Build a subculture, not an audience

Transcript

Intro and studio news

What’s going on, everybody? Welcome to You’re Not the Audience. Today I’m going to talk about why every great brand needs a subculture. That’s a little bit clickbaity, but you get what I’m saying. You’re Not the Audience is a weekly live show where I break down brands, products, subcultures, and how they stand out by not appealing to everyone. This is a weekly live show we do here at Parliament. I am Calvin, creative director at Parliament, and Parliament is a brand transformation agency that helps brands facing big changes, and we help them discover the next version of themselves through strategy, positioning, identity, messaging, all that good stuff. And so today we are going to talk about what brands can do to also add a focus on a subculture inside of all of their brand work.

So how’s everyone doing today? Everyone good? I think I missed last week because I had some client stuff come up. So at this point I feel like my weekly live show is becoming a biweekly live show. But that’s a good sign. Everything’s been busy lately. We’ve been hustling the last few weeks, I feel like, so everything has been real nice. I like staying busy. It’s summertime. It’s good in Portland right now. How’s everyone doing where they’re at? Is it sunny? Nice. We’ve been dealing with wildfire smoke here in Portland, which is not great, but thankfully it’s mostly kept away. It’s only been really bad a couple days.

So today is just going to be a normal episode. We’ll talk about some fun news and obsessions lately, then we’ll talk about subcultures and branding, and then just wrap it up at the end. We’ll go for an hour like normal. Should be good today. We’ll just start talking some news and obsessions while folks are rolling in.

So the funnest thing that’s been going on at Parliament is our founder, Chris Erickson, has been on a crazy epic journey. I’m going to pull up his Instagram really fast and see if I can find any cool imagery of what he’s been doing. So Chris, our founder, decided to leave for a month and take his son to Mongolia, where they’ve been doing a crazy intense moto trip all across Mongolia. And I think they’re doing Korea and Japan, too. This is Chris. If anybody wants to go check it out, I highly recommend it. This is his Instagram, and he’s been posting all of these incredible stories from Mongolia. They’re just truly out in the middle of nowhere. He’s with some group that does these big motorcycle adventures, and so they’re shooting arrows out here. It’s been a really, really awesome looking experience. They’re staying in all these amazing places, great weather. So go check out Chris’s Instagram and you’ll get some cool rides through all this stuff. It looks just epic out there. Not a single tree, open fields, looks beautiful. So he’s just been out causing trouble. His Instagram handle is kindandhumble, if anybody wants to go hunt him down. So that’s been really cool to see. I always like seeing him go on his crazy adventures. He did a month in southern Africa, I think, a couple years ago. So he has a tendency to vanish for a few weeks and go off on these crazy trips, which is awesome.

Obsession of the week: SPINE

So otherwise, my obsession lately (the other guys at Parliament are going to make fun of me for this) is this little book called SPINE: Siderius Plug’s Immortality in Ninety-nine Endnotes. So we’re going to get really nerdy for a second. I have a soft spot for choose-your-own-adventure books and things of that sort. Game books, people call them a lot. I’ve always wanted to do one for a brand. So if you’re a brand out there and you want some kind of choose-your-own-adventure book, let me know.

This one is really interesting, though. Oh, Aaron, here we go. (I just told Aaron all about this this week.) So this is what people call a solo tabletop role-playing game, but it’s really just a book. There are a bunch of prompts in it that tell you to write things or do things. So it’s almost like a self-help prompt book, but it’s all through a narrative. In this one, a family member has died. The only thing in their will that they’ve sent you is this book. And you are a researcher who then needs to read this book and respond to it, basically. But slowly over time, you start losing yourself in the book. So you are this character, you’re reading the book, and the book is awesome. There’s a ton of random ephemera in it. This is the title page, or all the credits. And then as you’re reading the book, there are all these little things in here. Just great, interesting storytelling happening in here.

