Prioritising cultural relevance in your advertising is one of the key ways of ensuring your brand conversion. How?

Well, through cultural relevance, brands no longer just advertise their product or service. Instead, they also acknowledge and celebrate the identities of their audiences.

This allows their messaging to:
  • be more meaningful
  • create value for the customer
  • resonate with audiences on a deeper, more personal level, and
  • be more memorable to consumers.

So, how can a brand ensure that they start speaking to consumers in a voice / language that they will understand?

Find out as media update's Lara Smit speaks to 8909's executive creative director Khanya Sijaji to find out more about the importance of cultural relevance in advertising here.

Let's get relevant:

In your opinion, why is achieving cultural relevance through advertising so important?

I don't think cultural relevance is something to be achieved in advertising. I think that it is advertising.

What you do then is use that cultural relevance and tell that story to reposition a brand or sell a product. But the landing of that concept and the relevance of that client product to the consumer can only be done through cultural relevance.

In order for any story to land, it has to ring true and be based around culture.

Culture is:
  • an understanding of
  • the make-up of, and
  • the behaviour of people.

If we aren't [only] tapping into two of those three topics then it is a miss-hit. You are then having a conversation in isolation and you are not speaking to or with the people — you are speaking at the people.

Once people feel you are speaking at them, you're easy to ignore.

What effect does this type of advertising have?

There is this myth that has been realised by a few brands, which is becoming a loved brand.

A brand that people internalise — I feel — is one of the best things that culturally relevant work achieves.

[It helps to create] a brand that:
  • people identify with
  • forces people to think differently
  • reconsider their human behaviour, and
  • becomes a guide in people's lives.

All of these magical things that we sometimes touch on in advertising can be achieved through work that is culturally relevant.

How does advertising achieve cultural relevance?

Storytelling. Effective storytelling lends context. It helps you to dictate the delivery of your message — [for example], should it be light and humorous, or heavy and meaningful?

Storytelling allows you to unveil things that may have been hidden or ignored.

To put anything into context, you need to tell a story that helps people understand things.

So, cultural relevance becomes more than a goal; it becomes your how and your why and this gives your brand the opportunity to be woven into your customer's narrative.

What challenges are posed by trying to achieve cultural relevance in this space?

The biggest challenge is that we still revert to selling. [Instead, we should] start telling more stories and join conversations.

People connect to people. If you achieve cultural relevance through your work, the brand becomes a platform that connects people.

How can agencies participate in producing culturally relevant advertising responsibly?

Allow people to bring themselves to work. The relevance that you are trying to achieve [is done] by talking to communities out there. The people that are in your office come from those communities.

We all have opinions, and we all wake up in different corners of this country to come to one space and lend those opinions to our work, agencies and clients.

How do you think that brands can achieve cultural relevance? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Want to read more about how employees contribute to the cultural relevance of an agency's stories? Then be sure to read our article, Why diversity helps creative agencies tell stories that are culturally relevant.
*Image courtesy of Canva