There is a particular kind of campaign that arrives at a cultural moment like a tourist arriving at a landmark: present, photographed, and essentially unchanged by the experience. The brand sees a conversation happening, locates its product somewhere adjacent to it, and publishes something. The audience notices. Not in the way the brand intended.

Cultural fluency is not the same as cultural awareness. Knowing a conversation exists is the beginning of the problem, not the solution to it.

Culture as operating system

Marcus Collins, former Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy and author of For the Culture, offers the most useful frame for this: culture is not a backdrop against which branding happens. It is the governing operating system of the communities brands are trying to reach. Products alone often do not differentiate a company in the marketplace. Instead, it is the cultural identity and the meanings associated with a brand that resonate with consumers. He uses Beats by Dre as the example: a product that outperformed Bose despite Bose having superior audio quality, because the cultural meaning Beats carried was more compelling than the functional one (Collins, For the Culture, 2023).

The implication is uncomfortable for most brand teams. It means that the question "what do we want this brand to mean?" is secondary to "what does this brand already mean to the people we want to reach?" — and those two answers are often incongruent. Collins argues that many brands mistake information for intimacy and therefore cannot integrate themselves into people's cultural zeitgeist. Brands must close the incongruency gap between desired meaning and how people actually see them.

The difference between listening and monitoring

Most brands have social listening tools. Very few have genuine cultural intelligence. The distinction is roughly the difference between reading transcripts and understanding what is actually being said.

Duolingo's monthly active users surpassed 100 million by mid-2024, driven substantially by a TikTok strategy built on giving its creative team genuine freedom to operate inside platform culture rather than alongside it. The brand's social team was not executing a campaign brief on TikTok. It was participating in the platform's own logic, including its humour, its self-awareness, its relationship with fandom, and its tolerance for chaos (Blankboard Studio, 2025). A major part of Duolingo's success comes from its mastery of social listening: the brand turns audience perception into content rather than pushing brand messages into audience spaces.

This is a meaningful operational difference. It requires hiring people who are genuinely embedded in the cultures the brand wants to reach, giving those people real creative authority, and accepting that the result will not always look like what a brand strategy deck anticipated.

Ben & Jerry's is the other canonical example, and for different reasons. The brand's political and social positions are not a campaign layer applied to a product. They are structurally integrated into how the company operates, including internal policies, supply chain decisions, and institutional donations. The communication follows from the practice, which is the opposite of how most brands approach "purpose." When the communication is primary and the practice is secondary, audiences notice, and the gap between the two is precisely what gets called out.

What performative allyship actually costs

The social media literature on brand missteps tends to focus on the reputational damage of specific campaigns. The deeper cost is more structural. Each time a brand positions itself in a cultural conversation it has not earned the right to enter, it narrows the credibility window for future attempts. Trust, once corrected downward, does not recover at the same rate it erodes.

According to Edelman's 2024 Trust Barometer, trust has become a "buy or boycott" factor for 71% of global consumers, with 63% saying they would purchase or advocate for brands based on their stance on societal issues, even if those brands were more expensive. The same research shows the converse: inauthenticity is not just ignored, it actively produces negative brand behaviour. Jumping on a trend without context, appropriating an aesthetic without acknowledging its origin, or deploying progressive language without internal alignment are not neutral acts. They register, and they accumulate (Edelman, 2024).

What cultural listening actually requires

The structural moves are not complicated, but they are costly in the ways organisations find hardest to fund. Diverse creative teams are not a diversity initiative; they are a signal quality problem. A brand team that does not include people from the communities it wants to reach will consistently misread those communities, regardless of how much research it commissions. Community feedback loops, whether through Discord servers, DMs, comment sections, or direct consultation, provide signal that no analytics dashboard can replicate.

The more fundamental shift is in orientation. Collins argues that culture moves forward through discourse and conversation, and that brands able to activate the bonds that connect communities, understanding culture as the governing operating system of those communities, unlock what he describes as "the ultimate cheat code" in commerce. That is not a claim about viral moments. It is a claim about long-term relevance, built by brands that understand what their audiences actually believe and find ways to be genuinely useful to those beliefs, rather than merely adjacent to them.

Culture does not need brands. The brands that understand this are the ones most likely to earn a place in it.

References

• Collins, M. (2023). For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be. Portfolio / Penguin. Link
• Edelman. (2024). Trust Barometer 2024: The Belief-Driven Buyer. Edelman. Link
• Blankboard Studio. (2025). Duolingo Marketing Strategy: How Humor & Memes Drive Growth. Blankboard. Link
• Visibrain. (2025). Wisdom from the Owl: How Duolingo Became TikTok's Standout Brand. Visibrain. Link
• Michigan Ross / Collins, M. (2024). Faculty Profile: Marcus Collins. University of Michigan Ross School of Business. Link

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