Rachel Lowenstein on what brands get wrong about cultural strategy

Independent strategist and content creator Rachel Lowenstein has spent over a decade helping the world’s most influential companies, including Nike, Google, Unilever and Meta, understand how culture is moving, especially where it relates to women and girls. She reveals where brands are making missteps and offers a framework for playing in culture effectively.

I once sat in a two day workshop about how to make a toilet paper brand relevant in culture.

I’m sure every seasoned marketer has a similar statement that if they admitted it to a civilian (non-marketer), it would sound unhinged. And to be fair, like a lot of things in marketing, it was kind of unhinged.

I remember throwing out an idea that the brand should simply be present in every conversation in culture about poop. National Poop Day? That’s your day, brand. A scene in a movie about poop goes viral (hey, Bridesmaids)? Work with the film in a co-branded social partnership. Creators who make their entire platform about finding the best place to poop? Girl, that’s your influencer strategy! I argued that making it weird was the cultural entry point because the category is so incredibly boring.

The brand didn’t like it. Too risky! Too chaotic! Too unsightly! Too obvious. We moved on. I don’t remember what we did end up running with but I do know that the brand didn’t become any more relevant in culture.

This was years before the TikTokification of brands where throwing out the brand guidelines gave way to being weird online like Slim Jim or Calm.

Not every brand needs a culture strategy. If you have a terrible product, no amount of cultural cachet is going to fix that. And, increasingly, culture-forward marketing is having an inverse effect by depleting a brand’s coolness. As one of many examples of this, the Empire State Building hotties showed every brand capitalising on an anti-capitalist protest, forming a sea of sameness that made any brand entering the conversation seem decidedly uncool.

Brands used to activate around these moments to signal being culturally attuned to people. Now they’re doing it to perform for the algorithm to drive up organic reach. Thus, the marketing ecosystem is increasingly defined by brands marketing to appeal to platforms rather than appealing to people.

So, do brands have the right to enter cultural conversations? And, how do you do it right?

As a cultural strategist to brands, it’s entirely in my interest to say “yes” to the first question. But I think far too many brands are leaning on cultural relevance rather than fixing core business problems. No one cares how funny an airline is online when they are squeezing customers into buying tiers of economy options that range from terrible-to-slightly-less-terrible, or how cool a fashion brand’s partnerships are when it’s now using polyester instead of the natural fibres it became popular for.

That said, I think the brands should be getting involved, as long as it’s the right cultural sphere for them. To do that, I advise my clients to think about it through a simple Three Cs framework (because we love a framework):

Curiosity

Contribution

Catalyse

Curiosity means approaching communities, subcultures and fandoms through the lens of openness. You’re here to enter their world, they’re not here to bend to yours. Asking “what if” rather than demanding “we need” from these cultural spaces will open up ideas you probably wouldn’t have arrived at had you not been curious at all.

Contribution means you are creating mechanisms that add to culture, rather than extract from it. For example, I advised the Dove team on their r/eal reviews activation, where we took the first 50 comments reviewing a Dove product on Reddit and used them in Dove’s next campaign. Our entire approach to the partnership with Reddit was making sure the brand was contributing to the Reddit community as a place for brutal honesty rather than extracting from it.

Catalyse means your brand has a lasting impact beyond a singular (and maybe expensive) moment. The memes, the viral posts, the comments are fine. But a talented community manager and social strategist should have that on lock. The bigger opportunity is to engage with culture in an enduring, additive way. Rare Beauty does this beautifully with its focus on self-expression and mental health, unlocking creator and cultural partnerships that feel distinctly ownable. Liquid Death does this well by making sure it’s the most unserious brand on the market, allowing it to engage in a flywheel of endless talent and brand partnerships with the likes of Jason Kelce and e.l.f Cosmetics.

All of this requires culturally intelligent people, and our industry is barely investing in them. We put millions into AI and pennies into the cultural fluency young people already walk in the door with. Then we keep them out of the rooms where decisions get made. An AI model can only work with what has already happened. The entire job of cultural strategy is to understand where culture is moving before the signals give a clear picture.

With the Effie LIONS Foundation, we’ve been roadshowing research we debuted at Cannes on cultural fluency inside marketing organisations. We’ve heard from senior leaders saying they’ve been trying to make this argument internally for years and no one would fund it, and young people feeling like marketing organisations aren’t investing enough in this skillset.

Brands should play in culture, but only if they offer expressiveness and distinctness rather than add to the monotony that culture is becoming. Maybe my ideas for the toilet paper brand were too risky, but the toilet paper brand picked the safe idea – and I still don’t remember what it was.

Download the D&AD Trend Report 2026 to discover six trends shaping the creative industry, including Closing the Cultural Chasm, which analyses why deep community listening as a prerequisite, not a nice-to-have.