So you’re essentially reading these small novellas, and the novellas have endnotes in them. When you hit an endnote, you go to the back of the book and read the endnotes, which give you prompts to do things to the book. So for example, here’s one of the very first pages. It tells you to write things in the margin, tells you to do drawings, and tells you to actually even destroy parts of the book. And the goal over time is that you’ll read through the book, destroy it slowly, write in it, and then you hand it off to another person. It can be played a few more times. So the book just becomes this organism all to itself. So, very nerdy, but I think it’s doing some really interesting things. I am just such a sucker for game books like this. I’m always trying to think about whether I can do something like this someday with a brand. So, anyone out there, let’s do it.

Okay. All right, Aaron, you’ve been saved. That’s enough nerd talk for the day. I’m going to try and hang in there today, but there’s a chance my voice starts going out. I’ve been fighting off a cold all week, or bad allergies, something. I think it’s a cold at this point. So sorry to anyone I was around. Worst-case scenario, I’m just going to have a really raspy Tom Waits voice by the end of this.

From personas to subcultures

Okay, let’s get into it. Today I want to talk about how brands can focus on building not only an audience, but a subculture. So: build a subculture, not an audience. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. At Parliament, a part of our brand strategy work is helping people define audience, like who their really big radical buyer is, the person that just gets them. And it’s maybe helpful to think about the different types of audience personas we can pull together here.

So the normal style of targeting an audience is the persona style that we all know, and that’s demographics. That’s the stats: who they are, ethnicity, how much money they make, where they live, all of that kind of stuff. Demographics are fine. They don’t actually tell you a lot about how a person behaves. And so what we tend to focus on at Parliament most of the time is psychographic personas. Psychographic personas are rooted in a person’s actual emotions and behaviors, and they’re usually also tied directly to our brand archetype. So you know those 12 big stories that are all universal, those brand archetypes, whether you’re a rebel or a hero or a creator. Usually our persona is a person who falls into one of those buckets, and it captures what they desire, their fears, and what we provide to them. That’s a pretty common psychographic persona.

But the reason I have been thinking a lot about subcultures lately is because subcultures start defining where that person exists in the world, the group of people they belong to, and the places they belong to. So let’s talk about what a subculture actually is, how I’m defining it first. We all kind of get the idea of a subculture, like punks and metalheads. Those are subcultures. But everything kind of has its own little subculture. So really, all a subculture is is a group of shared beliefs, a shared aesthetic, shared language, rituals, symbols, all of those kinds of things, and a group that stands behind them and imbues meaning into all of those things. The other really important part about subcultures is they usually share heroes and enemies and sacred third places. That sacred third place could be, if you’re a punk or metalhead, a music venue. If you’re a hardcore Patagonia outdoor environmentalist, it’s the outdoors. And you share heroes and enemies in that world.

So for example, here’s a great example of how these things all line up in different ways: Harley. Demographic-wise, Harley’s demographic is actually upper-middle-class professionals with money, because Harleys are expensive. But their actual subculture, once you stretch all the way to that, is Harley is for rebel bikers who are against the daily grind and the status quo. And it’s focused on freedom, brotherhood, and the open road. And so that connects your actual customer persona to this really aspirational subculture that they might not be deeply ingrained in, but they desperately want to be. So it is an aspirational desire to become part of that subculture.

So Aaron in the chat is an ultramarathon runner, which is its own very nerdy, specific subculture of people. We all have these things. Sorry to call you out, Aaron, but you ultramarathon runners, you’re all crazy. Aaron, if you’re staying on for a while, I’ll probably end up asking you what some of the symbols or the rituals of your marathon runners group are beyond just going on marathon runs. (“We’re the worst.”) Can confirm, you are the worst.

Okay, so that’s what a subculture is. It’s just a group of people who share a lot of the same beliefs, essentially, down to their core being. The way I think about this, and the way it started coming up for me, was we do this persona work, and that answers who they are as a person. The brand archetype that we then do really defines what motivates them at their core and what worldview connects them with others. And then the subculture explains how that worldview shows up amongst actual people, and where it shows up.

So subculture-wise, you see punks wearing similar clothing, patches. They’re anti-authority. But then there are other subcultures that we don’t think of as subcultures, because we always associate subculture with counterculture. You’ve got Etsy moms and dads, people who are looking for financial and creative independence through their craft-focused hobbies. That is a very specific subculture of people, and they all meet in the same place. They’re all on Etsy. They have similar things. So there are different subcultures like that.

