A bottle of Aussie shampoo or Bondi Sands can sit on a bathroom shelf in London, plastered with references to Australia, and still make perfect sense to someone who has never been here.
The customer does not need to be Australian. They do not need to live near Bondi. And they do not need to fit neatly into an “18-34 female” media segment — and according to former Vice Media and William Morris Endeavour executive Mark Adams.
Speaking with B&T, Adams, who has worked in the media, arts and entertainment space for the best part of two decades, argues marketers have got the order of operations “completely wrong”.
Rather than beginning with a demographic audience and working backwards towards a brand idea, they should find a cultural “muse” that can help them make a contribution only their brand can make.
“You might as well give your segmentation definitions to your brands based on fucking horoscopes,” he said.
His point is not that brands should stop pursuing mass reach. It is that the community that inspires the idea does not have to be the same audience that ultimately sees the advertising.
“You start with a muse audience. You use that community to figure out what a contribution that only your brand could make is. Make that contribution, capture the effects of that contribution, then turn that into the content and even the advertising that you blast using paid media to everyone.”
“If you want to get big, start small.”
The Bondi Sands bottle on a London shelf
Adams said brands such as Bondi Sands is an example of “cultural equity travelling well beyond the people who might traditionally be considered its target demographic”.
The brand has built its identity around Bondi Beach and the Australian beach lifestyle — meaning a bottle can arrive in London carrying the Bondi name and Australian cues without needing its customer to have any demographic connection to Australia.
The same principle applies to Aussie, the P&G-owned haircare brand.
“I’m not Australian, and yet I know what Aussie stands for,” Adams said. “You’re selling a certain energy.”
For Adams, that “energy” is the equity. The demographic, he said, must come later.
How about Gymshark?
He makes the same argument with Gymshark, which Adams advised when it was closely connected to a community of people looking for something more social and communal from the gym.
The opportunity was not simply to find people who went to gyms and buy media against them. It was to understand what that community wanted and build something around it.
That thinking comes from Adams’ earlier career in music management, when he worked with artists including Usher, Björk, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift.
He said music audiences were not reduced to definitions such as “19 to 24-year-old females” in particular locations with particular incomes.
Instead, marketers looked at mindsets, passions and interests — and those cultural insights could influence products, merchandise, live shows and marketing.
At VICE, which acquired Adams’ business theAudience International and where he served as head of innovation, the focus became “networks of culture”, rather than broad audience labels such as millennials.
“People are into some weird-ass shit, and there’s a podcast about that,” he said.
And AI, he argues, is making those networks increasingly visible.
“It’s there now,” Adams said, when asked whether brands have the data to identify communities and how they connect.
He describes AI as allowing marketers to conduct an “archaeological dig” into a brand’s founding principles, deepest equities and product truths, before mapping where those ideas are appearing across culture.
“Every community has unmet needs,” Adams said. “Open a paper if you can’t think of a community with an unmet need because they’re everywhere.”
Lululemon’s ‘yummy mummy’ problem
Another example Adam shared was athleisure and athletic apparel brand Lululemon.
Adams said the brand was concerned it was becoming a “yummy mummy brand” and “boxing ourselves into this kind of Karen corner”.
Its founding principle centred on breathing and flow, so rather than simply finding more consumers who looked like its existing customer, the team used AI to explore where those same ideas appeared elsewhere in culture.
It then found hip-hop.
“If we can somehow link the first principles of this brand, which is breathing and flow, with the first principles of being a sick rapper, which is breathing and flow, we’re suddenly moving out of this corner we’ve boxed ourselves into of downward-facing dog and sun salutations.”
The resulting ‘This Is Yoga’ campaign worked with eight other communities globally and, Adams said, “absolutely smashed it”.
How Smirnoff stopped interrupting culture
Adams points to Smirnoff as another example of the difference between borrowing culture and contributing to it.
When he looked at the vodka brand’s festival activity, he told then-Diageo president Syl Saller that it was “badging and borrowing and stealing equity from a cultural asset”.
“You’re not contributing anything,” he said. “You’re in fact interrupting it.”
The answer was to start with a product truth — Smirnoff’s triple distillation — and connect that with the idea of equalisation and balance.
Adams said festival audiences were almost 60 per cent female at the time, while only seven per cent of DJs on stage were women. Smirnoff subsequently pushed for 50/50 male and female DJ representation on its stages, or threatened to withdraw its sponsorship.
Artists including Amelie Lens, Charlotte de Witte and The Blessed Madonna responded positively, while the idea eventually extended into a Spotify partnership aimed at addressing gender imbalance in music recommendations.
“Do something with a centre of gravity that is culturally appropriate to talk about around the dinner table,” he said, “instead of just to endure until you can skip the ad.”
