How Modern Brands Build Cultural Relevance

There's still a version of marketing that treats awareness as the goal. Run enough television. Sponsor enough events. Stay visible. Over time, the right people will choose you.

That model is losing ground.

Audiences filter more aggressively now. They skip, scroll, and ignore anything that doesn't earn their attention. And they have a deeply sophisticated antenna for what feels authentic and what doesn't. The brands gaining ground aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones that have figured out how to participate in culture rather than just advertise alongside it.

And that's precisely why those brands become harder to compete with. Media spend can be matched. Creative can be copied. But a brand that has built genuine cultural relevance, community participation, and audience trust has created something much more difficult to reproduce.

Culture isn't a channel. It's the brief.

Marketing once treated culture as inventory. You bought access through the right media placements, the right events, the right sponsorships. The brand stood outside culture and waved.

What replaces that isn't a new channel. It's a different role. The brands pulling ahead treat culture as infrastructure—something they contribute to, participate in, and earn a place inside. Brands that embed themselves in culture and meaning consistently outperform those relying on volume and reach alone.

The implication for marketers is structural. It's not enough to produce great creative. The work has to be grounded in a cultural truth that's real enough to travel—across channels, across formats, across time.

Communities drive narrative now. Not brands.

"Social media strategy" is no longer the right unit of analysis. What matters now is community.

Social media strategy optimizes for impressions and reach. Community strategy optimizes for belonging and trust. Those are different things, and they require different thinking.

According to a recent Publicis Media Data Intelligence report, 66% of Gen Z and Gen Alpha spend more time with community-created content than with official brand content. Eighty-three percent of Gen Z say their engagement actively shapes how brands and creators develop content. These aren't passive consumers waiting to be reached. They participate in how narratives get built.

This is showing up in purchase behavior, too. Influencer promotion had a strong impact on a recent financial purchase for nearly 24% of credit card buyers and 23.5% of banking customers—categories traditionally built on institutional trust. The creator ecosystem isn't a youth marketing tactic. It's a credibility infrastructure.

The brands getting this right aren't doing one-off activations. They're building long-term relationships with voices that have genuine community authority and letting those voices participate in the brand narrative rather than just execute a brief.

Silos are a liability.

PR, advertising, and content once operated separately. Different teams, different metrics, different briefs. That separation now limits performance.

Brand narratives move across channels without regard for internal structure. A single piece of community storytelling can generate earned media, fuel paid amplification, build organic search visibility, and show up as an AI-cited source—all from the same moment. The return comes from planning that integration at the brief stage, not patching channels together afterward.

AI discoverability makes this more urgent. Newer versions of ChatGPT are citing brand websites directly, moving away from intermediaries and toward primary sources. The clarity, structure, and credibility of your owned content now shapes how your brand appears in AI-generated answers. Our Agentic AI Purchase Survey\ found that roughly half of consumers who used AI while shopping ultimately purchased from a brand they weren't otherwise considering. AI gets a brand on the radar. The owned experience has to close.

The work Razorfish developed with First Hawaiian Bank is a useful case study. "Banking on the Heart of Hawaii" wasn’t built as a campaign layered onto media. It was built from a cultural truth: that banking in Hawaii is inseparable from community, identity, and local pride.

Instead of treating culture as a backdrop, the work positioned the bank as an active participant in it. The idea carried across channels because it was grounded in something real, not constructed for a single execution. Paid, owned, and earned didn’t operate as separate tracks. They reinforced the same narrative.

The lesson isn’t about replicating the format. It’s about starting from a cultural truth strong enough to unify everything that follows.

Loyalty is built in the moments that matter.

One assumption persists in marketing: Customers stay because they love the brand.

The data doesn't support it.

Most customers say they stay because switching feels inconvenient —not because of emotional attachment. Only 15% of banking customers and 11% of insurance customers cite love for the brand among their top motivators for continued loyalty. Meanwhile, 65% of marketers believe that's exactly why their customers stay.

That gap pushes investment toward the wrong levers.

What actually builds emotional connection? We asked consumers which moments would most increase their loyalty. Consistently, moments of vulnerability outperformed milestone rewards. Customers remember how a brand shows up under pressure—a fraud alert resolved instantly, a proactive outreach during a difficult period, an early check-in when something goes wrong. Those moments build something no points program can replicate.

The takeaway for marketers is that experience isn't separate from brand strategy. Every touchpoint is simultaneously a retention moment and a brand moment. The brands that integrate those two things—rather than treating them as different functions with different owners—are the ones building loyalty that doesn't depend on switching friction.

What this requires

Cultural relevance isn't a campaign outcome. It's a compounding asset that builds when a brand is consistent, present, and grounded in something true.

That means building culture into the brief, not the execution. It means treating community as infrastructure, not audience. It means planning for channel convergence from the start. And it means showing up in the moments that matter, not just the ones that are easy to measure.

The brands doing this well aren't waiting for a perfect creative idea. They're building the systems, the relationships, and the organizational clarity to earn relevance—and keep it.

Sources: Razorfish Future of Loyalty Survey (GWI, 2025, n=2,000); Razorfish Agentic AI Purchase Survey (March 2026, n=2,000); Razorfish 2026 consumer research with GWI; Publicis Media Data Intelligence, "The Big 5 Consumer Trends" report (February 2026)