Peloton de la Muerte and the aspirational insider

Where I started thinking about this a lot was we did work for a mezcal brand called Peloton de la Muerte, and we really wanted to be the bartender mezcal. Not fancy, not top shelf, none of that, but when in doubt, reach for this mezcal. And so the subculture that we were targeting was bad boy and bad girl bartenders with taste. That was really our focus. And I’ll show you how that came about. We didn’t actually end up calling out the subculture specifically in the branding or anything, but I can show you what that looks like. I don’t know if I’m supposed to show you a sneak peek of this, but it’s fine. Peloton isn’t going to care.

So Peloton’s rad. They’re a mezcal brand that’s been around for a long time. They came to us to help tighten up their brand strategy and do some identity work for them. They kind of ran their own way and went off. It’s a long story. Their final stuff, unfortunately, does not look like this. That’s what I’ll say. Which is a bummer, because it looks super cool. So this is where Peloton was going. We did this really rebel-focused brand. Peloton de la Muerte means the death squad, which was tied to the Mexican rebellion. Really badass history behind the brand. There’s a flag with a skull and crossbones on it. So it was really meant to be this rebel outlaw. We are the rebel. We’re tied to these kinds of badass rebels that have belief behind them.

And so as we started breaking down their audience, we noticed this thing, and this is pretty common in marketing and brand strategy. I already talked about it with Harley, where you have your aspirant, your primary consumer. That’s this person in the middle. For the Harley example, it’s upper-middle-class professionals who have excess money to spend on something as expensive as a Harley, but they’re aspiring to be the insider, which is on the left here. And that insider in this case is that rebellious bad boy bartender who’s tattooed up, stays up late, but also has a little bit of taste and responsibility. They’re charismatic. We feel like they are cool. That’s a very rough way of talking about it. So once you do that, you start realizing you have this main consumer who’s aspiring to be this smaller percentage of your actual audience. That means we’re targeting some kind of specific subculture right there. Our main consumer is a weekend warrior. They’re probably a professional. They’ve got their shit together in life, but on the weekends they want to feel like they’re a little bit of that righteous rebel. So that defines our subculture a lot.

And the other thing that subcultures then do really well is they give you a person to not include as well. We’ll talk more about this later, I think, but subcultures also tell you who is not your audience. This is part of the heroes and enemies part of this. So in this case, our heroes are that insider, and our enemies are skeptics of mezcal who think it’s too smoky, who just kind of don’t get it. So that gives us permission to say they aren’t included. They aren’t a part of our subculture, and that’s okay. It’s not always bad to be a gatekeeper. That’s going to come back to bite me someday.

So this is where it came from, working on Peloton, and I’ll give you a glimpse of this stuff. I love how this identity turned out. It was so fun, and unfortunately it didn’t totally end up this way. Very rebel, rough type, all of this. It was very fun to make and work on. A cool mark that’s rooted in the old flag that it was based on. So maybe someday we’ll put together a case study of this stuff just for fun. Great lines: “Take a stand, live free, die happy.” This is the flag that it was roughly inspired by. This is our take on it. So, great vibes on this stuff. This one even said, “Some get it, others never will.” That’s specifically targeting our skeptic right there. Some just don’t get it.

Nopes, exclusion, and finding your people

Okay. So I’m going to keep talking about that a little bit. What thinking about subcultures like this helps us do is it helps you find your people, not just your customers. Oh, we’ve got Fuel in the Tank here: “What’s your experience been phrasing it as exclusion versus not our focus? Seems like marketers would hate the idea of excluding anyone.”

