The Age of Soloculture, Part 4: The Only Way Out Is Through
Succeeding in a world of Solocultures will require new tactics from advertisers. So what are they?
Hi. Hey. Hello. This is The Other 90, a blog about strategy from your friends at Quick Study.
Today’s Study Guide is the final part of our four-part series on Soloculture. If you missed any previous parts, you can start your adventure here. We’d love to hear your thoughts & comments on the series, so don’t hesitate to reach out.
If you’re looking for a sprint-based approach to solving your strategic challenges, let’s chat: hello@quick.study
Let’s start here:
In the fall of 2023, AdWeek and Frontify conducted a study of 200 “creative marketing leaders at brands and agencies.” 58% of the respondents said that brands are struggling to understand the needs of their customers, 72% said brands are struggling to respond to cultural changes, and 73% said brands are struggling to respond to changing user behaviors. We’re aware that we aren’t doing a good enough job at connecting with people on their terms.
And guess what? Consumers agree that the marketing isn’t working. Our research at Quick Study found that 30% of Americans struggle to name a brand that is relevant in their life today. Over at GlobalWebIndex, they found that only 10.5% of Americans felt represented in the advertising they saw in 2023. So we have marketers saying they aren't doing a good job understanding and reacting to consumers and their needs, and a country of marketed-tos that don’t feel like they’re being reached in a useful way, if they’re being spoken to at all. At least we can all agree on something in this country: the way advertising works right now is broken.
There are myriad reasons why so much of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on advertising in the US is DOA, but the biggest sin of all is the misunderstanding of the world people inhabit today. Or as we’ve established throughout this series, worlds. Solocultures are not a passing fad or a TikTok trend; every person has a more unique worldview today than ever before thanks to how they consume, manipulate, and contribute to the further transmission of information. No one human experience is the same, so why should all our advertising be?
The path of least resistance for marketers would be to look at an increasingly fragmented & divided country and choose the most generic & broad route possible in order to appease and not offend. But the results of such efforts over recent years have only served to homogenize culture, lulling us into a sleep of boredom. “Homogenization is beginning to alienate consumers rather than entertain them,” says Kyle Chayka in his new book Filterworld. “In recent years, an underlying sense has emerged that algorithmic culture is shallow, cheap, and degraded in the washed-out manner of a photocopy copied many times over.” Ads made for everyone cut through clutter like a dull knife through concrete: they don’t.
Society also cannot abide going too far in the other direction and risk the loss of authenticity. Hyper-personalization of ads, particularly online, reached such levels of invasiveness that governments actually decided to legislate the internet for once. Filling up on cookies & delivering contextual ad placements can be clever in certain scenarios, but it’s not realistic to expect this kind of marketing to prevail as people become more fragmented across platforms and formats, stretching the bounds of responsive tools that make ads feel custom. This is where the limitations of AI are truly tested: sure, it creates scale, but it’s hard to believe humans will be as motivated to act by relatively soulless content from the uncanny valley than they would be from work created with care by other humans (keyword “care”). As Chayka goes on to say in his book, “This, too, is a form of algorithmic anxiety: the feeling that, when such a human endeavor as making culture is so automated, authenticity becomes impossible.”
So how do we address Soloculture in a balanced fashion? What’s a practical way to showcase a brand and create value for each consumer without losing authenticity or inducing boredom? There is no one answer, but over the course of our series we’ve been silently laying the blueprint for a more thoughtful & effective approach to creating relevance & results in the age of Soloculture:
Recognize your Soloculture
Our research earlier in this series found that 46% of Americans today feel like they are living in their own bubble more than in years past. This includes the people who make ads! We hear often about marketers needing to check their biases at the door, which is true, but this is deeper than that. Strategists and marketers need to understand that those biases have been formed by their own Solocultures and play a role in every single decision they make on behalf of brands. This doesn’t need to be a bad thing; the individuality of Solocultures can make the work more fun as long as there is diversity amongst key decision makers. Thankfully, more marketers are being honest about their knowledge limitations as we saw in the AdWeek study. This self-awareness is key to getting out of the way and letting trusted research & data fuel the work.
