How Foresight Can Help Your Brand Build Cultural Relevance

Cultural relevance is an issue that brands are grappling with across categories. We wrote not too long ago about alcohol brands and cultural relevance, but it’s an issue that is equally relevant for established players in automotive, luxury, retail, and beyond. It’s a term that generates head nodding around boardroom tables, but with different understandings of what it means. Ultimately though, cultural relevance is about being in-step with the underlying forces that drive communities of interest. And, being a genuine participant in the co-creation of that group’s culture, not just the weird person who nobody knows, but is somehow in the group chat.

We’re also in a period of peak interest in AI that is making it more tempting than ever before for brands to chase hype and engage in trend-fetichism, by mining data and chasing the next big thing. Ultimately though, brands who want to regain or build cultural relevance need to be drivers of culture. If you’re mining data to detect a trend and quantify its velocity, it’s too late for that – you won’t be a driver, you’ll be a follower.

Cultural relevance is earned. And, one of the most authentic ways of earning it is through collaboration with the communities who are just starting to make, or struggling to make progress in the fringes. The ones who aren’t trending – yet.

How then should brands be thinking about identifying these communities and qualifying opportunities to build cultural relevance? How do you know where to direct your energy and focus? And, how can you assess whether it will be worth it for your brand?

Foresight offers a mindset and a set of tools that are perfectly suited to help brands start this journey, and make informed, strategic decisions about where to invest their time and energy.

 

Why Foresight?

As a practice, foresight is inherently concerned with identifying voices in the margins of culture. The process of exploring potential futures involves finding ‘weak signals’ that provide you with an indication of where culture may be headed.

Foresight also provides you with the tools to explore the plausibility of potential cultural change, and assess its impact through critical uncertainties and scenario thinking.

So, not only can you identify the communities that may be the ones driving culture in the years to come, but you can also begin to explore whether those communities are the ones that are the right ones to potentially collaborate with.

 

Qualifying Opportunities With Foresight

Let’s take the example of luxury brands, and the rise of IYKYK ‘quiet luxury’. It was one of the defining trends of 2023, but the signals that pointed toward its potential surge in popularity were visible well before it was being talked about.

In fact, quiet luxury experienced a similar surge in popularity during the global financial crisis of 2008.

“The embrace of quiet luxury is more than just a lockdown-era lesson well learned. Fashion has long been the barometer for social and economic changes. A prime example is the 2008 recession, where after a decade of logomania and Paris Hilton’s ‘that’s hot’ catchphrase, brands like Céline (under the then creative director Phoebe Philo) offered functional fashion that felt more attune to our everyday lives.”
ELLE Magazine

A first step on any foresight journey is to conduct a horizon scan, looking across social, technological, economic, environmental, and political dimensions to identify forces that may have an impact on the future of your area of focus. A foresight practitioner will routinely consider the past when considering how any given force might shape the future – patterns have a funny way of repeating themselves, but can take different forms.

A horizon scan conducted by luxury brand 2019, during a period of massive economic growth, would have inevitably included the yellow vest protests in France, which were motivated by concerns around economic inequality among a proportion of working class people.

The writing was on the wall, well before the quiet luxury resurgence of 2023. And if a brand was looking to ‘own’ the next big trend, this would have been an ideal time to find partners with cultural cachet, who were inspired by the tensions that existed in 2019.

 

Identifying The Right Voices & Potential Collaborators

Another routine practice in any foresight journey is to identify ‘weak signals’ and fringe voices that are on the margins of culture – the absurd, the weird, and those who exist outside of what is broadly considered to be “normal”. This is particularly true when projects have longer time horizons.

In the world of alcohol for example, last year a German brewery created a new powdered beer – think micronised coffee, but beer. Their motivation for doing so is sustainability-driven. It’s a bit weird, and isn’t likely to catch-on en masse anytime soon, but it’s a great example of a fringe signal that we might learn from if we were thinking about futures in alcohol.

Similarly, lists of emerging designers in 2019 were littered with examples of people doing interesting things with minimalism and quiet luxury (before we called it that). Many of them would have been solid bets for brands seeking partners to build credibility with.

 

Putting It All Together

So, if you want to build cultural relevance for your brand, start with a foresight mindset.

Scanning the horizon can help you develop a perspective on what the future may look like, and what future scenarios have the potential to shape the operating environment for your brand.

From there, think about the voices on the margins that have something compelling to offer in these scenarios, and whether or not their values are aligned with your brand.

How ‘far out’ you want to reach with an approach like this is ultimately up to you.

And although the future is uncertain, you don’t need to look very hard to find examples of brands wasting money on partnerships grounded in right now that have backfired or failed to deliver. In many ways, building partnerships grounded in the future is inherently less risky than those built in the now. At least you have the opportunity to potentially build the future you’d like to see.

Want to know more about how foresight can help you build your brand’s cultural relevance? Let’s chat.