How to Align Your Brand with Changing Cultural Trends

What should all brands have in common? For one, they should work hard to avoid wasting time, money and resources. Secondly, they should try their best not to anger or alienate their consumers. To achieve that they need to take a closer look at culture and trends. Now although cultural trends come and go, their impact remains significant as the years go by. If you want your brand to grow and prosper, you must study, analyze, understand and accommodate those trends.

But how can your brand stay authentic and innovative while keeping up with the ever changing cultural trends? What are the steps you need to take to ensure that you don’t land your brand in hot water? Let’s explore this interesting and very important topic together.

Tips for using cultural trends for brand growth:

Brands such as Pepsi and Protein World have learned first hand how ignoring cultural context can really harm their image, reputation and thus profits. To avoid ending up where they have, your brand must follow the following steps:

• Take time to understand your audience well

Before you dive into marketing, you need to take enough time to know everything about your audience. By doing this, you ensure that you market to the right audience, you create the perfect message, you motivate action and you keep your consumers satisfied.

Of course you will need reliable data to figure this out. However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg as numbers and figures can only take you so far! You will also need to move beyond demographics and deeply understand the cultural trends that really matter to your consumers. Find answers for questions such as:

What are my consumers interested in? How do they spend their time? What are they most passionate about?

The more your understand your consumers’ cultural attitudes, the better you will be able to strategically market your brand to them.

See Also: What You Need for Establishing A Strong Brand Identity

• Conduct a thorough cultural research

Now that you have taken the time to better understand your audience, it’s time to take it a step further and explore the cultural trends that are currently influencing your consumers. The Culture Vulture is a great place for you to start.

Interesting topics you should consider can include issues such as startups and how they are remaining competitive, how to cater to Baby Boomers as well as how to include balance and serenity in your offerings to follow the mindfulness trend.

Moreover, you need to look into hot topics that directly affect your consumers. These issues include the environmental impact of your business and how it can strive to stay green throughout its operations.

• Craft a unique message that stands for something

After understanding your consumers and their cultural attitudes, it is time to craft your message. An effective message should align with or even resolve a bigger cultural narrative. Try to make your message simple yet powerful. Choose your words wisely and make sure they pack a punch. Moroever, make sure that your brand’s message is clear, creative and consistent.

To get some inspiration, do some research and study brands that made a difference by redefining gender roles with their simple yet very powerful messages. A great example is Under Armour’s “I Will What I Want” Campaign. You can check it out in the video below.

See Also: How to Get the Best Results Out of Affiliate Marketing

• Use visuals to strengthen your message

When creating a marketing campaign, visuals are as important as written and spoken words. Actually, the right visuals can help create an emotional connection with consumers, inspire them to take action and convince them that you are culturally aware and relevant. This includes videos, images as well as well-placed labels.

So take the time to explore how you can strengthen your message using the right visuals. Moroever, pay special attention to new, non-traditional avenues that can capture more attention and create higher engagement.

Finally, remember that sometimes your visuals can be powerful enough to create cultural relevance on their own. A great example is CoverGirl hiring their first male brand ambassador, James Charles.

Wrap up

To wrap this up, we invite you to answer the following questions: How do you keep your brand relevant to cultural trends? How do you ensure that your brand messages are inspiring, motivating and successful? We look forward to hearing your insights and feedback in the comment section below.

The post How to Effectively Use Cultural Trends for Brand Growth appeared first on The Global Now.