Oh, yeah. I mean, we bump into that all the time. I think that’s actually the interesting thing. We do that with brand strategy all the time. We deliberately put nopes (we call them nopes) in our audience. And there’s something about putting it in a formal document like that that makes marketers say, “Okay, it’s been officially decided on.” But I think you definitely are right. When you tell a lot of marketers that we can’t target everyone, we can’t do just this broad swath, they get a little bit of their back up. They’re like, “What about this person? What about this person? What about this person?” But when you remind them that we always need to be speaking to that radical buyer, that person who’s right in the dead center of our audience, the aspirational insider of our target, I think that really helps them, because then you give them permission to not waste time and money on those other people. Because that’s usually what all those other people end up being. When you have a nope, you’re just wasting time and money. The mezcal one is a great example, because you have people you might think align with it, but they just don’t like mezcal. This is a very simple one, because it’s a consumer good that people either love or hate. But I think it just gives them permission to focus and not waste money there. And that’s the way you always get a marketer: don’t waste time or money on these people.

So I think it does give you permission to find your people and not just hunt for customers. The thing I always like to ask is, essentially, stop asking just who is going to buy this. That doesn’t actually tell you a lot. But if you start asking what group will care the most if we disappear, then you start getting somewhere in really defining that group. And this is a thing we do a lot in our strategy work, where we put in that brinkmanship: if we vanish, what happens? We do that when we’re talking about mission, when we’re talking about vision, when we’re talking about behaviors in a company, the actual values behind a company.

Sorry, let me back up. Values are the way that a company behaves at its core, and all brands have values of some sort. And the way we always test if values are true is we ask them, what are you willing to lose money on? You make decisions based on your values, and you know something is really a value if you’re willing to lose money to stick to it. And I think in this case, when we’re talking about subcultures, asking a brinkmanship-type question like what group of people will care the most if we disappear forces us to take a step back and ask, if we disappear, what void is left? And I think that really heightens our perception of the end consumers of our products and the groups that we belong to.

But yeah, Ryan, Fuel in the Tank, talking about exclusion is hard. I think it almost becomes a little bit necessary when you’re talking about subcultures, because it’s inherently a cliquish, gatekeepy kind of thing, but I don’t think that’s always bad in a lot of these situations. I’ll talk about that at the end, because I think that is one of the potential pitfalls.

How a subculture tells a brand how to behave

Okay, so you’re working toward defining your subculture, like the slightly dive bartender with taste for Peloton. The cool thing is that once you start defining that subculture, it starts actually telling you how your brand should behave and how it should interact with that world. So for example, I’ve shown you some mountain bike branding stuff, like Marzocchi and Race Face. There are all these companies that make cool mountain bike gear. Personas might just tell you something like, when you’re a mountain bike brand, “Sarah loves authentic experiences,” and you’re like, “Okay, I get what that means.” I think when you focus on the subculture, it actually starts telling you exactly what that person genuinely cares about and all of the places they exist. And that gives you permission to lean into things.

So if you’re targeting mountain biking, that gives you stickers to slap on bikes. That gives you big epic air competitions for bikes. It gives you zines that are part of these worlds. It gives you bike shops, the slang that they use, the geographic locations that they’re focused on. Especially if they’re like Marzocchi, that brand we worked with, they’ve got a love for stoke and epic rides. And then that is also about brotherhood in that group, that adrenaline junkie brotherhood that happens. So you can immediately start assuming all of those things about people. And that’s where we start getting into some of that gatekeepy stereotype and generalization stuff that can actually be helpful, but we’ll talk pitfalls later.

And the one challenge with that is that sometimes subcultures don’t exist until someone creates them. That’s how they work. If your brand feels like it doesn’t quite have a subculture that already exists, there are some options. Most of the time we’re leaning into a subculture that already exists. Harley has those rebel bikers. Vans has skateboarding. Patagonia has outdoor environmentalists. Those are all the hardcore subcultures they lean into and own, or augment and steer elsewhere.

And I think a couple of really good examples of creating one are CrossFit and Peloton. Peloton the exercise machine company, not Peloton the mezcal company. Peloton literally means squad or battalion, so the exercise bike company even named themselves after a squad. So I think CrossFit and Peloton have done really, really incredible jobs at inventing their own subcultures, and they’ve both done it in ways where they have shared vernacular. CrossFit especially has made shared suffering a part of their culture. CrossFit is really about defining a physical gathering place where you have that shared suffering, and Peloton did it in a way where its name is squad. It’s all digital community, but it gives you a place digitally where you can lock in and have that shared suffering and that shared achievement with others. They also create their own aesthetics and their own beliefs through all of those things. I think they’ve done really good jobs at all of those things.

