‘What Lies Beyond the Brand Monologue?’

People have always found ways to make life more interesting and beautiful. We form communities, exchange ideas, develop rituals, make things, pass knowledge on, create things nobody asked for and nobody knew they needed, and decide, collectively and sometimes unconsciously, what matters.

At K&C, this is the world we are endlessly curious about. This, to us, is culture.

It exists on the corner of a street as much as in a museum, in the customs of a group of friends as much as in an indie film or a K-pop music video. It emerges from human society as an expression of what we collectively love, value, and find meaningful. It takes shape through interaction and is participatory by nature. People exchange ideas, influence one another, disagree, respond, borrow, and build on what came before. No single person determines where it goes, and its outcomes can rarely be planned or predicted. It evolves and changes over time, shaped by individuals and communities alike.

This is what makes culture so fascinating to us: the continuous expression of people living together and interacting with one another.

This follows naturally from the view we explored in What Is a Brand?: that a brand exists in relation to the society around it and is ultimately held by the people and communities it touches. If brands exist within society, then we are interested in the relationship they choose to have with it.

Historically, that relationship has been defined primarily through communication, and for good reason. A brand has a point of view to express, and communication is how other people come to understand it. Over time, brands have become extraordinarily sophisticated at understanding how culture can enrich that expression. They work with its artists, borrow from its language, participate in its events, and tell stories about its people and communities. Much of the work that results can be intelligent, beautiful, and culturally meaningful. Yet, fundamentally, it remains a statement about the brand itself.

This is the thinking at the heart of Brand Marketing: using communication to give a brand’s point of view form and expression in the world. Communication can be shaped and authored almost entirely by the brand. It allows a brand to express what it believes and invite people into its world. Like a monologue, it can be intelligent, moving and beautifully made. It can tell us exactly who someone is and what they believe, and there will always be a place for it.

But if culture itself is participatory by nature, we believe there is another possibility for how brands can relate to it.

That is why we are interested in what happens when brands become equally sophisticated at understanding what they can contribute in return: because human relationships are built on more than communicating who we are. We tell stories about ourselves, express our beliefs, share what we care about and invite others into our worlds. It is part of how we become legible to one another. But equally important, we take an interest in what other people care about, what they are trying to do and what they might know that we do not. We exchange things, help one another, make introductions, share resources, and sometimes create things together. Sometimes we support something for the simple reason that we think it deserves to exist.

We participate.

For brands, participation shifts the relationship with culture from primarily communicating through it to actively contributing something to it. Brands have a great deal to contribute. They possess extraordinary resources: money, spaces, technology, expertise, networks and reach. There is something incredibly exciting to us in imagining those resources being used not only to amplify the brand itself, but to help someone else do something interesting.

A filmmaker might make a film that would otherwise never have been financed. A basketball court important to a neighbourhood might be preserved. A researcher might be given the freedom to investigate a new way of living. An artist might gain access to a technology and do something with it that its creators never imagined. A craft, place, idea or community might find a new audience.

Something might exist that otherwise would not.

The principle itself is hardly new. For centuries, patrons, institutions, and businesses have put their resources behind artists, thinkers, craftspeople, and communities. Long before anyone spoke of cultural relevance as a marketing objective, organisations were already supporting people and ideas they believed were worth bringing into the world.

But participation also asks something different of a brand. Where communication can be shaped and authored almost entirely by the brand, participation cannot be controlled in the same way. To participate means accepting that the brand does not need to author everything it enables, nor determine every outcome. Invite someone into a genuine collaboration and they may disagree with you, take an idea somewhere unexpected, or make something that bears little obvious resemblance to the organisation that helped make it possible. This requires letting go of a degree of control, but that is precisely what gives the other side agency. Allowing some value to exist independently of the brand is part of what makes the exchange meaningful. And contribution itself tells us something about the contributor.

This does not mean abandoning our own point of view. Quite the opposite. Dialogue becomes interesting precisely because both sides have something of their own to bring to it. In this sense, participation is a little like a conversation. We enter one without knowing exactly where it will take us, but are curious about the possibilities. That uncertainty is part of the reason for having it in the first place. If we already knew where it would end, there would not be much point in starting it. The challenge for a brand is to hold its convictions without assuming that every encounter with the world must end in their repetition. As we wrote previously, the strongest brands hold their convictions firmly enough to mean something, and loosely enough to be tested by the world.

We do not see a contradiction between that contribution and commercial value. Brands are businesses, and we are not interested in pretending otherwise. A brand can say that it believes in creativity. It can also enable creative work to exist. It can say that it values craftsmanship. It can also help a craft survive, evolve or find new practitioners. It can say that it believes in community. It can use what it has to help a community strengthen what it has already built.

In that sense, participation is not separate from brand building. What a brand chooses to enable becomes evidence of what it believes.

Over time, those choices can shape how people understand a brand, build affinity and distinctiveness, and create reasons to choose one company over another. The commercial value does not exist despite the contribution. It can emerge because of it.

Importantly, participation does not replace communication. It expands the relationship a brand can have with culture. Communication allows a brand to express what it believes and invite people into its world. Participation allows it to take an interest in the worlds of others and contribute something to them.

We have come to call this way of thinking Culture Marketing, although the name is necessarily imperfect. What interests us is not culture as an industry, a demographic or a category of content, but the much broader fabric of human participation in which brands already exist.

Culture Marketing is therefore less a new marketing technique than a different way of thinking about that relationship. A brand can express what it believes through what it says and what it makes. It can also express those beliefs through what it chooses to participate in, support, and make possible.

If communication is a monologue, participation opens the possibility of dialogue. Dialogue asks something different: enough confidence to speak, enough curiosity to listen, and enough openness to accept that the most interesting outcome might be something neither side would have created alone.

That possibility is what excites us.

Because we believe brands can use what they have not simply to make themselves more interesting to the world, but to help make the world around them more interesting and beautiful.