Find the subculture your audience belongs to
Your audience already belongs to a group. Calvin Ross Carl on how that group’s rituals, symbols, and vernacular give you a recipe for building your brand’s world.
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl argues that brands should think about how their audience already exists within a group of people. Branders are comfortable with specific emotions and personal drivers but shy away from the groups people belong to. Once you find that subculture, it hands you a vernacular, rituals, and symbols to lean into, and that’s where worldbuilding starts.
Highlights
- Your audience already exists within a group of people.
- Branders often avoid the generalizations that come with groups.
- A subculture gives you a recipe for building a brand world.
Key insights
Look at the group, not just the person
Personal drivers matter, but the groups people already belong to say even more about what will resonate.
Subcultures come with raw material
Vernacular, rituals, and symbols are ready-made building blocks for a brand that wants to feel like it belongs.
Detailed analysis
This connects audience work to worldbuilding, a recurring idea on the show. Instead of inventing a brand world from scratch, start with the culture your audience already lives in.
Conclusion
Find the group your audience belongs to. Its culture is the starting point for your brand’s world.
This is definitely the clickbait version of this: stop thinking about subcultures, not your audience. That would be my clickbait version. But I think just starting to think about how your audience actually exists within a group of people already.
I think we often, especially as branders, don’t like to think about the generalizations that our audience exists within. We feel okay about doing it about very specific emotions, personal drivers, but I think it’s really powerful once you start thinking about where the groups are that they already belong to. And that gives you a whole world of vernacular, those rituals, those symbols, all of those things that you can start leaning into.
I think it’s also very fun to do that. I think that’s where worldbuilding starts, which we’ve talked a lot about. Once you tap into that subculture, it starts giving you just a recipe for how to build a world for your brand.