I don’t know how those things are doing these days in the post-COVID era. I feel like everyone got into CrossFit and got a Peloton bike during COVID. Anyone in chat get into CrossFit during COVID? I just had to start working out a lot. Okay, this does make me think: during COVID, what became your hobby that you didn’t have before? Everyone started baking sourdough bread? What was the weird hobby you accumulated during COVID times? You probably fell into your own subculture for a little while that you didn’t originally intend to.

Rituals and symbols

Okay. So whether you’re falling into a predetermined subculture or you’re creating your own subculture, one thing that subcultures always need (and we’ve talked about this a lot in some of our past world building episodes) is rituals and symbols. Rituals are just the routines, the events we do, the places we go. And symbols are obviously our logo marks, but also everything else associated with the aesthetic of our world. So for rituals, Harley and those mountain bike brands we’ve worked with, like Marzocchi and Race Face, have got rides, rallies, bike customization. All of those kinds of things are the rituals of that world.

Symbols, though, can definitely go beyond our logos, and they absolutely should. Otherwise, they’re too thin. They’re just a veneer. For Harley, you’ve got the aesthetic of leather vests, you’ve got eagles, you’ve got the open road. These are all symbols that imbue our brand with deeper meaning, and everyone starts recognizing them. So that’s important to always remember: symbols go beyond just the obvious branded elements. And that’s even why, when we were doing Peloton de la Muerte, everything should always look like wheat-pasted protest posters. We should reference the actual historical flag that it’s originally drawn from as much as possible, because that’s ingrained in Mexican culture. There are little elements like that where you need to literally lean into those symbols.

Every brand needs enemies

Okay, this is my favorite thing. I’ve always had this thought. This is probably a branding hot take: I think all brands should have enemies. I think all brands should have a little bit of rebel in them. That’s probably just my own personal preference, but I think subcultures to some extent always have enemies. There’s always something you’re fighting against. It might not be a specific person. It might be a specific way of thinking. And I think this is when you start getting into some of the challenges of thinking about subcultures, because there is inherent gatekeeping in it, intentionally or not. And I think a lot of that revolves around the fact that with any hobby, any really deep personal interest, some people get it and some people don’t, and that’s okay.

For example, when we go to an absolute classic subculture, like punk bands, punk stands up for the working class, and mainstream music and the government are its enemies. Very simple. Granted, that is very much a rebel brand. But then you go to Marzocchi, the mountain bike gear brand. They just make shocks for bikes, but they really stand up for adrenaline junkies, and they’re against nerdy tinkerers who want to min-max and make the best out of everything. And here’s another side of it: this is a term all the mountain bike guys used when we worked with them. They’re against dentists. Dentists was slang they used for rich guys with really fancy bikes who don’t really know how to ride, and who kind of just get in all the hardcore guys’ way when they’re riding. So that’s kind of the mean side of it, but it really easily defines who you’re not for. Marzocchi is about bombing big runs, big jumps, not caring, meat hucking. It’s like you’re throwing your meat off the mountain. And the people who don’t do that are dentists, because they’re just guys with fancy bikes that they want to tinker with. They don’t get out and ride much, and they aren’t in it for that carefree adrenaline thrill. So it makes it very easy.

And I’d also even talk about the subculture of Etsy moms and dads, or crafting folks, where it’s the idea of creative independence. They stand up for finding creative independence through hobbies, and they’re against soul-sucking nine-to-fives. That’s a way you can appeal to those people, because that’s why they’re doing it. They want to make some extra cash, they have a really deep passion for something, and they’re not getting their fulfillment through whatever their normal nine-to-five experience is.

