Culture is fragmented. It’s messy. It’s changeable.
Today, if you’re an established global brand, creating and nurturing cultural relevance is harder than ever. This is especially true in the alc-bev industry, where category dynamics are shifting rapidly, and where the values and consumption behaviors of younger generations are forcing brands to re-examine their role in popular culture.
The challenge for long-established and leading alc-bev brands?
How do you stay tethered to what makes you… you… all while responding to shifts in culture, and people’s evolving relationship with alcohol? The trendiest innovation opportunities across alc-bev, are relatively clear, but they’re only one piece of the puzzle. And, they don’t always make sense for every brand.
Whiskey
In Whiskey, for example, creative flavor play, premiumisation, and sustainability are the three core tenets driving innovation for F’24-F’25 (read more on The Sound’s innovation work), with new and exciting ultra-premium brands rapidly emerging to entice audiences. But, what are you to do if moving into flavor, or catering to up-market interests aren’t relevant to your core audience?
Wine
In the wine space, we’re seeing an uptick in interest in new and under-the-radar regions and methods of production. We’re also seeing more interest in products that have compelling inclusivity and sustainability stories. But that doesn’t really help you if you’re a ‘cheap and cheerful’ value wine from California, trying to figure out how to reverse declining volume.
Gen Z
And, of course, the number of people choosing to pursue a sober-curious lifestyle continues to grow, with Gen Z in particular taking a moderate approach to their social, work and love lives. But for brands whose DNA is grounded in hedonism, subversiveness, or party culture, embracing this trend can seem like a pretty big leap.
Nurturing brand relevance
If you’re at the helm of a well-established global brand, born out of what, today, feels like a completely different era, how do you stay relevant? In many ways, the brand stories and symbolism that marked the rise of some of the world’s most iconic alc-bev brands are completely at odds with the currents driving today’s cultural norms.
But, in other ways, they’re still very relevant, but just look different. Celebrating, exploring, socializing, and the need for cathartic release, are more relevant than ever. 44% of people aged 21-35 in China and 36% in Germany cite “going out with friends” as a preferred way to combat stress and isolation, ahead of yoga or meditation. Meanwhile, 90% of UK students believe clubbing improves mental wellbeing.
The drivers and occasions that the alc-bev industry is built upon haven’t changed, but the cultural context surrounding them has.
WARC’s Guide to Creating Cultural Advantage offers up some helpful principles to keep in mind for brands that are navigating these shifts, and trying to understand how to re-anchor themselves culturally:
- Popularity and trends are byproducts of culture: Brands need to avoid conflating “culture” with “popularity,” and avoid chasing cultural relevance by trying to build association with what (or who) is trendy at any given time. The former number one beer in the United States learned this lesson the hard way.
- Consumer identities have become more fluid: Brands need to be careful not to characterize audiences by rigid cultural norms (e.g. Gen Z are all about ‘x’). It’s easy enough to see the high-level patterns that unify overlapping groups and sub-cultures, but you might learn more if you look for the bizarre, and validate the weird, instead. And, if you’re planning on grounding your approach in those high-level patterns, you run the risk of being on the receiving end of more than a few eye-rolls (How do you do, fellow kids?).
- Focus on communities and sub-cultures as the new marketing unit: People can be united by similar mindsets across geographies and segments, but instead of focusing on people as the primary unit of marketing, brands should focus on communities. The full potential of a brand’s target audience is not one generic group anymore; it’s now made up of an accumulation of micro-communities who have varying degrees of cultural influence.
Building cultural understanding
Ultimately, efforts to build cultural relevance begin with cultural understanding. With that in mind, here are a few ways that your brand can develop a better understanding of culture to drive brand saliency and relevance.
1. Identify the communities and sub-cultures that matter to your target audience
Brands are often too quick to get into functionally-rooted research that involves nights out with drinkers, or other approaches that are very category-centric. Instead, start with cultural research and social listening that will help you identify the make-up of the culture surrounding your category, and your product.
Ask questions like:
- Who influences and inspires these people?
- What communities do they belong to?
- Who do they look up to within those communities, and why?
- How do the values I’ve rooted my brand in show up in their lives today?
- Who are individuals they would describe as being culturally avant-garde?
Once you’ve got foundational insight into the above, you can amplify it using social listening, and really get into the codes and cues of popular culture. And, you can begin to see the patterns of influence within the communities and sub-cultures that matter, identifying where there are springboards for your brand.
2. Recruit differently
If you want to really understand culture, and how to remain culturally relevant, you need to go beyond the usual panels of drinkers, lapsed drinkers, and competitive drinkers.
Of course you should screen for awareness and product use when conducting research. However, brands should also embrace more creative and culturally-rooted ways of thinking about the composition of research participants. If you’re a global whiskey brand struggling to maintain cultural relevance, doesn’t it stand to reason then, that the people still drinking your product aren’t necessarily purveyors of culture?
If you’ve done the foundational research to understand who inspires your target, and who they believe is culturally avant-garde, then talk to those people instead. A struggling global whiskey brand might be better off recruiting a panel made up of a blend of current, lapsed, and competitive users that are influential members of relevant communities and sub-cultures… electronic dance music enthusiasts, digital nomads, fashion-forward thrifters, etc.
3. Get off the sidelines and into the game
If brands want to be culturally relevant, they need to build with the people who matter to their brands and not build for them.
Matt Klein put it best in this 2023 blog post on Foresight as activism:
“The reason artists don’t need market research is because they’re already immersed in the world they’re making for.”
If you consider yourself an observer of culture, then you’ve already resigned yourself to being a follower of culture, and not a driver. Your brand should be an active participant in the interests of those they seek to resonate with. When you do this well, you don’t need to decipher what’s trending; you’ll know.
What this means for alc-bev brands is that rather than chasing culture, you should find ways of co-creating it with sub-cultures and communities. Find those who are driving cultural change, and work with them to create something new, instead of trying to place your brand at the nexus of that change.
Is your alc-bev brand grappling with how to respond to cultural change and maintain its cultural relevance? We’d love to help.
Written By:
David Akermanis
David has a 12 year professional strategy background in brand strategy, design, and consulting. Since joining The Sound, he has been applying his knowledge of strategic foresight methods to help organizations design for, and capitalize on the future. David enjoys both ambiguous/complex problems and ruthless simplicity. He loves a good strategy framework, and loves breaking/bending them even more. David holds a Master’s of Design, specializing in strategic foresight & innovation.
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