Any half decent writer will bemoan the fact that there’s no synonym for the word ‘culture.’ ‘Heritage’, ‘milieu’, ‘lifestyle’, ‘civilisation’ – none of them quite fit. Calling it ‘the arts’ generally leaves out the human chaos element of it all, while ‘scene’ conjures up student paper music reviews. 

Given how important the concept of culture is, its lack of alternative wordings remains one of the glaring problems in the global vernacular. This leads to an issue of repetition, of cliché, of sapping the word of its inherent power through over-usage. It’s a headache for even the greatest theorists. 

It seems though, the good people of marketing and advertising have no such compunctions about overusing the word ‘culture’. In fact, they’ve doubled down on it in recent years. It’s the buzzword, the gold rush, the El Dorado of our times (or perhaps it is just where the people banging the drum for ‘storytelling’ have ended up a few years later).

But what does ‘culture’ really mean? And how can brands engage with something so ephemeral; something that refuses to comply with KPIs or be neatly packaged into a deliverable? 

Despite brands spending fortunes chasing culture (are you sick of the word yet?), many still feel painfully detached from the world around them. They’re out there, but rare, and suggests that a lot of this culture-mining is way off the mark. 

You could blame this on the classic issues of tight purses, data-obsessed boardrooms and AI, but I would suggest that many of us are looking at culture in way that is both convoluted and short-sighted, highly-transactional, poorly-considered, and often, completely bizarre. 

As with any kind of study, the key here is critical thinking. One of the major issues is culture not being interrogated with the right rigour and methodology, or by those who can surface genuinely grounded and fruitful insight. Instead of being questioned, culture is merely chased, resulting in a widespread sense of bafflement when it arrives in its typically intangible forms.