Why your brand needs a subculture, not just an audience
Demographics tell you who a buyer is, but not how they behave or where they belong. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl explains how subcultures—groups with shared beliefs, aesthetics, rituals, heroes, and enemies—take persona and archetype work out into the real world. He walks through Harley and Parliament’s strategy work for the mezcal brand Peloton de la Muerte, where an aspirational insider defined the subculture and gave the brand permission to leave skeptics out. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on subcultures, Build a Subculture, Not an Audience.
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Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl opens by separating three ways of understanding an audience. Demographic personas cover the stats: age, income, ethnicity, and location. Psychographic personas, which Parliament favors, are rooted in emotions and behaviors and usually tied to a brand archetype. Subcultures add a third layer: where that person exists in the world, the group they belong to, and the places they gather.
He defines a subculture as a group with shared beliefs, aesthetics, language, rituals, and symbols, plus shared heroes, enemies, and sacred third places. Harley is his first example: its buyers are upper-middle-class professionals, but its subculture is rebel bikers chasing freedom, brotherhood, and the open road, and buyers aspire to join it.
He then shows how the idea surfaced in Parliament’s work for the mezcal brand Peloton de la Muerte. The primary consumer was a weekend warrior who aspired to be the insider, a tattooed, charismatic bartender with taste. That insider defined the subculture, and mezcal skeptics became the people the brand didn’t need to include.
Highlights
Demographics describe who someone is but say little about how they behave.
Subcultures share beliefs, aesthetics, rituals, heroes, enemies, and third places.
Harley buyers are professionals who aspire to the rebel-biker subculture.
Subcultures aren’t only countercultures; Etsy makers are one too.
For Peloton de la Muerte, the bartender insider defined the subculture and skeptics were left out.
Key insights
Subcultures show where a persona lives
Persona work answers who someone is, and archetype work explains what motivates them. A subculture shows how that worldview appears among real people and where it shows up.
Buyers often aspire to an insider
The primary consumer is frequently not the core of the subculture but someone who wants to belong to it. Identifying the insider they look up to points to the subculture a brand should speak to.
Subcultures aren’t only rebels
It’s easy to equate subculture with counterculture, but groups like Etsy makers seeking creative and financial independence share beliefs and gather in the same place, too.
Knowing who isn’t included is useful
Shared heroes and enemies tell a brand who its audience isn’t. Calvin argues a little gatekeeping is fine when it sharpens who the brand is for.
Detailed analysis
The clip reframes audience definition as a question of belonging. Demographics and psychographics describe individuals, but a subculture hands a brand a ready-made world: its vocabulary, rituals, symbols, places, and opponents. That gives creative and strategic work far more to draw on than a list of traits.
The Peloton de la Muerte example shows the practical payoff. By mapping the gap between the everyday buyer and the insider they aspire to be, the team found a subculture to target and a clear line around who sat outside it.
Conclusion
An audience tells a brand who buys; a subculture tells it where those buyers belong and what they believe. Calvin’s case is that brands built around a subculture gain a richer world to work in and the confidence to leave some people out.
Transcript
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 let’s build a subculture, not an audience, today. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, because at Parliament, part of our brand strategy work is helping people define audience: who their 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 somehow directly to our brand archetype. So, you know, those 12 big stories that are all universal, those brand types, 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. Actually, let’s talk about what a subculture is, how I’m defining it first. We all kind of get the idea of a subculture. Punks, 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 implies 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, Harley is a great example of how these things all line up in different ways. Demographic-wise, if we’re talking about Harley, 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’s 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 with, but they desperately want to be deeply ingrained with. So it is an aspirational desire to become part of that subculture.
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. So Aaron, if you’re staying on for a while, I’ll probably end up asking you what are some of the symbols or the rituals of your marathon runners group, beyond just going on marathon runs. “We’re the worst.” Can confirm, you are the worst.
Okay, so that’s kind of 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 work that we 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 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.
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 even actually end up using subculture specifically. We didn’t call that out in the branding or anything, but I can show you what that looks like.
So here’s where it started coming up. 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. 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 this 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.
But 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 [bleep] 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 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.