Swim at two depths
Our research into sports in part 3 revealed how Solocultures allow people to become deeply engrossed in their very specific consumption pattern. Increased access means some fans spend 24/7 engrossed in their favorite teams and athletes, while the ability to personalize the experience lets casual fans consume the fringe aspects of sports culture like sports betting or the occasional podcast.
This selective depth has widened the gap between a casual brand fan and the hardcore brand fanatic beyond sports as well. Much like lost fringe friends, people these days are either all the way in on your brand story or pretty much tuned out and choosing a brand in your category for ease & convenience only. There is still some movement between these two types of fans, but that movement is much rarer than it used to be. If growth is the ultimate goal for a brand, the question “do I want new people to love my brand or existing fans to love it more?” should be part of every brief, because the resulting work should look very, very different.
Say yes more
We learned in Part 1 that sharing newness with each other is the new foundation for connection in America. 70% are introduced to something new by friends or family at least a few times a month, and one-third of Americans say that it’s happening a few times a week or more. “Have you seen this?” is the currency of the realm, and the beauty of a world full of Solocultures is that the money will never run out. Brands can thrive in this environment by loosening the definitions of who or what they would traditionally connect their brand with, and identifying new partnerships, influencers, and collaborations that make their customers feel seen in ways that literally no other brand could. Scaling such an opportunity is challenging, but taking a lot of swings at connecting the dots for your consumer has never been more important. Remember, you will tire of the swings you are taking before your audience does, especially because in our Solocultural world the majority of your fans will not be seeing every swing you’re taking (in fact, if you’re doing it right, they’ll only see the ones that feel right to them).
Think in moments, not days
Perhaps the most important thing marketers can recognize is that time is no longer linear. We found that 77% of people feel disconnected from time at least sometimes in their lives, and that 59% feel the world is moving faster than ever before. None of our consumption timelines are the same order or pace, but that doesn’t mean marketers should ignore the whens & wheres of their storytelling. Choosing appropriate moments to speak to your audience is even more important than before because the time you show up carries value that is based on the consumer’s Soloculture, not yours. How do you ensure that your message still carries value the day it’s posted, but also 3 weeks later when the algorithm is still serving it to people? And if you can’t guarantee that value, how do you change the way you treat the platforms you are using to reach people? These questions should create opportunities for more creativity, not less.
All Things Considered™, advertising’s crisis of relevance is unsurprising. The magic bullets of advertising’s recent past (top tier influencers, Super Bowl ads, huge spends, etc.) are no match for the situation we are facing. A consistent drumbeat of layoffs has created major gaps in historical knowledge, causing brands to repeat old missteps and agencies to be too afraid to push the envelope. There are 6 PR people per journalist today, creating tension in how narratives are shaped and gatekept. People are retreating from the noise of feed-driven platforms to spaces that are more difficult for marketers to reach. Today, ads and audiences often feel like two passing ships in the dark: The likely result isn’t a crash, it’s that they’ll never know the other was there. For advertisers, that’s the worst fate possible; another expensive campaign worked on by dozens, seen by millions, but ultimately heard by no one.
Success in this environment will be hard-won, but it is possible. Marketers must be willing to adopt new ways of working that prioritize what we know: people feel increasingly disconnected from time & each other, and they crave sharing the new things they love in order to create connective tissue and build culture. Brands that create value in this environment will thrive, and the slowest to adapt will not. In a sea of Solocultures, be a spotlight; connect Solocultures through a clear, consistent, and authentic message. Make your relevance individual and undeniable. Honoring the existence, and contents, of our Solocultures is the best chance there is at making an impact, advertising or otherwise. If the way culture is fed doesn’t adapt to how it’s consumed, our silos will only get deeper, more disparate, and more difficult to connect. The clock is ticking (non-linearly, of course).
This concludes our final part of the Study Guide series on Soloculture. Thanks for following along! Today we’re also publishing the full Age of Soloculture series as a PDF that you can download and share, as well as an infographic that summarizes our Soloculture research.
The Other 90 is written by me, Rob Engelsman, a former baby model and now Cofounder & Strategy Partner at Quick Study. To find out more about how we help brands and agencies get to smarter plans faster, email rob@quick.study. You can also find me on Instagram & LinkedIn.