A new report from creative agency Hopeful Monsters posits that brands must start to think in terms of creating, harnessing and supporting fandoms and communities to help navigate a “silent growth crisis” in a fragmented, polycultural world.
However, rather than viewing a fragmented media and cultural world as a challenge, Hopeful Monsters believes tomorrow’s winning brands will view this disjointed society as an opportunity.
B&T caught up with Hopeful Monsters’ head of strategy, Glen Cassidy, for an exclusive chat about the report and the frankly puzzling situation Australia’s marketers find themselves in.
“We’ve been talking about fragmentation forever, media fragmentation in particular, for a couple of decades. Creative fragmented to keep pace, too. But it’s the cultural fragmentation now that’s what we’re exploring,” he said.
“It’s the tools of conversation, subreddits, group chats, private communities, the growing gated communities that operate on a ‘if you know, you know’ basis. They’re all on the rise. But at the same time, we’re looking for more ways to cement our identity and escape algorithmic excess, to find our tribe and a common sense of belonging.”
The report synthesises several different data sources to show that the world is becoming more multi-polar, more polycultural and less traditional than before. Quoting Michael Farmer, it shows the FMCG sales of P&G, Unilever, Nestle and Colgate-Palmolive grew at a compound annual growth rate of around 8 per cent.
Since digital advertising hit the scene, this has slowed to less than one per cent per year, or about half the rate of the US economy. It added that at least 20 of the 50 largest advertisers in the US have grown below 2 per cent per year for the past 15 years. What’s more, over the last decade, a 1 per cent increase in advertising share has become less than half as effective as it was before.
The reason for this change? Stagnation in terms of marketing and advertising strategy.
“Over 75 years ago, legendary copywriter Howard Gossage wrote, ‘People don’t read advertising, they read what interests them and sometimes that’s an ad,” said the report.
“The difference now is that what interests people is more diverse, easier to connect around and often happens away from what we perceive to be the big, mainstream”.
What is important to note here, that Hopeful Monsters is not positing that the fleeting ‘trends’ on social media have led to this fragmentation. In fact, they are a symptom of the change, not the cause.
“People talk about the speed of culture and all this kind of stuff,” said Cassidy.
“Culture actually moves slowly. Stuff might trend, but these are just micro-moments, fads, if you like. Trends happen over a longer period of time. That’s what we should be talking about. We deliberately haven’t tried to snapshot what these platforms deliver or have a Gen Z focus for that reason.
“Why is human behaviour in the aggregate pushing towards what we’re talking about here? Why is it fragmenting? It’s not because of short-term reactions, it’s a longer term shift that’s been building for a while in culture.”
With cultural fragmentation, brands can no longer rely on broad reach, mass media to deliver results. The cost of advertising is “astronomical,” according to Hopeful Monsters.
Nowadays, aligning and embedding a brand within a sub-culture and creating cultural saliency can be a significant growth accelerator, it reckons.
“Rather than asking whether a brand is broadly famous, it asks whether it is meaningfully present in the cultural codes, rituals, and shared meanings of the communities that now drive attention and identity,” reads the report.
So what should brands do?
“A brand can show up in multiple nodes of culture,” said Cassidy.
“That’s the beauty of this. If they decode the complexity that exists and find through lines across different nodes of culture, meaning can be made when they stitch together narratives across nodes of culture. Brands can’t be everything to everyone.”
In Cassidy’s mind, Heaps Normal is the “best example” of “cultural world building,” lauding it for its efforts in penetrating deep into the layers of “culture, music, art, creativity, food and hospitality”.
Importantly, Heaps Normal finds its way into these subcultures by building the infrastructure that supports them, not just sponsoring an event where those involved in the culture gather. That, of course, is straightforward for brands that have at least some function as part of a cultural event.
It might be less straightforward for less ‘cool’ brands or those in low-interest categories.
“We’re not saying it’s right for every brand or that every brand should world build to the level of Heaps Normal,” said Cassidy.
“But you might look at a brand like Telstra, which is arguably doing some of the best wide-reaching brand-building work in the country. Is it right for them to get into the depths of culture? They could if they wanted to, but potentially not. I’d say the same for ‘low identity brands’ like a soap brand or a detergent. It’s not right.”
But there is potential for even unsexy brands to support these emergent cultures. And it’s through similarly unsexy work – Cassidy references CommBank, through its sponsorship of the Matildas, literally building separate changing facilities for women footballers.
“Some brands wouldn’t recognise the need for investment in those things. They would just be looking for something to invest in and tick the reach box. It’s not about that,” he said.
When reach is more expensive, messages are less effective. Perhaps it’s through relevancy and micro-connection that growth can be accelerated. Hopeful Monsters certainly thinks so.
The 1,000 Tiny Pieces report is available now.
