemy of cultural insight. McCracken goes as far as to recommend the creation of a new role in every brand organisation: chief culture officer.

Few have taken him up on that. In my experience, it is still a rare marketer who looks much beyond the immediate consumer and category. Time is too tight, the subject matter too diffuse, and the temptation to default to a couple of “quick-and-dirties” too great. And to be fair, when confronted with the homogenised views of the people with the money in their pockets, it can be hard to make a case for broader exploration.

Yet the CCT evangelists are right: the Levitt consumer lens is artificially narrow. Making a study of consumers without reference to culture is like making a study of fish without reference to the sea. It can be done, but it misses the bigger point: the swirling currents and warm streams that buffet and nourish contemporary lives.

Given the vastness of that milieu, and its awesome complexity when compared with the cruder consumer-brand axis, CCT is, first, an exercise in humility. As with the ancients, who came to realise that the firmament didn’t revolve around a small part of the Mediterranean after all, widening our gaze to the cultural level is to place our little brand story in its appropriate context.

On the downside, the brand is no longer the all-encompassing hero even of its own narrative. On the upside, it will have some kind of meaningful role in an unimaginably richer one. That is both the reality, and the reward, of daring to raise our sights.