A Quick Guide to Culture Branding in 2024

When creating a brand, there are other considerations besides tone of voice and color schemes. For many modern businesses, culture branding is a tried-and-true avenue to give your brand depth and better relate to your targeted audiences. By putting forward your company culture, or building off instantly recognizable sentiments and iconography, your online business can find its identity in 2024.

Culture Branding Explained

Culture branding is half housekeeping and half marketing strategy. Good brands market themselves, so culture branding tries to bring the company culture in line with your industry and the expectations of your audience. That changes with geography, audience demographics, and the nature of the industry you’re in.

This can be a balancing act. Modern business models in retail or iGaming often deal with more than just their storefront brand. A site offering slots will host a kaleidoscope of different brands on their homepage since games can have their own setting and culture. Take the popular Sahara Riches online slot game as an example, where it’s completely branded around the world’s most renowned desert and the historical culture around it. That makes it appealing for those who recognize it or have a connection to the area. Many brands associate themselves with geographical locations, or a time in history, as a quick and easy way to appeal to their audiences.

That kind of branding only works in some industries, however. Not every business can tap into pre-existing imagery and ideas when marketing to their customers. In those cases, it’s best to step back, analyze your audience, and draft a culture branding strategy from the bottom up. When an enterprise nails its company culture and culture branding, it may become a trendsetter in its industry. Take Apple as an example, whose sleek and simple approach to product design has become a staple of most other Silicon Valley businesses today.

Creating a Cultural Branding Strategy

A good cultural branding strategy should identify a culture among your audience. This can be geographical or based on occupation/hobbies, and other shared experiences that have some bearing on the services you offer. By merging those cultural values with your brand, audiences can relate to it and should engage with the business more often. Cultural branding is only one part of brand strategy covered in-depth here at Global Brands Magazine.

Have a Brand Story

Every business has a story of how it came to be. This can include aspirations for what the business wants to be, or other pro-social goals that the brand wants to foster in its audience besides its primary goals of profit. Modern businesses often put a narrative front and center, so they can connect to audiences and appear more authentic. It’s the starting point for most cultural branding strategies. It’s important to avoid inauthenticity – if your business has a relatively mundane past, aim your brand story at an ambitious and appealing future instead.

Research Your Audience Culture

The culture of an audience is often intangible and hard to grasp through rigid analytical tools. Fortunately for you, social media allows audiences to congregate, voice their opinions and preferences, and discuss the current zeitgeist in your industry.

Source: Pexels

Join or build your own social media community where your audience can thrive. Business covers many ways to build a brand community, which can also provide better quality data for other marketing uses. Recruit social media marketers who are familiar with the audience, or the wider culture of your industry, to get an authentic voice representing your business.

Marry Brand & Audience Sentiments

With a brand story and some idea of the audience culture, you should synthesize the two and apply it to everything in your business. That includes your business imagery, brand language, and any stated values/beliefs your brand holds. Play to the preferences of the audience and avoid embarrassing faux pas that are looked down upon by them. Remember that audience sentiments, attitudes, and trends shift over time, so staying on top of a cultural branding strategy is a job that’s never fully done. At Global Brand Magazine, we cover social media branding frequently.