Cultural branding is one of the strategies businesses can use to reach a new target audience, as it creates relevance to their styles. When you appeal to their lifestyle, you can easily beat the competition. This article will examine cultural branding and how to leverage it to reach your target audience.
What is Cultural Branding?
Cultural branding is a marketing strategy where businesses infuse a new lifestyle into their branding, showing what they want to provide to their customers. The goal is to enable brands to establish meaningful connections with their audience.
This bottom-up approach also enables brands to shape their culture according to the bottom-up culture of the target audience. This makes the target audience feel appreciated and have a shared purpose with the brand. Customers who feel appreciated are likelier to engage with and buy from your brand.
While traditional advertising strategies focus on the benefits and features of a brand, cultural branding focuses on the product’s DNA. It answers questions such as who we are and why your audience should care. For successful cultural advertising, a brand may focus on its core ideologies and values that connect it with its target audience.
Cultural Branding Strategies You Can Use
Cultural branding requires a lot of planning and not just putting some fluff together. It requires extensive research and a good understanding of the target audience using a good buyer persona. This ensures better brand positioning, relevance, and authenticity. The way you do your cultural branding will depend on your strategy. Here are a few strategies you can use:
Determine Your Audience’s Values And Beliefs
Your target audience’s values and beliefs will determine your cultural branding. These values will ensure every cultural branding strategy aligns with their beliefs and cultures. Remember that different countries have different values. Therefore, if you are marketing your products and services in different markets, you need to understand the values and beliefs of each.
Determine the emotions to evoke
To create a vibrant community culture, you should connect the brand with the emotions they care about. By including a particular emotional connection in your overall marketing strategy, you can improve your overall customer experience.
Create a cultural branding model that will impact your internal team. To connect with your customers emotionally, this connection should start from within. Some of the issues to include in the framework include
- Management style,
- Cultural strategy,
- Shared values
If you can manage to achieve these issues, your brand can attract customers who connect emotionally with it.
Share your Brand story.
One of the best ways of connecting with your target audience is by sharing stories that can resonate with your audience. In the previous steps, we noted the importance of understanding your audience. Now, it is time to weave a narrative that they will love. The brand narrative should reflect your audience’s background, experiences, and aspirations.
You can show your audience how you created your brand came to be. For instance, in their Widen the Screen campaigns, Proctor and Gamble used their platform to share stories of creatives in the black community. They showed how interesting and life-affirming their stories were, a sharp contrast to the stories shared on mainstream media.
Use images and symbols.
On top of adding brand visuals and aesthetics, choose the right symbols and emotions that will spark ideas and emotions in your brand even when someone cannot spell your name. For instance, people will easily identify Adidas shoes when they see the logo, even before they read the name.
Choose the correct brand language.
Cultural branding requires that you use language and communication that is relevant to your target audience. Since words are very powerful, your choice of brand language will determine whether your message will be compelling.
Create a good sense of community.
Instead of just selling products or services, the big brands do much more: They create a community. They focus on societal shifts and provide their consumers an opportunity to be part of their growth journeys, providing them with validation, identity, and belonging.
A good example of a brand that does that is Subaru. The vehicle manufacturer has a line of vehicles representing a club and not just a mode of transport. Their vehicles are loved by adventurous consumers who are environmentally and safety conscious. The car fosters a sense of community among its owners. Similarly, The Barbie Doll movie had a genius marketing strategy that also created a sense of community.
Offer experience to consumers
The role of cultural branding is to provide a wholesome experience for customers. Rather than just using the product, it includes how it should be used. You should ensure that every touchpoint in your emotional advertisement resonates with the brand’s essence.
For instance, a company like Starbucks has created an in-store experience for its customers. Besides just the coffee, the store offers an experience ranging from curated music to high-end decor and plush sofas. This environment encourages customers to stay longer, whether working on their laptops or relaxing.
Why Cultural Branding Matters
Cultural branding can create enormous opportunities for your brand. These include
- Stronger brand identity. You should do more than just the basics to create a strong brand. You should understand the essence of your business, why it matters, and how it aligns with your customer’s values. All these steps will help you evoke customer’s emotions, enabling them to connect strongly with your brand.
- Great loyal customers. One of the biggest challenges of the 21st century is gaining customer loyalty. When you create a brand culture that mirrors your audience, you can easily gain your audience’s trust.
- Increase company morale. By introducing your brand culture to your everyday work environment, you can add positivity to the work environment.
In Conclusion,
Brands are now going out of their way to nurture their customer relationships through ads that appeal to emotions. One of the ways they do that is through cultural branding. If you are getting started with cultural branding, our tips above will help you get started.
