Finding your cultural edge

Let’s start with some love.

Dating app Hinge actively positions the brand to fight the GenZ loneliness epidemic. It’s more than the antidote to the gamification of dating (it wants people out on promising dates, not on the app). Hinge is a cultural force for good. It’s mission is to help people unplug from their phones and get out into the real world. It backs more in-person time with initiatives like its One More Hour social impact platform to help GenZ connect IRL. Other things have included a free limited edition Hinge Phonebook, a phone-shaped book full of ideas to get people out there.

Hinge stands for something. It knows its place in culture and the connection strategy means it’s securing a greater share of the future because its users want to belong to that version of the future. Hinge is among only a handful of fast-growing outliers in the market. Tinder has lost more than 1.5 million users since its peak in 2022. Other dating apps are also seeing user decline. Growth is built on lots of factors but being a cultural engine is one of them.

Shaping culture starts below the waterline

Every brand has the potential to be a cultural force. And yet most brands look and feel the same. They rely on identikit brand and marketing tactics. Customers are often being asked to pick their favourite grain of sand. Now is the time to make a move. Kantar BrandZ data tells us that brands with high cultural vibrancy are 79% more ‘different’ and 48% more ‘meaningful’ than the others. They grow 6X faster. There’s work to do. By their own admission, 50% say that they are chasing trends rather than shaping culture.

To shape culture you need to start below waterline. It needs to make sense strategically. If you’re latching onto trends then you’re in too shallow, or too late. As mentioned earlier, Hinge is alive to its cultural place. It’s done the work to contextualise cultural shifts and what these mean to its audience. But cultural connection isn’t just for alluring consumer brands. Nationwide has been through a major rebrand to reposition itself as a ‘dependable disruptor’. Deep insights on consumer needs and cultural context has helped it shift perceptions find ways to build real connections with younger audiences.

Do your research. Fake relevance won’t pass the sniff test. Relevance is cultivated. Hinge spent two years researching loneliness in young adults. Be interested. Be curious. As Hinge CEO Jackie Jantos (who was promoted from CMO) says: “If [Gen Z] is an audience you’re curious about, hopefully you’re also curious about how you might support them in ways beyond what you’re building to sell them.”

Anything less could be dismissed as cultural costume, or culture washing. Live your values and connect with purpose.

Punching with purpose

When customers know what you stand for, they stop shopping around. Decision made. Our clients don’t come to us with a product. They also come with a point of view. Smel. is a cheeky, fun and straight-talking perfume dupes brand that packs punches when it comes to saving its customers money.

With our friends from Manchester studio MuddyWellies, we translated insights and cultural shifts to create a daring and energetic visual identity that looks as cheeky as it sounds. The brand is self-aware and isn’t afraid to take shots at expensive designer perfume brands. With an iconic logo and playful tagline, Smel. has all the talkability and recognition needed to connect with GenZ, who want brands to see them, not just look edgy. Smel. cuts through the noise of the often overblown fragrance industry. It’s making a strong statement that high-quality scents don’t need to come with a high price tag or a fancy name. Its products are vegan, cruelty-free, and skin-safe. Decision made.

Creating cultural energy

Brand love is built through living values, active participation, cultural relevance and integration. Relocating The Brits this year to Manchester Co-op Live was a masterclass in this. The Brits team didn’t just ship its London-centric identity north. It created a fresh identity for the city. As The Drum reports: “By giving Manchester ownership of a cultural moment, the Brits earned a new level of relevance, resonance, and respect that no traditional marketing campaign could ever buy.”

Could you say something on how you work locally, and beyond?

Where is culture heading?

Spend an hour on Substack and you’ll get 60-minute understanding of where culture is heading. You’ll detect that people want deep connections and intimacy. They want to know that an opinion is a human thought and a post was created through lived experience, not a bot. Users rebel against inauthenticity. This isn’t a trend. It’s a deep rooted cultural shift. Backslash in its 2026 Edges report calls this ‘Proof of Human’, which it views as the ‘gravitational centre’ of what’s next in culture.

In the report it highlights six cultural shifts to take notice of. It calls a shift an edge: “Edge – A meaningful cultural shift with the scale and longevity to propel a brand toward a greater share of the future.” These are: dark mode, discomfort zone, modern civility, digital friction, awakened world and archived authority. Learn more here.

“Edge – A meaningful cultural shift with the scale and longevity to propel a brand toward a greater share of the future” – Backslash

These shifts don’t make AI an either or question. AI is a creative and productivity tool. As we wrote in a recent post, we use AI as a low-flying creative partner. That’s it. Used well, it can support efficiency, exploration, and iteration, but it doesn’t replace us, our decision-making, accountability, or our creative intent. We’re deliberate about when we use AI, and when we don’t. When it comes to culture, AI can help us analyse data and model behaviour, but it can’t contextualise culture. It doesn’t understand nuance or have intuition. Finding your edge requires lived experience.

Curious? Let’s schedule some time together. Connect with us here.