Stereotypes, generalizations, and Gen Z

And since we’re talking about subcultures that might exclude others, intentionally or not, that is both the power and the pitfall of the stereotypes and generalizations that start happening here. In the same way that I think gatekeeping isn’t always bad, I think it can be okay. It really helps us define who’s into a hobby and who’s not. We don’t want to keep people out intentionally, but it just happens naturally. And I think stereotypes and generalizations can be totally okay, because we kind of are all doing it anyway. When we’re creating personas for people, especially psychographic personas, you are making assumptions about how people behave, about their emotions. You might be extrapolating it from some data, but you might also just be going on instinct, shared-world instinct about what we know about the world, what we know about the customer base, what we know about the brand. And we take that and extrapolate it out to whole subcultures.

And there is always a whisper of truth in a lot of stereotypes. That’s what makes them really powerful, but it can also make them very hurtful, because once you extrapolate it, it can go to an nth degree that becomes bad. So that’s a thing you always have to be really, really mindful of when you’re thinking about subculture work like this, or extrapolating off some of those generalizations about a group. Just know that once you extrapolate it out, it could go to a point where it is potentially problematic. So this is classic, and it applies to all things: don’t be racist, don’t be sexist. Those things get you nowhere. Those only end up breeding hatred for a brand, and for people in general. Don’t be an [bleep]. Big brand statement this time. Hot take: don’t be an [bleep]. We need to do a deep insight article on the Parliament website about that.

Ryan says, “Curious how subcultures evolved with Gen Z and Alpha. Seems like the idea of labels as a whole is something that means less to them than millennials.” I’m curious what that looks like as well, because we are definitely getting to a deeper monoculture with the prevalence of social media. Things are becoming more and more homogeneous. But there’s always a group of people, and it’s more tied around passions, and everyone’s passions are different no matter what. I think that’s maybe just down to a genetic thing. I think there’s probably some shared monoculture in the way we experience things. We’re definitely in the time of echo chambers.

For example, I’ve been talking a lot about booze stuff: spirits, all of those worlds of packaged alcoholic beverages. And there’s this really big idea right now that Gen Z isn’t drinking, no one’s drinking, and it’s actually all [bleep]. They are buying less, but they’re still drinking like crazy. Rather than investing in fancy drinks and cocktails where everything’s super expensive, what they’re doing is buying malt beverages that are 15%, or ciders that are 10 to 15%. They’re trying to go for maximum bang for their buck. So I think in the end we are still humans. We will always do what humans do, even as our AI overlords slowly crush us and make us all into their machines, but that’s another conversation.

I think you are on to something about how our meaning for labels is changing, but I think maybe we just invent new labels, just like new slang, and new groups of people. All those things come about. So I think they’ll be there. At some point, though, we will just be too old, and we’ll no longer understand their categorizations or their labels. So that is a challenge.

The cosplay pitfall and the need for conviction

Okay, so let’s talk a little bit more about some of the pitfalls. You have to truly respect the subculture you’re into, and the stereotypes and generalizations you’re making, and I think it’s very obvious when you don’t. So the big pitfall here is if you don’t respect the subculture, it looks like you’re cosplaying. And that’s when generalizations start to appear cynical, tone-deaf, all of those things. People can read that immediately. They immediately know when your love for a space is not authentic and is just manufactured. So whatever brand you’re working with on this stuff, and whatever brand you run, you have to actually truly believe in and respect the culture that you are existing within.

And this goes back to the classic: you still can’t create conviction and vision within a company. That kind of has to exist there. We run into this all the time, where we work with great companies making incredible stuff, and once you get in deep with them, you realize they keep struggling with a target because the conviction isn’t there. And so sometimes you have to remind them of that conviction. That’s our job: remind them of the conviction, bring it back up to the surface, and get them reinvigorated on it. But sometimes it’s just not there, and so you have to work around it. So I think you do need quite a bit of conviction as a company to really respect and focus on your brand’s subculture.

