The step-by-step framework for building a brand subculture
A brand subculture starts with a belief that other people already share. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl lays out his working framework for defining one: the belief, the people who hold it, their culture, what the brand gives back, the places and things they revolve around, and their enemies. He also explains why authenticity matters more as the world gets more fake, and how a subculture can act as a super persona that ties a brand’s psychographic personas together. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on subcultures, Build a Subculture, Not an Audience.
Watch the full episode
Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl starts from a viewer’s comment that authenticity still feels like the ultimate metric. He agrees, and argues that as more of the world can be faked, brands that go hardcore authentic will see a bigger payoff, even though it will be harder to do. That takes conviction, and conviction means rejecting something.
He then walks through his rough framework for defining a brand’s subculture. It starts with a belief others rally around, then asks who already holds it, what their culture looks like, what the brand gives back, which places and things they revolve around, and who or what they’re against.
Finally, he connects the framework to Parliament’s persona work. A subculture can serve as a super persona: the shared world that a brand’s radical buyer, core personas, and fringe personas all identify with.
Highlights
In a world of fakes, authentic brands may see a bigger payoff.
Every brand subculture starts with a belief others already share.
If a brand can’t say what it provides to its audience, it has nothing.
The places and things a subculture revolves around are the nouns of a brand’s world.
A subculture can act as a super persona above individual personas.
Key insights
Conviction comes first
The framework begins with what the brand believes that others rally around. Without that shared conviction, there’s no group to belong to.
Align with a culture that already exists
Rather than inventing a culture, the brand finds the people who already hold its belief and the slang, rituals, and symbols they use.
Give something back
Every Parliament persona includes what the brand provides to that person. Calvin treats this as non-negotiable: a brand has to make the culture’s lives better.
Name the enemies
The enemy might be a way of thinking rather than a person. Calvin prefers the word enemies because it makes the definition sharper and more focused.
Detailed analysis
The clip turns an abstract idea into a working sequence a strategist can test. Each step builds on the last: belief defines the people, the people define the culture, and the culture reveals what the brand can offer, where it should show up, and what it stands against.
Calvin is candid that the process is new and likely to change. His plan is to start putting it into strategy documents, using the subculture as a super persona that sits above the psychographic personas Parliament already builds.
Conclusion
Belief, people, culture, contribution, places and things, and enemies together give a brand a clear worldview. Calvin’s framework offers a practical way to define the subculture a brand belongs to, and to keep it authentic as faking it gets easier.
Transcript
I tried my best at coming up with what I think the framework is for this. 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, 25 years, authenticity was such a thing. It was like: 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.
Okay. So I was trying to think of what the framework is for defining this subculture in your brand. I probably should have put this together. I just have bad notes, so I won’t share this. 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 all believe and others believe? So we’ve got belief. 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. 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 that 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? So that’s the noun. What are the nouns of your world? The places and things.
And the last one, and 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 I think in very black-and-white terms, so I like using the term enemies. It makes it much stronger, much sharper, much more focused.
So I think if you can define the belief and conviction, the people, the cultural artifacts—the slang, rituals, and symbols—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. I think it might be helpful to start including it in documents.
And one way I think it becomes helpful is the way we currently do psychographic personas. You saw that glimpse there 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, and we have our radical buyer that’s 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 kind of depends on the brand.
But I think what the subculture gives us is what we’ve called, in the past, super personas. Here are the individual personas, the psychographic personas, but then the super persona, or the subculture they all exist within, is: all of these people identify with this subculture. So I think we’ve done some stuff like that before, but I’m looking to finally start formalizing this. So this is how we end up changing our strategy documents.
But 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. I think those have come up some, but 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. But yeah, I think that’s some of the framework I’m thinking. How do we define this super persona, this subculture that includes all of the psychographic personas that might fall within our brand?