Your dashboard cannot see irrelevance

The risk nobody posts about

Tshiamo Maremela runs A Very Cool Studio, a cultural intelligence and creative advisory, and he has a ranking of brand dangers that puts the famous one second. "The biggest cultural risk isn't necessarily being cancelled because you got culture wrong," he told us. "It's becoming irrelevant, and becoming irrelevant so quietly that your dashboard can't even tell you that information."

Picture the version he describes. Nobody is angry. No apology is drafted. "You could go into your dashboard and see that your campaigns are still performing, your media is still running, the dashboard looks healthy, but when you think about it culturally, you realise that the brand is becoming less important to people's lives." Run that long enough and, in his words, you stop having a communications problem and start having a business problem.

Data and culture are not opposites

We opened by asking him to pick a side between the reporting half of marketing and the cultural half. He refused the question. Culture is measurable, he says, just not as one number: "culture isn't something that you can reduce to a single KPI", but you can measure cultural signals, changes in behaviour, conversations, changes in language, the movement of ideas.

His division of labour is the cleanest we have heard. "Data just tells you what is growing, what is changing, but culture is around understanding the why behind it all." Then: data gives you a signal, culture gives you the context, and strategy is what you do with both.

Why good brands still get it wrong

The failure is not creative, and it is rarely ignorance. Big brands, he points out, often hold more cultural information than anyone else. The problem is what the organisation does to an idea on its way out. "That idea has to go through 10 layers of approval, and by the time it comes out, that entire idea has been made safe because the brand wants to limit its exposure to risk. And safe is the problem when it comes to culture."

Then comes the defensive phase, which is where the work starts looking identical across a category: a brand realises people have stopped caring, so "now we need to throw in an African proverb or an African print or an African song." Everyone reaches for the same language and the same creators, and you end up technically relevant and culturally indistinguishable.

Musa Kalenga, group CEO of the Brave Group, describes the same wall from the agency side. Clients ask for something different and then meet it with alarm: "when you show them something different, they kind of go, whoa, I'm not ready for that." The honest version of a new approach, he argues, requires the client to change its own process too.

What to do instead of panicking

Tshiamo's antidote is a practice rather than a campaign: look, understand, decide, act, run weekly or fortnightly with marketing, the commercial teams and HR in the same room. What is changing, not only in your category. Why it is changing. What it means for the business, which may be the product or the sales team rather than the advertising. And then what your legitimate role is, which sometimes is nothing at all. "Not every cultural moment actually needs a brand response. You can see something happening and you can actually let it walk past you."

Try this week: put one quiet question on your next marketing agenda — is this brand becoming more or less important in our customers' lives, and what evidence do we have either way? Then take the last cultural moment you jumped on and ask whether you had a legitimate reason to be there, or whether you were covering.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.