Oh yeah, Ryan, Fuel in the Tank: “Authenticity thankfully still feels like the ultimate metric, especially as the world is becoming so fake.” Oh man, I’m so curious about how our takes on authenticity and brand are going to change over the next 10 or 20 years, or honestly maybe the next few years. During the millennial branding period of the last 20 to 25 years, authenticity was such a thing. It was: take a generic consumer good, invest in it on a deep spiritual level, and make it more authentic. That was the trick for the last 20 years, and it worked pretty well for a lot of brands. But now that we’re going into a world where anything could be fake and seem real, I think we’re going to get an even bigger payoff for going hardcore authentic. But I think it’s going to be even more difficult for brands to do it and not lean into things that are fake. It takes that conviction. You have to reject something in order to have conviction.

A framework for defining your brand’s subculture

Okay. So I tried my best at coming up with what I think the framework is for defining the subculture in your brand. I probably should have put this together; I just have bad notes, so I won’t share them. But here’s the way I think about this framework and how you get to defining that subculture for your brand. This is my rough process, trying to finally put my thinking into a process, which means it’ll probably change in a week. But this is how I think you can go about using this little framework for creating your sense of belonging in your brand.

So it always starts with the belief. The conviction starts there. What do we believe in our brand that others really rally around? What is that deeper thing that we believe and others believe? Then we’ve got the people who already believe this. Who out in the world already identifies with the conviction and belief that we should have as a brand? Then you question what their culture is like. What is the culture that we already exist in? What slang, rituals, and symbols do they use that we also align with?

Then the question is, what are you giving back to them? What do you provide that culture? What can our brand give them that makes their lives better? If you look at the personas we currently have at Parliament, every single one has a very clear section on what we provide to that persona, because if you can’t do this, you’ve got nothing. The next is, what are the places and things they revolve around? What products, places, and experiences show that we get them and that we actually believe in and care about them? So that’s the nouns. What are the nouns of your world, the places and things?

And the last one (I feel like this could be softened) is just enemies. Who isn’t this for? Who are you against? You’re not always necessarily against someone. You might be against something. There might be something you’re just naturally opposed to, or naturally the opposite of. But I think defining who your enemies are is really good, and in very black-and-white terms. I like using the term enemies; it makes it much stronger, much sharper, much more focused.

So if you can define the belief and conviction, the people, the cultural elements (the cultural artifacts like the slang, rituals, and symbols), how you give back and what you provide to them, the nouns, the places and things, and then finally the enemies, I think that gives you a pretty strong worldview for a brand. And I think that could work. I’m going to start testing this as we move forward. I want to start actually putting these into some strategy documents and see if they work. We talk about this stuff all the time to get to sharper personas, but I think it might be helpful to start including it in documents.

And I think one way it becomes helpful is the way we currently do psychographic personas. You saw a glimpse of that in the Peloton one. I’ll just pull it back up again. This isn’t quite our normal spread. We’ll usually have three to five people broken out on here. We have our radical buyer in the middle, we have our core people that are important to the brand, and then we might have some fringe people, maybe some nopes. It depends on the brand. I think what the subculture gives us is what we’ve called, in the past, super personas. Here are the individual psychographic personas, but then the super persona, or the subculture they all exist within, is this. All of these people identify with this subculture. So we’ve done some stuff like that before, but I’m looking to finally start formalizing it. So this is how we end up changing our strategy documents.

Ryan said, “Authenticity thankfully still feels like the ultimate metric, especially as the world is becoming so fake.” Yeah, absolutely. I’m actually probably going to be talking about authenticity and timelessness next week. Those have come up some, and I’ve been trying to think about what those things are a little bit more and why they stick around. So we’ll probably talk some about that.

So that’s some of the framework I’m thinking about: how do we define this super persona, this subculture that includes all of the psychographic personas that might fall within our brand? Maybe I’ll tighten up this little framework and share it around on the internet somewhere and see if it makes sense. Maybe I’ll just do some short videos to talk about it so it’s a little bit more palatable, and you don’t have to sit here and watch me read notes and talk for an hour. So, some final thoughts on subcultures: just keep thinking about that pattern. Demographics lead to psychographics, which lead you to an archetype that really drives and motivates them. And then finally, what subculture does all that stuff exist within? There’s a little bit of a pattern there you can go through.

