If we look at where the word “brand” started from, you have to go back thousands of years. Branding literally comes from the livestock term as it relates to domestication of animals. How else would you know which animals are yours when you send them off to pasture? Branding was (and remains today) a designation of ownership of a commodity, often in a cultural community.
Clearly, things have changed and the nature of brands have evolved. But in its essence, branding remains a valuable tool for marketers to identify and differentiate their wares. Doing so in a compelling way increases brand value. In order to do that effectively, it’s about leveraging the best research and insights available. Sure, there’s typical quant and qual research. But there’s also the opportunity to go much deeper to discover the inputs to how consumers act and think.
To shed more light, Jamie Gordon, Chief Disruption Officer at The Mighty Shed explores it further. As a social scientist and consultant with over 20 years experience unpacking culture and consumerism, Jamie puts insights into action. Success in business (and as humans) comes not simply from understanding the nuances of our cultural differences, but rather the power of the values that unify us.
Back to the Cultural Future with Mad Men
On Madison Avenue in 1960s, Jamie shares that the really hip agencies such as Ogilvy started using anthropologists. They were investigating how to dig deep into culture and going beneath the surface. Specifically, they were exploring product usage by consumers, reasons why they use it and what their values are. What the Mad Men era discovered was that when you understand human values, the context of the way people live and what’s driving behaviours, you can get a sense for how to connect on a deeper level.
By focusing on values, you get a sense on how to anticipate the needs of those you’re trying to serve.
Because you’re not just looking at point-in-time consumption behaviour or surface-level things, you get to the meaning behind why people do what they do. Jamie understands that if you know what a person’s values are and what their worldview is based on their culture, then you can have an idea of how they’re going to react in certain situations.
Utilizing anthropological techniques and tools is important for brands, knows Jamie. If you’re not leveraging these disciplines to discover insights about your target consumer, how do you know what to stand for? If you don’t really know what your most valuable consumers (your evangelists) are thinking, you’re toast.
Cultural Anthropology Versus Ethnography
Leadership and creative teams today toss around many social science terms. The two that are especially relevant, notes Jamie, are anthropology and ethnography. As you’ll see, they have many variants that comprise them more fully.
Anthropology is the science of studying humans and the human condition.
It’s divided into cultural anthropology (studying lived experience and cultural nuance), archaeology (studying past cultures via artifacts to find meaning) and linguistics (the study of language and how the construction of language is a reflection of culture). Moving on, there’s also physical anthropology or biological/medical anthropology (studies the impacts that culture has on biology and vice versa). Ethnography as an approach comes from the field of cultural anthropology, and is its main research approach, which is about uncovering the story of a culture.
Cultural ethnography explores the values, beliefs, rituals and behaviours that shape a group.
What’s powerful, suggests Jamie, is that ethnographic research looks to get into that lived experience. But it’s not from a distance. It’s specifically from the point of view of people who are living that experience. It’s rooted in the concept called cultural relativism. This concept says that the story of a culture should be told from the perspective of somebody within that culture. In doing so, it addresses the risks of a researcher trying to tell the story of a culture by limiting the ability of the researcher who can often have their perspective clouded by their own lived experience or culture. This is called ethnocentrism.
How Design Thinking Can Transform Everything You Do
Whenever tools or approaches are leveraged to gain insights, it often moves to the consultant or agency or brand to leverage them. In many cases, there’s a rush to a solution. As Jamie shares here, it may not be the most effective or efficient approach.
Design thinking may be a term you’ve heard before but may not know what it’s really about. It’s an incredibly powerful platform, shares Jamie, that focuses on agility and the ability to open up areas of creativity and inquiry. How it works is fairly straightforward: you start with the desired end or output in mind. Then, it’s about exploring – with different propositions – ways to expand your thinking. By way of different types of stimulus, whether that be insights or experimentation, to narrow down alternatives to relevant areas. Then, expanding again and creatively articulating new areas of opportunity. Finally, then it’s about narrowing back down by iterating on some of the preferred options.
The biggest challenge is that people (including many leaders) often want linear explorations (yesterday). But that’s the whole point. Get comfortable being lost. You don’t need to have the right answer right away. The truth is, when you give yourself structured time to really dig in and think, the necessary answers come more quickly and constructively.
The greatest success with design thinking is about setting parameters so that you can actually expand your thinking. It’s freedom within a framework.
Jamie points out that that by providing a really strong marketing context, you can then articulate what your constraints are. In doing so, you’re actually able to be free to think more creatively because you have your limitations understood already. It’s incredibly powerful.
Putting it All Together with Purpose
For brands, how and why you exist (and therefore how that shapes your point of view) should be expressed in everything you do. Jamie notes that your brand must inform the way you communicate, how you develop your products and how you operate your supply chain. In an age where people can see exactly what you’re doing on all of those micro levels, they will make judgments. Especially if you trip up.
By knowing your purpose, as informed by the ethnographic and anthropological research you’ve conducted, and filtering it through design thinking, your north star will emerge.
It makes decisions easier to consider. It takes a lot of work and time to get to your north star but once you do, it creates shortcuts in the decision-making process. And most compellingly, it enables your brand’s success. Without it, you’re just making claims to things that aren’t yours to own, just like that poor, unmarked cow in the middle of a field somewhere with no one to bring it home.
In Partnership With
Jamie Gordon is a social scientist and consultant with over 20 years experience unpacking culture and consumerism. As the Chief Disruption Officer at The Mighty Shed, Jamies puts insights into action with a global community of brands, corporations and agencies. Jamie has discovered that success in business (and as humans) comes not simply from understanding the nuances of our differences, but rather the power of the values that unify us. Knowing this, Jamie optimizes marketing impact and reach through brand strategy, human and cultural insights, storytelling and futuring.
Tim Bishop, CM is a multi-disciplined executive with a proven record of optimizing strategic efforts to expand the influence of leading organizations, such as the Canadian Marketing Association, Cineplex Entertainment, Lavalife.com, IMI International and Northstar Research Partners. In Partnership With is his latest focus to curate Canadian marketing experts to celebrate the power of strategic partnerships in a perspective-based content series.