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Why marketers must get better at connecting with culture if they are to survive the coming creator economy shake-out.

Once upon a time, our biggest competition, as advertisers and marketers, came from other brands. But that’s no longer so. Increasingly, that competition is coming from a whole new generation of brands, built the other way round, like a sort of antimatter in the branding world, if you will. I should explain.

Your regular brand works like this. You have a product, or a range of products. You construct a story around it. You communicate that story to your target audiences. This, you hope, will create the connection that will drive sales, ensure repeat purchases, and sustain your pricing model.

But in the age of social media, a growing number of brands are being launched by influencers and content creators, which start where regular brands finish, with the cultural connection. They finish where regular brands start, with the sourcing of the product, or range of products, with which that connection is monetised.

Your content creator may be the modestly talented son of a football legend and a girl-band singer turned fashion designer. She may be a former duchess now residing in California. She may be a Hollywood actress with a passion for aspirational healthy living. Or he may be a YouTuber known for high-budget stunt videos. But in each case, they already have the kind of bond with audiences that your typical brand marketer would give his or her right arm for – anywhere from a million to almost half a billion online followers. Then they start looking for something to sell.

From that emerges Brooklyn Beckham’s Hot Sauce, £15 a bottle; Meghan Markle’s Fruit Jam, £10 a jar to you; Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Champagne Sabre, for slicing the tops off of those pesky champagne bottles. Really. And then there’s Mr Beast’s Feastables confectionery range, which includes $35 bags of sour gummies.

The fame, the recognition, the sense of personal connection, all that stuff that marketers work so hard and pay so much money to achieve, they already have it. They just need to slap it onto something people can pay for. You only have to look at the 10,000 people who turned up at a New Jersey mall in 2022 on the opening day of Mr Beast’s (again) new burger chain. People in Mr Beast T-shirts. People holding Mr Beast banners. It was like Beatlemania all over again. The upshot of all of which was a new world record for the greatest number of burgers sold in one day.

Faced with this kind of cultural resonance and emotional power, regular brands will have it tough.

You can make a better product, of course. But these days it’s a matter of time before someone copies it. Or you can cut your margins to further undercut the high prices charged by the content creators, but the makers of Far Eastern lookalike ‘dupes’ cut them further still, and you end up in a financial death spiral. Or you can increase your marketing budgets. Then again, how much more would budgets need to increase it by if you wanted your brand to become more famous and better-loved than some of the most famous and best-loved people on planet earth? And even if you somehow managed to persuade your FD to hand over the cash, how long do you think you could keep that up for?

But there’s one remaining lever that marketers and advertisers can still pull – the cultural connection.

By being more tuned in to the currents of audience culture, and smarter in how they relate to it, it is possible to make a difference far greater than budget alone.

There are ways of doing this. One way is to respond rapidly to significant events, as German industrial machinery company Böcker did when the world woke up to see images of one of its cherry pickers, stolen and abandoned at the crime scene outside the Louvre. Thieves had used it to hoist themselves up to make away with priceless historical jewels.

What kind of PR is that?

But from a cultural point of view, this whole episode was a rare and powerful moment. Exactly the sort of daring, old-school jewel heist you thought didn’t happen anymore, like something out of The Italian Job. It grabbed the headlines around the world.

So Böcker ran this ad:

When you can do something like this, it’s great.

But of course, you can’t always do it on demand. It depends on the right set of circumstances turning up just when you need it.

So the next option is to look ahead to predictable events that you believe might impact your target audience. And then you create something that puts your brand right at the heart of that event.

In 2025, the new series of Severance was about to be launched. It’s the sort of show that speaks to the culture, the mindset and the concerns of young urban professionals. The sort of people, in fact, who use Apple computers.

So Apple USA set up a Severance office in the middle of Grand Central Station, staffed by the actual actors from the show.

Again, it got huge publicity and made a significant cultural connection, both in the US and around the world.

And then, finally, there are the brands that go one stage further. Rather than piggybacking on other people’s ideas, they identify key cultural themes and movements and actively create events and resources to add real value.

A classic example of this is Red Bull.

There’s a perfect synergy between what the product does and the kinds of events it has created over the past 44 years. For example, there’s a 22-storey building in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which looks a bit like the world’s biggest skateboard ramp. So last year, Red Bull actually covered the curved side in plywood and turned it into that. Then they got Brazilian skater Sandro Dias to drop in from the top.

So here is where we’re coming out. Brands already have enough challenges in today’s hyper-competitive global marketplace from rival name-brands and off-brands who copy, outspend or undercut them. But the new generation of celebrity creator-led brands, built the other way round, could be the final straw. However, by learning from the creator economy and being smarter in putting more thought and effort into the cultural connection, our brands can yet secure a prosperous future.

First published in Warc 16 March 2026.