Culture maps unlock powerful opportunities.
Real insight lives in the flourishing networks where consumer passions can be found. Here’s where the advertising and design industry needs to be looking—at the ties that bind. Not at the mass consensus resulting from quantitative studies. Consensus does not help a brand know what a consumer wants next. Often what they want next can’t be vocalized.
Today’s big ideas and forecasting live in fast multiplying hubs that are evolving our global culture. Culture mapping plots the information surrounding these points in the network so that it’s actionable in developing powerful design and communication strategies. It goes much farther to define a consumer by their behavior than by demographics and to see where these behavioral influences are coming from. Our planning matrix allows us to position behavior in clusters and reveals patterns and polarities of consumption. It breaks apart the behaviors and places them in a modular setting that a brand can feed, shift and build upon over time.
This structure is also a powerful foundation for plugging in real-time data to fuel ongoing innovation.
This methodology was first published in WARC's journal Young Consumers (now published by Emerald Insights), and is featured in the current (10th edition) of Pearson's textbook Consumer Behavior.
