Culture Isn’t a Mood Board
Brands keep making the same mistakes again and again: add some AAVE, throw in bright colors, cast androgynous models, and suddenly you’re “culturally fluent.”
It doesn’t work like that.
Culture isn’t an aesthetic shortcut. It’s not a design system you can borrow. And treating it like one is how you end up with work that looks right but feels hollow; the kind of campaign that gets roasted in group chats before it even finishes running.
What Culture Actually Is
Here’s a useful grounding point: culture includes “language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, and ceremonies.”
Translation: culture is the shared system people live inside. It’s how they decide who they are, signal belonging, make sense of the world, and coordinate with each other.
Everyone has a culture. Your audience is already inside one. Your brand is the visitor.
And visitors who show up speaking the language phonetically — without understanding what the words mean or why people use them — get clocked immediately.
The tell isn’t that the brand is trying. It’s that they’re performing instead of participating.
Here’s the test we use:
If we remove the logo, does this still make sense?
Are we speaking the language, or quoting it?
Would someone in that culture share this unprompted?
If the answer to #3 is no, you’re performing for an audience that isn’t there.
What Participation Actually Looks Like
The difference between aesthetic fluency and cultural fluency is simple:
Aesthetic fluency = “This is what it looks like.”
Cultural fluency = “This is why it matters.”
Brands that get this right don’t mimic the surface. They understand the system underneath:
- Why does this visual language exist?
- What does it signal to the people who use it?
- What job is it doing in their lives?
- Are we adding to that, or just extracting from it?
If you can’t answer those questions, don’t ship the work.
Culture isn’t a marketing tactic. It’s what you can stand on across every part of the business—HR, operations, partnerships, creative.
The question isn’t “can we pull this off in a campaign?” It’s “is this authentic to who we actually are?”
Because audiences don’t just evaluate your ads anymore. They evaluate your company. Your hiring practices. Your vendor relationships. Who’s in the room when decisions get made.
If the culture you’re performing externally doesn’t match the culture you’re building internally, you’re not being fluent. You’re being opportunistic.
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**CITATIONS**
Culture definition — [Encyclopaedia Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/topic/culture)
“Fellow Kids” meme origin — [Know Your Meme](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-do-you-do-fellow-kids)