COVID hobbies and wrap-up

All right, for anyone in chat: what was the weird hobby you got into during the COVID days? What subculture did you accidentally find yourself within? For me, I was definitely in it before. I was a board game nerd, a game nerd. That’s things like this, things like SPINE. I was definitely a game nerd, but it just exploded during COVID, when you were locked in your house, trying to get away from screens because you’re attached to your screen working from home all the time.

Oh yeah, Ryan, Fuel in the Tank: “Nothing crazy. Lots of cocktails, bar stuff.” Oh yeah, same. Since we couldn’t go out, especially in Portland, where we were so locked down for so long, I just missed having a nice cocktail so bad. This is actually just very sweet, and I really love this, but right when COVID hit, basically the same month, my wife and I bought a new house. We tore the house apart. Everything was a mess. We were both working from home, remodeling our house, trapped inside because of COVID. And at some point we just started doing date nights where we have a kitchen island, and we’d trade off: one of us was the bartender, one of us was the customer, and we’d ask, “What do you want to drink?” and make each other cocktails. So I definitely got into some cocktail nerdery then, too. That was such a wild time. It was any recreation of real life during then.

Yeah, Aaron, you already talked about it. Aaron got really into marathon running, and you really went for it. Aaron, you’re free to give that up now. COVID’s long gone. You can just relax now. You don’t have to run. Yeah, I think that’s a pretty good one. We’re in our 40s now, so you need to have some kind of hobby that becomes healthy for you, I guess.

Sweet. Okay, I think we probably wrap it up for the day. Those are some final thoughts on subcultures. The clickbait version of this is: stop thinking about your audience, think about subcultures. That would be my clickbait version. But just start thinking about how your audience actually exists within a group of people already. Especially as branders, we don’t like to think about the generalizations that our audience exists within. We feel okay about very specific emotions and personal drivers, but I think it’s really powerful once you start thinking about the groups they already belong to. That gives you a whole world of vernacular, rituals, symbols, all of those things that you can start leaning into. It’s also just very fun to do. I think that’s where world building starts, which we’ve talked a lot about. Once you tap into that subculture, it starts giving you a recipe for how to build a world for your brand. And I think that’s a pretty good start.

Next week: timelessness

Okay, next week. I already hinted at this with Ryan in chat. I think I’m more specifically thinking about timelessness than authenticity. This is just something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially since I’ve now done episodes about the Wipeout branding and The Designers Republic, whose stuff shouldn’t seem timeless, but somehow it is. So I’ve been thinking a lot about why really great design ages slowly, while trendy design obviously ages quickly. I don’t really know. I guess designers with strong convictions often aim for timelessness, but why do some stick around and others don’t? We’ve talked about things like the Pizza Hut Classic locations that have come back, where they’re really amplifying the timelessness of the brand. Why do we resonate with that? I don’t know if I have any clear ideas for that yet, but that’s what I’m going to dig into this week.

Especially for designers: why do Braun and Dieter Rams still feel contemporary to us? Why did those stick around? Why does some old Japanese packaging stick around? Why does that old ’70s NASA identity feel so classic? (I’ve got the book around here somewhere.) Why do Swiss grid and typography design stick around? What conviction leads to good design aging slowly over time?

So, Ryan: “Interesting subject. Does timelessness matter to people besides designers when brands now change so frequently?” Yeah, I think that’s part of the reason I’m thinking about it. Timelessness is a word that brands and agencies care about because it promises long-term value to a client. It essentially also means economic and financial efficiency long term. So that’s the business side of it. But what I want to talk about a little bit is the consumer and customer experience of those things. Why do I still want to buy Braun products even though Dieter Rams hasn’t been there for decades? What about that long, timeless history sticks with me, even though their products don’t really look like that anymore? So I think that’s what we’ll talk about next week.

I’ll post some things up. I might try to put together this little subculture framework I was talking about, see if I can make sense of it, and share it in a video or online somehow. Yeah, I think that’s it. Thanks, everyone, for joining. That’s You’re Not the Audience for the week. See you next Thursday at noon Pacific time. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks, Aaron. Appreciate you all being in the chat. Later.