People judge brands on far more than what they sell. They notice how a brand speaks, what it responds to, who it collaborates with and whether it adds anything to the communities around it.
For years, the relationship between brands and culture was fairly simple. Find the spaces your audience cares about, whether that’s music, sport, fashion or entertainment, then buy your way alongside them through sponsorships, media partnerships, celebrity deals and advertising. That model still has a role. On its own, it no longer makes a brand feel culturally relevant.
Social media changed the rules because brands are now visible well beyond their campaigns. People see how they behave in comment sections, how they work with creators and which conversations they choose to join. Those small interactions add up to a far clearer picture than any single campaign, and audiences use them to judge how a brand thinks, what it values and whether it has anything interesting to say. The brands pulling ahead have stopped asking how to advertise around culture. They’re asking what role they can play within it.
Key takeaways
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Audiences judge brands on behaviour: Comment sections, creator partnerships and the conversations a brand joins now shape perception as much as its campaigns.
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Culture has to be earned: Treating it like a media channel produces content that references the moment without giving anyone a reason to care.
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Consistency creates cultural permission: Duolingo spent years building Duo’s personality before taking it into big cultural moments.
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The best ideas give audiences a role: Spotify Wrapped works because the user is the most interesting part of it.
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Contribution builds credibility: Nando’s earns its place in music by giving artists a recording studio to create in.
About the author
Simarin Tandon | Junior Digital Account Director
Having worked with brands across the Beauty & Wellness, FMCG, FinTech, and Home & Lifestyle sectors, Simarin focuses on driving acquisition and growth, whilst managing the Digital team at brandnation.
A curious marketer, Simarin’s finger is always on the pulse when it comes to performance and digital updates across both paid and organic platforms.
Culture has to be earned
One of the easiest mistakes is treating culture as something to bolt onto a marketing plan. A trend picks up speed, a TV show takes over the group chat or an aesthetic starts appearing everywhere, and brands rush to join in while it’s still hot.
Sometimes that works, especially when the link is natural and the brand has something to add. More often, the result references the same thing as everyone else and gives the audience no reason to care.
Cultural relevance comes from understanding why something matters to people, how they take part in it and whether the brand has a credible role in that behaviour. Speed helps on social. Speed without understanding looks like trend-chasing. The brands that build genuine relevance do it over time, by turning up consistently in spaces where they’ve earned permission to be.
Duolingo built the character before the moment
Duolingo is the obvious example, and its speed in reacting to trends is only part of the story.
The brand spent years turning Duo into a recognisable character with a very specific personality, sense of humour and relationship with its audience. People knew exactly how Duo behaved long before the brand took that personality into bigger cultural moments.
Its social team has also talked about using the comment section as a source of creative direction. For Duolingo, social is a two-way conversation: it watches what people respond to and lets that shape what comes next.
That foundation is why Duo’s fictional death and resurrection worked. Audiences were reacting to a character they already knew and cared about. The lesson for other brands has little to do with copying Duolingo’s tone. It’s about consistency. Cultural moments are far easier to create once people already recognise and understand you.
Spotify turned marketing into a ritual
Spotify Wrapped shows how a brand can become part of culture without constantly commenting on it.
At its simplest, Wrapped is product data: a personalised summary of what someone listened to that year.
Its cultural power comes from how much people want to share it. A top artist, favourite genre or slightly embarrassing listening habit becomes a way to express taste and identity, which gives the audience a genuine reason to take part.
Spotify created the format, and the user is still the star. People engage far more readily with content that gives them a role than with content that simply asks for their attention.
Nandos gives something back to music
Nando’s takes a different route through its long-standing relationship with music, from what you hear in its restaurants to its support for artists. It now runs a recording studio beneath its Soho restaurant, giving emerging and established artists a space to create and collaborate.
Providing something useful within a cultural space is a very different proposition from putting a logo next to it, and that’s what makes Nando’s involvement credible. The brand still benefits from the association. The value comes from a role it has spent years building.
Cultural relevance can’t be borrowed forever
Duolingo, Spotify and Nando’s are very different brands, and each has built something distinctive of its own. Plenty of brands try to borrow relevance instead. A creator can open the door to an audience, a celebrity can generate attention and a trend can deliver a short burst of buzz. None of them makes the brand itself culturally interesting.
At some point, the brand has to bring something to the relationship. Audiences can usually tell the difference between a brand that has shown a consistent interest in a space and one that turned up because the topic appeared in that week’s trend report.
From visibility to contribution
The biggest shift for marketers is the question they start with. Traditional advertising asks how a brand can be seen within a cultural space. Culturally relevant brand building asks what the brand can add to it.
That contribution could be entertainment, access, expertise, a useful tool, a platform for creative talent, a community or simply a point of view people enjoy hearing. The answer will look different for every brand, and it should.
What this means for your brand
Building cultural relevance rarely means showing up more often. It means being much clearer about the role you want to play. Before joining a cultural moment, ask three questions:
- Does the brand have a genuine connection to it?
- Can it contribute something useful or interesting?
- Will the idea still make sense once the trend has passed?
The strongest cultural marketing feels consistent with what the brand has already been doing, and that’s the difference between appearing in culture and becoming part of it. The brands that stay relevant will be the ones that know where they belong, what they can add and why people want them there.
Helping brands find that role is at the heart of what we do, across social, influencer, creative campaigns and experiential. If you’re ready to give your audience a real reason to care, get in touch and let’s work out what your brand can bring to the culture that matters most to them.
FAQs
It means playing a consistent, credible role within the communities and conversations your audience cares about. That might be through entertainment, access, expertise, a useful tool, a platform for talent or a distinctive point of view, built up over time through how the brand behaves as well as what it advertises.
Start by building a consistent personality people recognise, listen closely to your community and focus on what you can genuinely contribute. Join cultural moments only where the brand has a natural connection and permission to take part, as Duolingo, Spotify and Nando’s have each done in their own way.
Reacting quickly can drive short-term attention, but speed without understanding tends to look like trend-chasing. Audiences can tell when a brand has arrived because a topic is popular, and that kind of borrowed relevance fades as soon as the moment passes.
