Marketers and brands need to move beyond clicks and demographics and embrace cultural fluency as the key to building meaningful relationships, connections, and relevance with their audiences.
Colleen Ryan, Partner at TRA, called cultural fluency a “superpower because it solves the modern marketer’s greatest challenge: genuine connection in an oversaturated media landscape.
“When brands demonstrate authentic cultural understanding, they transcend transactional relationships to build communities,” she told Mediaweek.
Ryan explained that cultural fluency, the adoption of a continued search for global, local, and subcultural shifts that indicate incoming change, involves understanding that trends don’t emerge in isolation.
“A culturally fluent marketer spots underlying currents and knows that they are likely to play out in different ways across different audiences and in the context of their own cultural landscape.
“National cultures mould and shape incoming trends and cultural shifts, and to become culturally fluent, you have to be constantly observing how that process is influencing how the trends are likely to turn up locally.”
Colleen Ryan: ‘A culturally fluent marketer spots underlying currents and knows that they are likely to play out in different ways across different audiences and in the context of their own cultural landscape.’
Signals and signs that lead to cultural fluency
Ryan said that creating a system for observing, collecting, and curating cultural signals and how they evolve is the first step to identifying and developing cultural shifts before they become mainstream.
“Culture is a dynamic force, so we need always-on methods to monitor the flow and the shifts. A snapshot in time is outdated before we have time to take action resulting from it. And if you are Googling it – it’s already out of date.”
She explained that initial indications come from observing behaviour changes in cultural epicentres such as cities, universities, online communities, outlier groups, and extreme counterculture movements where new ideas emerge first.
“Micro-dosing is an outlier behaviour – why is it growing? What can we learn from it for your category? Veganism was once an extreme outlier, but now we all eat ‘plant-based food’ as part of a wider diet.”
Ryan said that cultural fluency is based on deep analysis of the patterns of signals, which can be innovations of products, services, or business models.
“Signals can be nascent social movements, emergent themes from subgroups and other non-mainstream sources, or marginal behaviours. Signals can come from outlier and fringe groups and innovators, or other worldviews.
“The mistake many marketers make is waiting for concrete validation, by which time the cultural shift is already mainstream. Cultural fluency requires comfort with qualitative signals and pattern recognition.”
Ryan on why demographic segmentation doesn’t cut it
Segmenting audiences by demographics such as age, gender, marital status, income, education, and occupation is no longer seen as a relevant way to connect with audiences.
Ryan said: “We are most definitely living in a post demographic era… Today, we can connect with someone who shares our interest in Victorian stamp collecting within minutes, and we will have far more in common with the people in that group than all the people who are the same age and gender as us.
“People connect through common interests, so tapping into evolving interests is an early access point to the relevant audience. Even generations are not much more than a group of people in the same age group.”
Ryan noted that brands need to learn to navigate communities as they change, adopt identity markers, and resist being defined by certain characteristics.
“[If brands don’t] they will be left behind or worse – risk alienating or simply failing to engage their audience.”
Going beyond authenticity
Meanwhile, Ryan said that brands looking to be authentic in their use of cultural fluency in their campaigns and strategies should “choose their moments carefully and participate meaningfully.”
She highlighted the evolution of Nike’s “Just Do It” campaigns from centring on athletes to addressing systemic inequality.
“This isn’t opportunistic trend-chasing – it’s cultural fluency recognizing that for their core audience, athletic achievement and social justice aren’t separate conversations.
“Cultural fluency requires accepting that you won’t be relevant to every cultural conversation.
“Trying to participate in all cultural movements dilutes authenticity and reveals opportunistic motivations,” Ryan added.
Cultural fluency in action
Ryan explained that culturally fluent marketers spot an emerging trend by noticing similar behavioural patterns and connecting those local observations to broader global cultural currents.
She highlighted the XXXX beer ‘one day only’ campaign from June as an example of cultural fluency and a successful balance of brand heritage with relevance.
The campaign, developed by Thinkerbell and UM, used archival imagery and a few famous faces with the placements live across Brisbane for one day only, to celebrate the brand’s place in cultural moments that shaped Queensland.
Ryan also highlighted Nike’s #1000Victories campaign aimed at inspiring the next generation of female athletes to celebrate their victories on and off the field in what TikTok described as a “world-first TikTok branded documentary.”
“This campaign demonstrated cultural fluency by understanding the shift toward authentic, documentary-style content on TikTok, tapping into the global trend of celebrating women’s sports achievements, creating content specifically “made for TikTok” rather than repurposing traditional advertising.”
@nike Victory is… 🧐 Nike Presents: 1000 Victories – A TikTok Community Story | Part 1 #NikeFC ♬ original sound – Nike
For marketers looking to develop their capabilities in spotting cultural moments, Ryan noted that continually keeping an eye out for signals is a skill that can be refined over time.
She explained: “If you plan to run a marathon next month and have not been running any distance regularly for the past year, you are not going to get past the one-kilometre mark.
“Culture is the same. If you start from zero, the depth of any analysis you carry out will be shallow at best and misleading at worst.
“Why? Because it is not the individual signals so much as the patterns that can be discerned and the changing interconnections of the patterns which give us foresight.’
The key to cultural fluency for Australian and New Zealand brands
In terms of brands in Australia and New Zealand, Ryan noted that they have the unique advantage of developing cultural fluency from the multicultural societies that make up both countries.
She also highlighted that each nation’s geographic position between traditional Western and emerging Asian cultures “creates intimacy advantages”.
“Brands can develop deep cultural relationships without the complexity of massive global markets. This allows for more nuanced, authentic community engagement.
Ryan added: “The region’s cultural creativity, particularly in areas like music, sports, and environmental consciousness, is a natural advantage to both countries.”