You can buy attention. You can borrow credibility. But cultural relevance has to be earned.
Reach tells us how many people saw something. Cultural relevance tells us whether it meant something to them.
That distinction matters.
A campaign can reach millions of people without changing what they think about a brand. An event can sell out without creating a meaningful relationship with the people in the room. A brand can collaborate with one of the most credible artists in a community and still remain an outsider to that culture.
Visibility is not the same as relevance.
Attention is only the beginning
Reach still matters. Views, impressions and CPMs tell us whether something travelled and how efficiently attention was generated.
But they don’t tell us what happened after that attention was created.
Did people participate?
Did they share it without being asked?
Did they come back?
Did creators want to become involved?
Did communities start approaching the brand themselves?
Did the way people talked about the brand change?
That is where cultural relevance begins to become visible.
Because relevance is ultimately about meaning.
A culturally relevant brand isn’t simply known by a community. It has a recognizable role within it.
Relevance has to be earned
Brands can buy media. They can buy access. They can pay a credible artist to appear in a campaign and immediately become visible to millions of people within a particular cultural space.
That can create awareness. It can change perception. It can even make the brand feel more culturally credible for a moment.
But the brand is still borrowing someone else’s relationship with that community.
The creator is the distributor of that credibility.
For the brand to build its own relationship, something has to happen beyond the campaign.
It has to participate.
It has to understand what people actually need. It has to create value. It has to enable rather than constantly place itself at the centre. And, most importantly, it has to show up more than once.
Because familiarity is built through repetition.
And familiarity creates the conditions for trust.
You cannot launch cultural relevance.
You have to earn it.
From one-off activation to cultural system
This is why one of the biggest challenges in Culture Marketing isn’t creativity.
It’s structure.
A great activation can create a moment. But if that moment disappears after the recap film is posted, much of its cultural potential disappears with it.
A one-off starts becoming part of a system when it is documented, repeatable, digitally extended and connected to a larger brand narrative.
Different markets don’t need to execute identical activations.
They need to understand the same brand role.
Global teams can define the cultural territory and the role the brand wants to play within it. Local markets then identify the communities, voices, spaces and cultural signals that matter where they are.
Those local signals are critical.
Which scenes are growing?
Which voices actually carry meaning?
What are people talking about?
Which formats are people participating in?
Which partnerships feel credible?
Which spaces should a brand support, and which should it leave alone?
Local partners aren’t simply execution partners.
They are cultural sensors.
When those insights flow back into a larger system, individual activations stop being isolated moments.
One-offs become formats.
Formats create repetition.
Repetition creates familiarity.
Familiarity creates trust.
And visibility can start becoming meaning.
Measure behaviour, not only attention
If cultural relevance is different from reach, we also have to measure it differently.
That doesn’t mean abandoning traditional marketing metrics.
Reach, impressions, views and CPM still matter.
But they should be the first layer of measurement, not the last.
The second layer is participation.
Are people saving and sharing the content?
Are they creating their own content around it?
Are conversations happening organically?
Are people signing up?
Are they returning to formats?
Are creators and communities approaching the brand without being asked?
Are people actively choosing to participate?
And then comes the third layer: brand and business impact.
Has brand association changed?
Has consideration increased?
Do people trust the brand more?
Do they understand the role it plays within their community?
Has participation led to product trial, direct traffic, demand or conversion?
Reach tells us whether people saw us.
Participation tells us whether they cared.
Business impact tells us whether that relationship created value.
What this looks like in practice
Our work with SOUNDBOKS is one example of how that relationship can develop over time.
What started with individual activations became a relationship spanning more than three years and over 60 community-led events and collaborations across different cities and cultural spaces.
But the strongest signal wasn’t simply how many people attended those events.
It was what started happening afterwards.
Artists, organizers, opinion leaders and communities began approaching us because they wanted to work with the brand.
Demand to experience and use the speakers grew to the point that a rental program developed, allowing communities in different cities to use SOUNDBOKS for their own events.
People who had experienced the product through those environments went on to buy their own speakers.
Requests started coming from cities including Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart and Hanover.
The relationship was no longer moving in only one direction.
The community started carrying the brand.
That is an important distinction.
Culture Marketing wasn’t simply creating exposure for SOUNDBOKS. Participation was creating demand. Demand created infrastructure. Infrastructure enabled more communities. Those communities created new relationships, stories and further demand.
The brand wasn’t just appearing inside culture.
It was becoming useful within it.
And usefulness is a much stronger foundation for relevance than visibility alone.
Cultural relevance has to be earned
This is also why cultural relevance shouldn’t be treated as something a marketing budget simply buys.
A budget can create the conditions for it.
It can fund research, local relationships, community partnerships, co-creation, experiences, content, distribution and repetition.
But communities ultimately decide whether a brand becomes relevant to them.
The role of Culture Marketing is to create the conditions in which that relationship can grow.
To listen before speaking.
To participate instead of simply appearing.
To enable rather than dominate.
And to stay long enough for familiarity and trust to develop.
Because you can buy attention. You can borrow credibility. But cultural relevance has to be earned. Reach tells us how far something travelled. Cultural relevance tells us whether it stayed.