This is an article I wrote and was posted today on boardsmag.com.

Brands need to become cultural artifacts rather than existing in vacuumed silos or categories, argues Colin Drummond, head of Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s cultural and business insights. Nicknamed “Cogs”, short for cultural anthropologists, the department is a 30-strong team of social scientists, account planners and investigative journalists that take the place of traditional account planners. 

As marketing professionals, we often make a simple mistake, one that is seductive in its “obviousness” and seeming common sense because its how everyone else does it. It’s taught in business textbooks, it’s practiced everyday by many clients and their agencies.

The mistake we make is this: we put brands in a vacuum called a category.

Ivory competes only in a category called Bar Soap, Nike in Athletic Wear, American Express in Financial Services, Starbuck’s in Retail Coffee. You get the picture.

On the surface, it makes rational sense. Consumers make purchase decisions among a class of products, so it’s key that we are clear about how our particular brand stands out as the best choice in that category. We identify its core benefits and differentiators, and that’s that. We think that Ivory’s usefulness is limited to cleaning and Sprite’s to refreshment. While these things are true, and the truth of those things are foundational to a good brand strategy, they don’t tell the whole story. To limit a brand’s usefulness to its category benefit is to limit a brand’s actual role to people.

A brand’s true usefulness is in how it helps us to participate in culture.

The iPhone is not just a phone. Obama is not just a President. Google is more than a search engine. Coke is more than a soft drink. For better or worse, GM and Detroit are more than a car company and a city.

In each of their own ways, these brands represent aspects of today’s America: modernity, hope, intelligence, optimism, blindness and decay. These brands are culturally useful to us when we use them or even just have an opinion about them. Because our association with them says a lot about who we are. Significant brands are never just relevant to a category, they contribute to culture at large.

Culture exists as a way to understand our relationship to others. As active participants in the culture around us, we are acutely aware of - and sensitive to - our role within it. We make hundreds of decisions every day based on how our role will be advanced or confirmed by the people around us, and by how the brands we choose to badge us are perceived by others — and ourselves. Brands help us to tell the story about where we stand in culture, about what we care about and what we stand for.

So what does this mean for brand strategy? It means every single brand out there has a golden opportunity to be more broadly relevant than they are today. Every brand can be telling a bigger story that will in turn help people in culture tell their own story better. We must think about how we can be useful to people as they negotiate culture. Instead of just thinking about how our brands can be of benefit within a category, we must think about how our brands can be of benefit within culture. Instead of just thinking about how our brands can differentiate on the basis of product or service attribute, we must think about how our brands can differentiate within culture.

It requires some bravery on the part of clients and their agencies - a different vision and definition of success. It’s so tempting to focus on category because it gives a specific reason to buy. When you go outside the category, you’re likely treading in more emotional territory. Strategy grounded in culture works on a different pathway: on conversation that leads to a deeper and broader relevance, seemingly indirect but ultimately way more intriguing.

How is this even possible, you may ask? You may believe that brands like Lady Gaga, Sarah Palin or Apple can enter the cultural conversation because they are more interesting than your bar of soap or computer software. Well, you’d be surprised. Look at Dove and Twitter. Any brand can draw a line in the sand, take a stand on something, tweak culture and enter the conversation. It’s a matter of grounding it in the truth of that brand and not being afraid to put something original out there. People will talk about it. And in a flash, you will have defied conventional categorization and become an active part of the culture.

www.cpbgroup.com