Cultural Intelligence for Marketers

Today’s marketers need cultural intelligence and fluency to stay competitive.

Modern marketing professionals cannot afford to lack cultural intelligence — that is, the ability to analyze cultural trends and patterns — and cultural fluency, which refers to your brand’s capacity to both understand and strategically position itself within culture. Culture functions as an ideological lens through which people decide the behaviors, perspectives, and beliefs with which they feel aligned. There are numerous historic examples of marketers impacting culture. For example, many people today tend to associate the color pink with baby girls due to the fact that brands in the 1950s began promoting pink as an exclusively feminine color. Likewise, today’s most successful campaigns both reflect and reshape the culture and social narratives in which they operate.

Brands have a dual role: They’re cultural actors and commercial entities that leverage marketing as a form of mass media, akin to entertainment or pop culture. When brands take ownership of the powerful influence they have on shaping culture, they — and their marketing teams — embrace a new paradigm that positions them as “...